Freelance writer and editor Michael Tardif is based in Bethesda, Maryland. Julia Heine is a photographer with McInturff Architects.

As Steve Reiss prepared to retire from the large architecture firm HNTB, he began to think about a second home that would eventually become his primary residence. Reiss found that house in Irvington, Virginia, near the southern tip of Virginia’s Northern Neck. Its beautiful site overlooking Carter’s Creek, a tributary of the Rappanhannock River, and eclectic architectural elements appealed to his design sensibility. “It had a Frank Lloyd Wright quality to it—low, not overwhelming on its site,” the architect explains. “It sat gently on the land.” At first, he focused on lightening the interior, getting rid of dark floors, painting most surfaces white and observing how sunlight moved through the house during the day and the seasons.

Designed by Richmond architect Allan McCullough in the early 1960s, the house had since suffered a number of unsympathetic alterations. When Reiss was ready to renovate, he decided to hire another architect. “My background is with large, publicly funded transportation projects,” he says. “I realized I could do the design work, but that if I wanted to do something special, I should engage an architect who could bring a lot of residential design experience to the project.” A modernist, he had long admired the houses designed by Mark McInturff, who had as much experience with renovation as he did with new construction, another plus.

That an architect would hire another architect to design his home is not as unusual as it might seem. “We’ve had seven or eight clients who are architects,” says McInturff. “Some had practices that focused on large buildings. Others worked for organizations such as the World Bank, in positions related to architecture but not in actual practice.”

“I was excited about working with Mark as a client, which was completely new to me,” says Reiss. “We shared a common language. We had the same sensibility, the same objectives.” The design, he says, developed quickly. “Mark came up with a concept that I had thought about, but had never been able to completely visualize. Within a week, he showed me sketches of what he thought the broad concept should be.”

McInturff quickly realized that the house and an adjacent guest cottage did not take advantage of the elevated site, which is surrounded by water on two sides. He saw the house as having two parts: a head and a tail. A large living space at the edge of the property overlooks the water, while the bedrooms and bathrooms are arranged behind it in a row. A long corridor extends along one side of the bedroom wing to face a courtyard between the house and guest cottage, and connect the entrance to the waterside living space.

 “It was clear to us right away that the big space had been cut up,” says McInturff. “A kitchen had been carved out of one corner. It would feel more generous if it was opened up and the kitchen relocated. That was the major move. After that, the d ecisions were about how to articulate the room.”

The architect replaced a fussy arrangement of doors and bay windows along the outer wall of the corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows to create a light-filled art gallery and a stronger visual connection to the courtyard. He moved the front door from the end of the corridor to the middle, calling attention to the entrance by placing it at a shallow angle to the new glass wall. 

The kitchen was relocated to what had been an enclosed porch, and the partitions removed from the large living space, revealing the fireplace as the centerpiece of a large, flexible great room with expansive waterfront views in two directions. “The house is now very simple and elegant, a simple box with the fireplace at the center,” says Reiss. “All spaces meld into each other. There are no walls; the furniture defines the spaces.”

The interior is animated with a series of colored gypsum board panels set into simple wood frames painted black and applied to the walls and ceiling. They provide a greater sense of height, a contrast to the adjacent white surfaces and a backdrop for art. The idea for the panels arose when project architect David Mogensen, while measuring the corridor, gazed down its length to the far wall of the great room and realized that the view needed to be framed in some way. Opening the ceiling to the underside of the rafters of the great room proved too costly, so he and McInturff ingeniously raised the ceiling in select locations to subtly define  the dining space and seating areas throughout the great room.

Reiss chose his builder as carefully as his architect. Mason Hearn, president of HomeMasons of Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, outside Richmond, had studied architecture at the University of Virginia. “Mason was familiar with Mark’s work, and had always wanted to do a McInturff project,” says Reiss. “Between the three of us, we sort of had an architectural thread connecting us.” Hearn also agreed to put his lead carpenter, Wayne Wilfong, on the project full-time. “That made me feel comfortable having a remote relationship with the contractor,” says Reiss, who still spent most of his time in Northern Virginia.

During construction, the three settled into a comfortable, though not entirely planned, routine. “I would come down here on the weekend,” says Reiss. “I would take photos and make sketches, and send them to Mark electronically either Sunday night or Monday. He would offer suggestions and solutions, and on Monday morning I would meet with Wayne. So I was not only Mark’s client, I was also his construction field rep. As an architect, I could understand his sketches and communicate them to the contractor.”

During construction, Reiss found sketches made by McCullough, the original architect, that the previous owner had left behind. The sketches showed the main part of the house facing the water as one large space. McInturff, it turns out, had returned the house to its original design.