Art House

Located just south of the Kansas City Country Club Plaza, this five-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath single-family row house was conceived as a brick monolith on a limestone plinth. The carved areas within the monolith are expressed in ceramic tile.

The interior of the house was developed around a double-height living/dining room on the main floor, surrounded by a U-shaped second-floor gallery for the owners’ art collection. A delicate bridge crosses the living room, providing scale at the patio doors and completing the gallery circulation.

The site faces a central park in a historic overlay district. The clients wanted a more contemporary house than would be allowed. The design team’s first challenge was mediating the desire for a contemporary home while adhering to the historic overlay rules. Another challenge was to create a range of exterior spaces, so they needed to figure out how to achieve this with an urban row house.

On the west side of the house, a screened-in porch is carved into the brick mass, adjacent to a developed limestone patio that is elevated from the park for privacy. On the northeast corner are two stacked exterior porches. The “birdcage,” as they call it, contains a grill and breakfast area on the main floor adjacent to the kitchen. On the second floor, it’s an exterior living room adjacent to the gallery.

This space utilizes the brick wall of the adjacent house to maintain a courtyard-like feel. A sunken mechanical space adjacent to it hides the mechanical systems.