By Jay Dedrick
Scripps Howard News Service
Virginia DuBrucq is constantly in motion, constantly thinking. She uses her daily race-walks around a park in her Denver neighborhood, where she's lived since 1965, to ponder life's possibilities.
It was on one of those walks seven years ago that she noticed the brick bungalow, the one with the inviting courtyard. She wasn't looking to move. But DuBrucq, an architect, studied that home and imagined the possibilities.
"I hadn't even been inside the house," says DuBrucq, 61. "And by the end of my race-walk, I'd designed the addition in my head, created the indoor/outdoor courtyard space."
The home is now hers, the added space a reality.
The building began as a barbershop with an attached residence; over the years, a candy seller and tailor had set up shop in the commercial space. Once she bought the home in 1997 for $190,000, DuBrucq wanted to revive the work-at-home arrangement, and now her architecture studio nicely fills the old storefront.
Still, the rest of the house -- two bedrooms, kitchen, bath and study -- lacked significant living space.
That changed in 1999 after six months of design and another six months of construction. The 1,250-square-foot, single-story house grew by 800 square feet: 350 on the original level, and 450 in a second-floor addition. A 300-square-foot portion of the existing home was renovated, too, in the $170,000 project.
"I wanted the addition to feel like it was part of the house, and I also wanted to stay small," says DuBrucq, who believes in the environmental benefits of "living smaller." Though she added a second story to the home, she didn't want a pop-top behemoth that would bully the neighborhood.
The showpiece of the project is a new living room on the main floor, a 12-by-20 space that takes the old rectangular bungalow into an L-shape. A trio of dual doors connects the room to the courtyard, sheltered by a massive ash tree.
Unconventional details distinguish the courtyard, most notably a boardwalk and pergola with rough-hewn wood columns painted white, and copper tubes overhead. Adding to the whimsy are the bases of the wood columns, which are set inside custom-drilled boulders that rest on boxes of small stones.
Natural light flows freely. Those six doors connecting the courtyard and living room are capped by a row of transom windows that wraps around to the adjoining wall, where four more windows frame the gas fireplace. The hearth is done in black glazed porcelain tile.
Light bounces from the vaulted ceiling of corrugated, galvanized metal, contrasted by scissor-like trusses in clear vertical-grain fir. The blond grain also shows up in the window trim, shelves and cabinets.
The golden hue complements DuBrucq's interior wall palette of muted green, purple and orange, contrasted by crisp white window trim.
The living room's most attractive feature -- to DuBrucq's two cats, anyway -- is the stained concrete floor with radiant heat. DuBrucq loves the feel of it on her feet in the wintertime, too.
Equally inviting is the upstairs master bedroom addition, reached by climbing from a Western maple staircase that begins in the cozy kitchen. Capped by a vaulted ceiling, the bedroom features several windows for cross-ventilation, a walk-in closet and a deck just big enough for a pair of chairs.
Twin bowl sinks in black and gray sit on a counter of fir slats in the master bath. Fir panels also cover the ceiling of the room, where high windows draw natural light inside while allowing privacy.
"I loved renovating it," DuBrucq says of her home. "Your house is your outer skin, so you really need to claim it."
(Jay Dedrick of the Rocky Mountain News at www.rockymountainnews.com.)
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