After buying a lovely point on Linkhorn Bay, Cindy and Jeff (an executive in the health care industry) set about creating a home that would blend the comfort of country living with the sophistication of classic design. They hired Gerrie King West, a principal in Folck & West Architects, to draw up plans. The couple envisioned a home where they could entertain family and friends, and Cindy brought her extensive collection of pictures as visual aids. “We met almost weekly over a two-year period,” West remembers. “Cindy has a real enthusiasm for architectural details, and Jeff understands spatial relationships. Their interest made the project a lot of fun.”
The resulting brick and stone house, which was completed in 2005 and is known as Compass Pointe, has Romanesque elements that express solidity and strength. A semicircular tower topped with a conical roof is its most prominent feature. The garage, set perpendicular to the main house, creates a spacious courtyard entry.
Having a marked predilection for old stuff, Cindy wanted to blur the home’s newness with old-school construction techniques such as parged brickwork. Parging is a method of waterproofing old, soft brick by troweling mortar over the face of the bricks and wiping most of it off with burlap bags. The brick masons of Snow Jr. and King gave Cindy the look she was seeking—the appearance of old stucco that had weathered off. “Plain brick would have been too new-looking for the Old World style of the house,” West explains. “Using fieldstone for the base of the house added another rustic element.”
The house has a pleasing stylistic coherence through the repetition of major design themes. The jack arch over the front door is echoed on windows and other doors, on the breezeway and loggia. The same flattened curve shapes the mezzanine overlooking the kitchen and family room and is repeated on cornices on kitchen cabinets.
The couple used design and construction elements to integrate the indoor and outdoor looks. The kitchen and family room, for example, have the same tongue-and-groove boards and heavy beams that make the ceiling of the nearby breezeway so distinctive. The family room’s dry-stack fireplace (also by Snow Jr. and King) is constructed of the same fieldstone used on the exterior. Ironwork railings fabricated by Baker Sheet Metal in Norfolk are used indoors and out.
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