Lexington, KY - After envisioning the project for many years, when the time came for Jody McKee to renovate her Penmoken home, there was no shopping around for designers.
"There was no question in my mind," McKee said. She had always known that she wanted Garry Murphy, David Wittmer and Martin Richards, of Prajna Design & Construction, to work on the project.
McKee, who works as the project design director for Kentucky Community and Technical College System, studied with Murphy and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky College of Architecture decades earlier, and she had long admired the company's designs, which often utilize natural timber elements and practical but artful craftsmanship. While the interior and exterior project also utilized the assistance of Michael Fugate of Landesign, local mason Chad Templeton, Tom Shirley of Cabinets & Designs, and a host of additional contractors, McKee and the Prajna team worked closely together to craft a vision and see it through.
The project included a new outdoor structure and backyard living space, and an addition to the back of the home, which added about 600 square feet to the modest-sized, traditional, one-story bungalow. The compact kitchen was expanded and refinished, and the interior renovation also included the addition of a laundry room, a bathroom remodel and an expanded master bedroom. Because it was important for the design to blend with the original context of the home, the interior work was more conventional. However, the crew was afforded more flexibility to experiment on the outdoor renovation, drawing inspiration from nature, with lots of primed western cedar, and a bit of an Asian-inspired motif, including a sliding wooden door and an entrance that resembles a "torii."
The outdoor work centered on an elaborate carport and garage structure, which has ultimately provided shelter for a ping pong table and community supported agriculture (CSA) boxes that McKee and her companion, John Mueller, serve as a pick-up point for. The structure, which also includes a gardening shed and a covered patio area, had been nicknamed "Garage Mahal" and the "ping pong pavilion."
"We do play a lot of ping pong in there," said McKee, who has been working on her game so that she can advance in her annual family reunion tournament (she's looking into taking lessons).
Dealing with the storm-sewer drainage was one of the first hurdles of the exterior work, and the crew took the opportunity to turn something practical into something beautiful - a rain chain connected to the gutter of the carport helps transport the runoff from the roof into a sculptural bowl, which overflows into a stone receiving container. A discreet vent beneath the structure collects the water that passes through the stone and delivers it through an underground pipe into the storm-sewer out front. The backyard birds use the water in the bowl to drink and bathe, and the decorative system provides a key focal point for the backyard.
"We didn't want a conventional downspout - that'd look kind of silly out here, " McKee said. "We needed something to receive the water, but we wanted it to be sculptural."
Inside, the crew refinished the kitchen to reflect a clean, light aesthetic that reflects elements of traditional bungalow design (such as white cabinets that are flush with the wall rather than overhanging and marble backsplash that contains overlain right angles). Re-use is an important element to Prajna's work, and they were able to re-use some of the home's original flooring and glass pantry doors, though both were moved to accommodate a new layout.
In the remodeled master bedroom, a cedar-framed storage space contains deep drawers and an entertainment center. Though it's not obvious from inside the bedroom, the storage space is flush with the interior wall and actually protrudes a couple of feet outside the main frame of the house, a trick Murphy and his colleagues used to extend the space in a subtle way.
The improvements have given McKee a new perspective on the house she has lived in since the 1970s -
while it was always charming, it had become somewhat outdated before the facelift.
"I felt like I owed it to the house - it had always been there for me," she said.