Home

Houses don’t all immediately become “home”. There is a period of introduction between the owners and a new house as the house shows you what it needs and you begin to figure out how to accommodate those needs and yours in a way that satisfies both parties. Glen Burnie was a needy house. Neglect or indifference can kill a house just as surely as active destruction – the process is just slower and less obvious. We chose to honor what was original while creating comfortable spaces for modern living. Our design/build team was totally on board with this concept. Today the house looks like it did 200 + years ago but has a fully functional modern kitchen and 5 brand new bathrooms – none of which strike terror in the hearts of people who use them.

I have very definite tastes and style. I love walls. Defined spaces make me happy. Glen Burnie is a dream because the rooms are huge and have amazing light. The house functions as very open but each room or sections of the house can be closed off to be self contained spaces. When you have very large dogs who are pathologically friendly it helps to be able to separate them from unsuspecting visitors.To be blunt – we live here and that means the house is going to be littered with debris from everyday life. We leave mail on the lowboy in the entry hall as well as dropping shoes by the door and coats and packages on the bench. Truth be told, Randy is a stacker. He likes to leave little piles of his papers in various rooms. I like having drawers that I can pick them up and shove them in when the clutter gets to me. Now he has a whole wing of the house for his office and he can stack to his heart’s content. The only time he has to pick up is when the cleaners come.

We had our biggest struggle with paint colors precisely because you can see into all the rooms from the central hall. I didn’t want to paint everything the same so used varying shades of blue green from Benjamin Moore to tie everything together. I repeated the process upstairs. The original kitchen wing was considered separately so I used creams and white for those spaces. Not coincidentally this is the same color palette I used in our Fairfax Station home and our lake house. These colors are home for us – they tie together all the furniture, rugs and art that we own.

Over the last 48 years of marriage we have spent an extraordinary (Ran’s word choice) amount of time antiquing in Central Virginia. As a result most of the pieces we own come with a memory attached. There is something wonderful about walking into a room and having those memories surround you. We still laugh about the empire table behind the sofa in the parlor which we initially decided was too much trouble to load into the car but then went back for because it was just too good to pass up. I was right though – getting that thing in the car was a struggle of epic proportions, and getting it out was just as bad.

Today when someone comes to see Glen Burnie, they are not just seeing a wonderful historic home but also getting a crash course in who we are and what we love and that is exactly what home should be.