Lexington, KY - David and Angie Stephenson love a good story. They certainly love a good story more than a new bedroom set or a new love seat, and their new home on Kastle Road is a well-written volume of worthy tales.
Take, for example, the front porch's stone columns: each rock was painstakingly dissembled from a chimney off an old homestead on a Berea farm that belonged to a family friend. The stones were then hauled back to Chevy Chase and reassembled. The exposed beams in the downstairs kitchen and living space are pine timber from a tobacco barn in Scott County; the oak pillars on the porch are from the same structure (the Stephensons used the leftover wood to build an arbor in the backyard).
"All the stuff in this house has a story. There are just so many new houses that are so sterile," David said. "I can appreciate a good story, and taking out that chimney was hard work, but I love knowing we did that, and I love knowing where this wood came from. My truck got stuck in the mud and I had to be pulled out when I was hauling these timbers out of that tobacco farm. That was kind of fun - after I got it out."
Under the stewardship of builder and architect Craig Rushing with RC3, the couple's vision for what they wanted in a new home was realized after six months worth of design and the ground breaking in spring of 2006, but the first obstacle came in the fact that they were razing one house and building a new one. The original structure didn't lend itself for a remodel or addition, and starting out with a clean slate allowed for the new home to have a basement and a rock solid, highly efficient foundation.
Though they were starting anew (in a loose sense of the word, as the aforementioned material wasn't new at all), all parties involved wanted to make certain they weren't compromising the neighborhood's aesthetic.
"We had the benefit of having everything new," David said. "The problem with everything new in an old neighborhood, of course, was that it could look new and look out of place. So we worked very hard in trying to make something that, while it was new, still didn't necessarily feel new. We had a lot of subcontractors coming in here thinking this was a remodel."
Apparently, the neighbors were taken with Rushing's work, and he was given the opportunity to further his mark on the neighborhood. After completing the Stephensons' home, he was commissioned to do two nearby additions - one a street over on Montclaire Drive, the other directly next door.
With the home's exterior approvingly fitting the neighborhood, the interior was fashioned to meet the needs of its inhabitants. Aside from using recycled and reclaimed material, the home is also equipped with many green features, such as a solar water heater and low-VOC paints - aspects that were very important to the Stephensons. While the couple knew they wanted to have green components integrated into their new home, they admit the ins and outs of eco-friendly building procedures and materials were ideas they were unaccustomed to. At the same time, they also didn't want to be passive bystanders.
Fortunately, Rushing, who came to the project with layers of experience in custom green design and material, was able to engage the couple during the entire process while balancing their wants with financial and other physical constraints.
"What is great working with Craig is he would send us down these paths to do research," Angie said. "We wanted to educate ourselves. We knew a little bit about trying to eat healthy, but the more we worked with Craig, the more we learned."
With ideas being exchanged and bounced back and forth off of each other, the Stephensons' home, which includes three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms (with more potential available when the basement is completed), was tailored to the health of the residents and the planet.
"Green has a lot of facets to it, one is health - for yourself and other occupants of the planet. Recycling also has benefits - the health of the planet. And you can save money recycling," David said.
True, money can be saved using recycled and reclaimed material if you're willing to put forth the manual effort, but there are instances and spaces in the house where the Stephensons splurged. Specifically, the large bathroom off the master bedroom, built with two sinks, a deep bathtub with jet sprayers and a large open shower. But such extravagance didn't come without sacrifice, or a good story.
"The bathroom is lavish for us," David said. "I had a 1966 Mustang fastback that I had since high school for 20 years. I didn't drive it much, it would have been a third car, there's no place to put it here, it was taking up space - so I sold it. And the money I got out of it, I basically put it into the bathroom. This is the Mustang Room. We're going to put a picture of it up in here."
With David as a professional photographer, pictures come easy for the family, and his artwork intimately decorates the walls throughout the house, which are an adornment to the warehouse-worth of inherited and handed down antique and collectible furniture scattered through every room. Piece by piece, the items are an eclectic hodgepodge of wood, glass and other fabrics, but taken as a whole, the collection adds a cherished ancestral sentiment to the family's dwellings - the kind of character you can't buy in a department store.
Aside from making the inside of the home unmistakably of the Stephenson mold, the family, which includes their 9-year-old daughter, moved to put their mark on the deep backyard. A pile of leftover building material was quickly utilized to make an arbor, a wood shed and, interestingly, a homing pigeon coop - a vestige of David's childhood hobby and quarters for 20 birds. And more projects are in the works.
"That pile keeps getting smaller and smaller as we keep building things, but it's still a pile," David said.
Moving to the front, the porch - a true porch, where a family sits and talks to passing neighbors - was actually the first component of the house the Stephensons said they wanted when they first started planning with Rushing. The outside sitting area is complemented with a black berry bush, or as David refers to it, "traffic stoppers."
"We didn't want to exclude ourselves from the rest of the neighborhood we live in," he said. "That, in a way, dictated the rest of the house. We started in the front and worked back."
Just inside the front of the home is a comfortable sitting room with a large window that looks out on to the porch and further into the neighborhood. It's Rushing's favorite room, now dubbed "The Rushing Room" - a testament to the affinity the architect and the family conjured during a trying time for any couple.
"It was just a positive experience, when we told people we were going to build, they told us not to. They said we'd end up divorced," Angie said. "But with Craig, we've made a lifetime friend. We all worked so well together, we all brought things in."
That's definitely fodder for another good story.