Family Room

Q: It's time to redo our family room, which has sustained a lot of wear and tear from three super-active children. What sort of furnishings would you suggest? My own stylistic preference can best be described as relaxed and comfortable.A: While the size of your budget will be the determining factor, I hope your do-over can involve more than just the furnishings. Floor coverings, fabrics and various bits and pieces contribute just as much to a comfortable and relaxed look as do tables and chairs.

A brick-and-siding Georgian-style home in the Crestwood Estates development of Ellicott City sold last month for $751,000 - $1,000 more than the listing price. "We had three offers on the house," noted listing agent Bob Lucido of Re/Max Advantage Realty. "If you price it right, you get into a bidding situation, especially if the house is spectacular to begin with. The owners…took a lot of our staging recommendations, and it showed beautifully. " The home's open floor plan, with 4,110 square feet of living space on three finished levels, contains four bedrooms, 41/2 baths and a two-car, side-entry garage.

Pulte Home Corp. is down to its final 24 homes at Windgate in the Bestgate Road area of Annapolis, where the company is building 167 three-level townhouses with gas cooking, heat and hot water.A sprinkler system, six-panel Colonial doors, Merrilat brand kitchen cabinets, prewiring for telephones and cable TV are some of the standard features in the Anne Arundel County community.The Rhodes and the Severn are 2,048-square-foot homes with a starting price of $147,990.In both models, the lower level houses a laundry area, utility room and space for an optional 19-by-19-foot family room and full bath.

There is a small area in Northwest Baltimore where, beyond an imposing wrought-iron gate, a narrow lane provides access to 18 homes of different sizes and styles. Color abounds here, by way of a variety of flowers, bushes and trees showing on the front and back lawns of each house. Ashley Long's home is a two-story, Victorian-style structure, with six large columns on a stone front porch and a symmetry of door and windows that is reminiscent of a gentleman farmer's home. Inside, a series of arches extending beyond the front door to the end of the 74-foot-deep home, along with a heavily molded, squared-off entrance to the living room and dining room, suggests a Southern warmth and gentility emblematic of Long's Tennessee heritage.

Q: We're going to remove a wall in order to combine the kitchen with the adjoining family room. I think, however, that it may still be necessary to have some sort of visual barrier to the more messy food preparation area. A two-way fireplace seems an intriguing possibility, but it's not very functional. Do you have some suggestions?A: What you really need is a partial division between the two rooms. A good solution might be a sturdy, self-supporting structure that doesn't go all the way up to the ceiling.

For the past 17 years, when Fred I. Henry was not driving a new-car carrier, he was likely to be building something at his home in Ellicott City.Right after he and his wife, Ann, moved into the house, which had been built for them and was the first on their street, he remodeled half of the two-car garage to make a family room.He hasn't stopped since.In 1993, he tackled his biggest project -- a new kitchen across the back of the house, hiring outside contractors just for digging the foundation and for tasks requiring a licensed contractor.

Q: Please give me advice about creating an informal atmosphere in a small family room. I need help with colors, fabric and the floor covering. The furniture looks like the contents of my fridge: a combination of leftovers.A: The proper use of pattern, texture, color -- and don't forget the lighting -- will enable you to produce the desired mood, even with nondescript furniture. Do with the old furnishings what you'd do with most of the leftovers in your refrigerator: Warm them up.My first bit of advice is to add some deep and contrasting colors.

I'm puzzled about how to decide on a color scheme for the family room in our new home. Someone told me to start by choosing a work of art for the room and to base the color scheme on that. Is that a good idea? Do you have other suggestions for how I can move in the right direction? I'm familiar with the pick-a-picture approach to color scheme selection, and my advice is to forget it. Especially in today's family room, there's likely to be little wall space available for an important work of art, what with the flat-screen TV and the bookcases, mirrors and cabinets typically deployed in these spaces.

To make their young son's room distinctive as well as create easier access to attic storage, Katherine and Robert Dwyer ripped out the ceiling of his bedroom. They left the exposed wood beams and added a skylight and a loft, reachable by ladder. That was 20 years ago. A few years later, in their daughter's room, they built an enclosed area they called a "nest," with louvered doors and a window. Those bedrooms in the Ten Hills house in the city were fun spaces for the children back then.

WHENEVER I bring a new gadget home, my wife gives me a look that says some kind of household technical apocalypse is, indeed, close at hand. I can understand her point. Scattered around our family room are nine remote controls, only four of which I can associate with some device that we actually use. The basement also is littered with a variety of small, odd boxes, cameras, circuit boards and cables, all of which were supposed to be the next great thing when I tested them out but obviously weren't -- otherwise, I'd remember what they were supposed to do. I try to convince my beloved that these are not junk, but valuable artifacts.

Often when an old home is in the final stages of an interior renovation, the grandeur of new molding, flooring and light fixtures stands out like a masterfully worked canvas awaiting the addition of the primary subject. Such is the story unfolding behind the new windows of the Alice and Mike Gosse's circa 1920 East Baltimore rowhouse, where the scarcity of furniture draws full attention to the quality of the detailed work completed. Just inside the front door, off a narrow hall, the entire first floor is open, extending little more than 15 feet wide and 65 feet long to the back wall of the home.

Architects live and breathe design, blissfully losing themselves in details most people would never notice — the bevel of a trim, the way light falls across a room, squared legs or curved. So what happens, we wondered, when two such aesthetes come together under one roof? Do they lie awake at night, pondering three-inch moldings or four? Is there a prenup for the Eames chairs? Do they fight tooth and nailhead? Judging from the example set by these married Baltimore architects who live and work together, it all comes together much more smoothly than any of that.

The exterior of Lee and Sue Jensen's home in the Catonsville development of Fox Hall Farms is traditional and reserved. Like its connected group of neighbors, the Colonial-style facade features neutral-color siding, a brick chimney, multi-framed windows and a double-car garage. Even the street seems very quiet. But still waters run deep. A clue to its interior appears quickly, just beyond the front door, when Sue Jensen, by way of a greeting, reveals matter-of-factly, "Our mover said that a normal move is about 250 boxes.

Jennifer Hauser Runde spent her early career as a choreographer, channeling her artistic talents into stories told through dance. But after Runde and husband Christopher welcomed a baby boy in 2006, and purchased their first house soon after, she happily shifted her priorities. Life was less about dance steps than baby steps — especially when their second son was born. "Spending hours a day at home with our two boys inspired me to think about the space as more than rooms that I clean and work in," says the 33-year-old Runde, whose family lives in a Perry Hall subdivision.

Our cavernous family room presents a lighting challenge. For nearly 18 years, we've lived with the builder's insane idea of decent lighting: two recessed lights above our fireplace illuminating a framed, faded poster from my college-apartment days, and the weak halo cast by a ceiling-fan light fixture. Early on, my in-laws came to visit and were appalled at my lack of lighting (and possibly décor, though they were too kind to mention that). They insisted on buying some lamps for us, which created twin oases of light on either side of our family room couch.

A widow now for three years, Joanne Adleberg continues to find sanctuary in the Pikesville condominium she and her husband purchased in 2004. When their house and three acres of land off Greenspring Avenue became too much to keep up, they were the first to move into the new condominium complex of Stevenson Commons, and as time went by, both found the building to be very people-friendly. The couple purchased the building's largest unit — 2,750 square feet — at a cost of $475,000.

From the nine-foot windows of their family room, Libby and John Strahorn overlook Harford County's rolling countryside and, they say, they'll never tire of the view.It's a big change from their last address: the 55th floor of a Chicago skyscraper.Sometimes they miss the bright lights and the glamour that comes from living in a major city, but say they are glad they decided to retire near Fallston.Their modern home was built to take advantage of the 225 acres of farmland and forest that surround it. The land has been in Mrs. Strahorn's family for four generations.

The exterior of Lee and Sue Jensen's home in the Catonsville development of Fox Hall Farms is traditional and reserved. Like its connected group of neighbors, the Colonial-style facade features neutral-color siding, a brick chimney, multi-framed windows and a double-car garage. Even the street seems very quiet. But still waters run deep. A clue to its interior appears quickly, just beyond the front door, when Sue Jensen, by way of a greeting, reveals matter-of-factly, "Our mover said that a normal move is about 250 boxes.

In the spring of 2007, a tremendous fire roared through the Bolton Hill property of Greg and Darma Kamenetz. Divided into apartments at the time, their stately, three-story townhouse was home to students of the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art, who were able to escape without injury. Rushing back to Baltimore from their home in Park City, Utah, the couple assessed the damage and then placed the property on the market. Realizing how much they loved Baltimore – Greg Kamenetz, founder and owner of American Management Company, was born and raised nearby – they withdrew the house from the market, opting to fix it up for themselves.

For Denny and Vicki Smith, one of the best things about building their Carroll County home was the rapport they developed with the builder. "Bob Ward builds a great home," said Denny Smith of his large single-family, "Yorkshire" model in the Manchester Farms development. "They worked with us and gave us a lot of suggestions." Another advantage to choosing a new house is watching the day-by-day evolution, from the pouring of a foundation to the final interior touches. "We'd come up on weekends and take pictures of the progress," Denny Smith said.