Above & Beyond: An Extraordinary Waterfront Home Renovation from the Inside Out

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Featured Homes

THE PROJECT: Add more than 300 square feet to the second story of a waterfront home to provide separate work-from-home spaces, more user-friendly laundry facilities, and additional primary suite storage with a bathroom that evokes refreshing, “happy place” vibes. Upon completion these efforts would reset the home’s total square footage from 3,014 to 3,480 square feet.

THE PLACE: With its location within a greater Annapolis critical area on the Magothy River side of Severna Park, the homeowners always knew that there would be restrictions to any plan they would conceive to enhance its square footage. If that square footage were to “grow” in a way that would make the most sense for them, the homeowners would need help re-assessing and re-envisioning the space they were already living in.

EXECUTING THE PLAN: The couple chose the firm of MKS Architects of Annapolis to continue with their grand plan to turn a dated, non-descript exterior into a head-turner and take a less than functional second floor to a more practical and updated place. 

Curb appeal, waterfront proximity, and a smart layout are all hallmarks of the most desired homes in our region. If you’ve already found the location and are building from scratch, you can always bake these attributes into the plan, however, if you fall in love with the potential of an older, existing home you know you will need to make a unique commitment to its stewardship going forward.   

After living in the same Severna Park community for some time, the feature homeowners had always kept their eye out for a property nearby that worked better in terms of waterfront proximity. They would find just such a property in 2017. Nearly 10 years on, the home recently experienced the completion of its third round of renovations. 

Home Reno #3

“We have done quite a bit of work on the house,” says the homeowner of the three-part approach that her husband and her applied to the overall project. Their first tweaks included a general reconfiguration of the first floor within the footprint, which relocated the kitchen to create better flow, and the second was an extensive tear-out of the existing finished basement in favor of increased storage potential and a well-equipped family room with built-ins and a full bath that the kids could easily access when they came in from the water.

Reno number three, however, needed to pull everything they wanted to do with the home together by finally addressing the structure’s curb appeal and adding some parental perks like separate his-and-her office spaces, laundry facilities that could be accessed without walking through the primary suite, and turning their bath into a sophisticated escape. 

The couples’ builder, Cornerstone Project Consulting, would refer them to the team of Melanie Stern, RA, and Project Manager, Paul Schilder at MKS Architects. Upon first seeing the property, Stern noted, its sense of disconnection to its surroundings. “It didn’t feel like a waterfront home,” Stern says of the residence built in 1986.

Paul Schilder, who managed the project for MKS, concurred. “Front to back it was like two different houses; where a lot of the times, when it’s a waterfront home, you kind of have that sense of a holistic house, so, the front is open, the back is open,” Schilder explains. “This one, it was…sort of a tale of two houses, walking in.”

Outwardly, he felt the home resembled a ski chalet with deep overheads, a very forward-facing garage, and a massive shed-like roof.

What They Had Been Living Without

A clean exterior presentation that would more appropriately tie the structure to its location was proposed by the team to address the home’s lack of street presence. This would include sensible door and window swaps that would help create a stronger connection from the front to the back of the home and then out to the water. 

Once inside, a darkly paneled, two-story entry that also suffered from skylights that were undersized for the job and inadequate tract lighting would also be swapped out for their more modern counterparts. And the space that existed vertically above the sloping garage roof would be transformed to provide more room for the homeowners’ desired additional office space and more easily accessible storage and laundry facilities on the second floor.

“We had a feeling the open foyer could somehow be better utilized, but we never would have been able to envision this floorplan on our own,” says the homeowner of the design solution MKS presented to her and her husband. 

What the family had been dealing with upstairs was the inconvenience of that sloping roof line and a laundry room that could only be accessed through the primary bedroom.  “They really just wanted their primary bedroom and bathroom and closet to function, because all of those spaces were under the existing roof,” Schilder says.

“It was uncomfortable for them to do laundry. The main closet and laundry were over the garage. And so, when you walked into that space, the ceiling height was a standard ceiling height, but after about four feet, which was the depth of the washer and dryer, the ceiling started sloping down to about four feet. So, as the homeowner walked deep into the closet, the ceiling literally came in on him as he moved.” 

Upon completion of the second story reno, the homeowners would gain an additional bedroom that they are using as a home office, an additional flex-work space, laundry facilities accessible from dual entries, a reconfigured and larger primary bedroom, and a primary bath that finally feels like the happy place they knew it could be.

“The bathroom before had just a small, square window,” Schilder says. “It was a very dated, ’80s/’90s shower—a walk-in shower, a single vanity, and a water closet. So, it was all one room and very tight-fitting. And that was all existing, basically, where their walk-in closet is right now.”

A New, Refreshed Presence

Like finishing a wrapped gift with a fine ribbon, this residence has acquired a new pride of place on its block that’s complete with a fully refreshed exterior of low-maintenance NuCedar shingles. 

“We are very pleased with the finished product and have had lots of positive feedback on both the interior and exterior of the house,” the homeowners say.  “When undergoing this renovation, we first and foremost wanted to create an environment that fit the needs of our family. The fact that our friends and neighbors also like the outcome has been a nice bonus.”