When Pennington architect Maria Burke-Slover decided to build a dream home of her own she faced a challenge with a paradox: design a new house that looked old.
A modern home with an attached garage, she knew, would look out of place in her 19th century neighborhood of Colonial Revival and Homestead-style homes. She wanted the house she built on her 45-by-120-foot lot to blend in seamlessly with the existing buildings on Academy Avenue, which included two local landmarks: the First Baptist Church, built in 1857, and the Pennington Academy building, a former public school that dates to President William McKinley’s administration.

“I worked hard to get this house to fit contextually, and I took my cues from what was around me,” Ms. Burke-Slover says. Pointing across the street to the former Pennington Academy, an 1890s two-story brick building that has been restored and converted into condos, she adds, “I knew my house had to be tall and I wanted brick.”
Working with general contractor Ron Meier, owner of Mercer General Works in Pennington, she built a 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom home that has a small footprint, yet plenty of interior space due to its vertical layout, partially finished basement and third-floor loft with dormer windows that serves as her husband’s home office. A quasi-modern touch is the eat-in kitchen and side porch, designed to look like a 20th century clapboard addition on the house’s west side.
The architectural illusion is maintained indoors. The kitchen wall closest to the main part of the house is brick to create the impression the room was a turn-of-the-century addition to the exterior of an older house. Ms. Burke-Slover says she chose new wide-plank pine flooring, even though it “dents up easily” from chair legs and high-heel shoes, because she wanted a worn-in, vintage look. On the ceiling, the installation of reclaimed hand-hewn barn beams, aged to a silvery gray, on top of the natural wood-stained bead-board panels imbues a sense of decades-old warmth and history to a room that was only built in 2007.
“The beams came from a very old barn in the Doylestown (Pa.) area,” Ms. Burke-Slover says. “A woman I work with often, Betsy Ackerman, is one of the leading architects in the area for barns, and we have access to a lot of recycled and salvage materials for when we do historic homes.” Ms. Burke-Slover’s 3-year-old kitchen, however, is proof that repurposed barn beams can impart historical character to even the newest homes. “I was just trying to get that feeling in here,” she says.
The square open-air porch, which can be accessed through both the kitchen’s dining area and laundry room, offers a cozy spot for entertaining. The laundry room, decorated with white bead-board wainscoting, is outsized and airy, with a row of large windows overlooking the yard. Long shelves filled with cheerful blue and white antique enamelware (flea market finds) serve both a decorative and utilitarian function. “I use the enamelware outside in the summer because it doesn’t break and it’s casual,” Ms. Burke-Slover says. “In the summer we set up the porch, and I have mosquito netting, and it’s so very nice and relaxing. Everything is all blue, white and yellow out there.”
In the main part of the house, the architectural details, colors and furnishings are traditional with a few contemporary decorative flourishes — mostly in the forms of unusual clocks and grids — in deference to her husband, Bill Slover, whom she describes as “a modernist at heart.” The living room has a wood-burning red brick hearth and a coffered ceiling painted in a warm shade of golden wheat crisscrossed with white beams. The unmistakable focal point, however, is a large antique quilt sewn onto a muslin-covered board that anchors the wall behind the white couch. Each square on the intricate quilt contains six different slivers of multicolored cloth. “It really is a work of art,” Mr. Burke-Slover says. “My husband likes modern art, and he loves grids, so we both fell in love with this. I did because it’s vintage, and he did because it’s a grid and has great colors.”
A guest bedroom, with his and her closets, and a bathroom that includes an oversized shower complete the first floor. “When I was designing this house, I anticipated that my parents would come live with me at some point in time because they’re in their 80s and, God bless them, they are still in very good health,” Ms. Burke-Slover says. “So this bedroom on the first floor with all the closet space is for either when I can’t make steps anymore, or my parents come to live with me.”
Upstairs, in an innovative use of what would otherwise be wasted space, a spectacular built-in bookcase runs the entire length of the second-floor hallway connecting the second guest bedroom and the master bedroom. The master bath is square without built-in sinks or cabinets, reminiscent of the way bathrooms were years ago. There is one free-standing marble sink and a stand-alone soaking tub in the center of the room beneath an antique chandelier. From the lower half of the double window that frames the tub hangs a linen and lace church cloth, which she has repurposed as a curtain. “I try to incorporate things I love in different ways than you would expect them to be used,” Ms. Burke-Slover says.
This decorating philosophy carries into the master bedroom where a long narrow piece of salvaged wood ($40 at a flea market, she says) serves as a headboard and creates an interesting interior design element. Light floods the bedroom from a row of windows above the gas fireplace as well as the full-length glass French doors that lead to a standing-room only balcony. The balcony, suspended by inconspicuous steel cables bolted to the side of the house, overlooks the Pennington School’s athletic fields off Burd Street. “It’s just a detail I put on the house... certainly not to sit out there or anything... I just wanted to get those doors there for fresh breezes,” she says. “This is the western side of the house and the breezes just come off the fields in the summer and keep this room incredibly cool.” The glass doors also frame full-length views of spectacular sunsets.
For all the home’s amenities, however, there’s one modern feature it lacks: the standard two-car garage. But nixing the garage was by design, Ms. Burke-Slover says. “We’re at the age when we should be shedding stuff,” and a garage, with its potential for accumulating junk, wasn’t conducive to their plan to simplify their lifestyle now that the children are grown and gone. “We’re trying to live more simply; well, that’s our goal and we’re trying,” she says with a laugh.