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This 19th-Century Washington House Is Brimming With Blue-Chip Art
Paintings and sculptures are the honorary residents of this D.C. power couple’s home.
By Natalia Rachlin Jennifer Hughes
Neatly set back from the sloping, redbrick sidewalks that line the streets of Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., is a 19th-century house with enviable proportions, exquisite furnishings, and light that is just right. But first impressions leave little room for doubt: This is a home where art rules the roost.
As you step through the front door, the monumental Sterling Ruby mixed-media piece in the foyer nearly overwhelms with its sheer size. A sight line from the entryway to the back of the house reveals a sliver of wall that hosts a looping digital animation by the British artist Julian Opie. Around a corner from the foyer, in the living room, a painting commissioned from the Englishman Richard Long serves as the confrontational centerpiece.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. As designed by Gordon Bunshaft, a rectangular pool in the garden echoes a window and balcony on the 1974 museum s façade. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Facing challenges from a federal planning authority and advocacy groups, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC is under pressure to revamp or justify elements of a significant redesign of its sunken sculpture garden.
The original Japanese Zen-inflected garden, which spans 1.5 acres next to the National Mall, was completed in 1974 by the architect Gordon Bunshaft as a complement to the museum’s distinctive Modernist drum-shaped concrete and granite building. The garden’s Brutalist gravel walkways and lack of shade made it inhospitable to visitors during Washington’s hot summers, however, prompting the Hirshhorn to enlist the landscape architect Lester Collins three years later to add trees, plant beds and other vegetatio