Upward Bound

Outside a Harvard Square Victorian, a towering beech tree is etched with the names of the owners’ daughters. Inside, the home is also indelibly marked. Twenty years after the couple—both Harvard-affiliated biologists—bought it, nearly every inch, except the attic, had been completely renovated.

So when their younger daughter entered high school and sought a place to entertain friends, the cramped, cluttered third-floor space didn’t immediately stand out.

“At first we toyed with the idea of redoing the basement as a retreat for the teenagers,” the wife explains. A grim assessment by structural engineers led the couple to reconsider their plan. “We also had an attic. So we thought, How about up? Let’s go up!” With the help of their longtime architect, Alan Joslin; interior designer Andra Birkerts; and contractor Matthew Fischer, up and away they went, creating a main entertainment room and a small study.



Before: A “multipurpose” room with too many purposes, the attic space felt chaotic. An unused kitchenette (leftover from the attic’s days as a separate rental apartment) took up space and served no function.

After: The dramatic media cabinet clarifies the main room’s function. “The TV itself doesn’t have much presence,” says Joslin. “We wanted to develop something that was monumental.”

The cabinet features a reproduction of one of the wife’s favorite photographs, an iconic Helmut Newton advertisement for Yves Saint Laurent. She and Joslin pored over hundreds of pictures before committing to it. The only problem? She couldn’t locate a good copy of the shot. Luckily, her younger daughter’s best friend—now a student at New York’s Parsons School of Design—combed through her personal collection of fashion books to find it.

Cambridge-based Typo Tech (now part of Benjamin Franklin Smith Printers in Boston) created a supersize replica for $600. Fischer then spraymounted it onto the media cabinet and took a sander to the side cupboards’ Formica to create a pebbled effect. Motorcycle headlights serve as spotlights.

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