Across the Washington area, modest Cape Cods and Colonials are routinely demolished to make way for supersized houses.
But there are exceptions to this market trend. On a property adjoining one of the McMansions in Arlington, Va., Daniela and Chris Sicuranza, both 40, chose to expand and renovate, rather than replace, their 1955 brick ranch house.
“We didn’t want to tear down and start over,” said Daniela Sicuranza, a freelance TV news producer. “The house was solid and in great condition. We just felt it needed some tweaks to suit our needs.”
Their biggest change was to build a 745-square-foot rear addition, large enough for a dining room, a master bedroom and a screened porch on the main level.
“For us, it was just the right amount of space we needed,” said Chris Sicuranza, a risk and compliance consultant for consumer banks.
The three new spaces are contained within a cedar-clad, rectangular structure that makes a bold statement in the backyard but can’t be seen from the street. “It’s our little secret,” he said.
Drawn to clean lines and simple shapes, the homeowners insisted on a modern design for the addition. “When we were exploring inspiration,” Daniela Sicuranza said, “the homes we liked the most were all in California. We hoped to bring a little of that feeling to our home.”
Rather than looking like an add-on, the porch is treated as a room well blended into the new wing of the house. Screened openings are sized to match the large windows of the adjacent dining room. Cedar siding and an overhanging roof line extend from the protected outdoor space to the rest of the addition.
“Maximizing outdoor space and preserving landscape was key, so integrating the screened porch into the addition served to reduce its footprint,” said Arlington architect Jon Hensley, who led the design and renovation.
The Sicuranzas were as particular in choosing the original ranch home to buy as adding onto it. “It took us three years to find the right house,” Chris Sicuranza said.
He and his wife purchased the home in 2009 for $725,000 based on its cul-de-sac location, remodeled kitchen and proximity to public schools.
“The lot is huge and private in the back, so that was the icing on the cake,” Daniela Sicuranza said.
After moving into the home, the couple became parents to two daughters, Gabriela and Lucia, now 7 and 5, respectively. In 2015, they decided to add the essential spaces missing from the home and renovate the interiors to improve family life. They declined to say how much they spent on the remodeling project.
The original dining room had disappeared when the previous homeowners incorporated it into their kitchen renovation. “We really needed a place to have meals with the kids and family,” Chris Sicuranza said. “Our only place to have dinner was at the kitchen island. For Thanksgiving, we rented long plastic tables and put them in the living room. It wasn’t ideal.”
To create more bedroom space, the homeowners looked at adding an upper story, but the staircase to reach this level would have taken up too much space in the small living room next to the kitchen. “Once that attic was taken out of the picture, we went back to the first scheme for a simple rear addition,” said project designer Heidi Sun.
