An architect and his wife wanted a home that made them feel as if they were on vacation—right in Washington Township.
Text by Leslie Garisto Pfaff
Design and photography by Dan D’Agostino
At first it was purely a business opportunity. Little Falls-based architect Dan D’Agostino was planning to develop a one-acre parcel of land in Bergen County’s Washington Township with his contractor partner, Mike Elayan. Then he thought again. At the crest of a road lined with elegant homes, the leafy property was at the highest elevation in the area, affording unobstructed views of sunrises and sunsets. Living in a house built to take advantage of those views, D’Agostino thought, would be a little bit like being on permanent vacation. Given the scarcity of vacation time in his life—he and his wife have demanding careers and two children under 5—it suddenly seemed wrong to be building a house on that land for somebody else.
So he and his contractor—who also happened to be his best friend—decided to divide the property and build on it for themselves—an idea, says D’Agostino, “that was just too good to pass up.” The house he created, with ample input from his wife, Andrea, delivers not just those awe-inspiring views but a host of amenities that indeed make every day feel like an “on holiday” day.
Soaring walls of glass on the front and back of the house make the most of celestial events and green vistas. D’Agostino installed a floating steel stairway between the first and second stories to maximize outdoor views. “From the great room,” he says, “we can see the sun rising on our left in the morning and setting on our right at night.”
The great room also reflects the family’s desire to live communally. An open-concept layout allows them to be together even if they’re engaged in different activities. And while the spacious room encompasses living and dining areas and a kitchen, it’s still imbued with the cozy feeling the D’Agostinos loved in their previous, smaller home, thanks largely to clever design: While the ceiling is elevated in the entryway and over the dining alcove to take advantage of the glass walls, it’s deliberately lower over a large part of the great room. In the living area, three smaller windows, punctuated with dark draperies, add to the feeling of coziness. There are no curtain rods to interrupt the sense of enclosure: The draperies actually are recessed into the ceiling. “I tried very hard to volley back and forth between closed and open,” D’Agostino says.
The coziest room in the house is probably the master bedroom. Its vaulted ceiling adds drama, but also could have made the room feel excessively stark had it not been for D’Agostino’s deft touches, such as a line of horizontal trim that leads the eye downward and the use of shiplap above it, which provides a series of shadow lines to break up the ceiling space. Adding warmth, quite literally, is a two-sided gas fireplace, one side facing the bedroom and the other the master bathroom, where it complements a clean, modern design featuring a floating vanity and a mirrored wall. D’Agostino designed the bedroom’s eastfacing window so that it would frame the sunrise, in keeping with the home’s “staycation” theme.
“We both wish we could stay in that area of the house forever,” he says. (It’s a desire given a java jolt by the bedroom’s built-in coffee bar.)
Another intimate space is the loft, which overlooks the great room and functions as D’Agostino’s office. But it also was deliberately designed to accommodate the kind of all-inthe- family living he and his wife crave. In front of his desk is a comfortable sofa for his wife and kids, so, he says, “I can be working on a house design while my family is watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and getting ready to go to sleep.”
The family draws a clear line between cozy and cluttered. “We’re neat freaks,” Andrea D’Agostino admits. So the design makes use of multiple built-ins, including a long cabinet adjacent to the floating stairway, to hide the detritus of daily living. D’Agostino tucked a large pantry area behind the kitchen wall to keep food-prep messes out of sight. “The downside of living in a house with an open-concept first floor,” he says, “is that if you don’t plan for it, your house is going to look cluttered.”
The D’Agostinos’ home looks anything but. The built-ins, the glass walls and the open-concept first floor all create a distinctly modern feel, which is balanced by more traditional elements like a coffered ceiling in the great room, the shiplap in the master bedroom and an exterior that evokes New England by way of the Hamptons. In fact, says D’Agostino, from the floor plan, the house looks like something that was designed to sit on a cliff in California overlooking the ocean. But Washington Township isn’t Monterey, so D’Agostino designed a house that would make sense in its environment. On the exterior, the two-story glass walls contrast with traditional touches such as an oriel bay window—more commonly seen on Tudor Revival homes— and a roofline featuring three peaks, which, D’Agostino says, “ties everything together.”
In fact, what really ties the house together is joy: the joy of living next door to your best friend, in rooms specifically designed for the whole family, in a house by turns dramatic and homey—the perfect place, as it happens, for a vacation that never ends.