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Explore a Garden Designer’s Gem of a Backyard Studio

An architect helps transform an existing garage into a home office surrounded by beauty

Becky Harris
Becky HarrisNovember 9, 2020
Houzz Contributor. Hi there! I live in a 1920s cottage in Atlanta that I'll describe as "collected." I got into design via Landscape Architecture, which I studied at the University of Virginia. I've been writing about design online for quite a few years over at Hatch: The Design Public Blog.
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Architect Seth Ballard and garden designer Kathryn Everett often collaborate on projects. They were trying to find office space to share when she called him to relay some bad news and some good news. “She told me she’d been talking with her husband and that they decided to transform their garage into an office instead. The bad news was that she wouldn’t be going in on office space with me. But the good news was that she wanted to hire me to design it,” Ballard says. The result is a charming office in the middle of her beautiful gardens.
Before Photo
“After” photos by Stacey Zarin Goldberg

Office at a Glance
Who uses it: Garden designer Kathryn Everett
Location: Chevy Chase, Maryland
Size: 504 square feet (47 square meters); 21 by 24 feet
Architect: Seth Ballard of Ballard + Mensua Architecture
General contractor: Rubert Salgado of RC Construction

Before: This was a typical two-car garage and driveway. A privacy fence cut this area off from the gardens. The original garage had a leaky roof and a plaster ceiling, and a family of raccoons had wreaked havoc on its structural stability, Grey Gardens-style. And because it was built decades ago, modern cars didn’t fit in it well, so the couple wasn’t using it for much.

Everett’s home office space was in her basement at the time, so she was craving natural light. She needed office space to do her work and to meet with her two partners and clients, and she wanted it to include a bathroom and a kitchenette. The idea was to design a space that could easily transform into a guest cottage if their needs changed in the future. With the garage serving a new purpose, she also needed to find storage space for things that had been kept in the seldom-used garage — client furniture, garden purchases, bicycles, gardening tools and supplies.
Ballard + Mensua Architecture
After: Although Everett is the garden designer in the family, her husband had the idea to remove the fence that separated the driveway from the backyard and extend the garden. She had part of their long driveway ripped out, and she designed a new garden in front of the studio. She created a garden room in front of the building by edging the area with a Hicks yew hedge (Taxus x media ‘Hicksii’). The flagstone pavers range from 3 to 5 feet long. She filled the spaces between them with creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum), sedums, blue star creeper (Isotoma fluviatilis) and mazus (Mazus reptans). “They are knit together like a carpet,” she says.

Having the space in the garden makes it easy to work outdoors, as Everett is seen doing here. It’s also a charming place to host clients for meetings.

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Ballard + Mensua Architecture
To bring in light, Ballard added windows and replaced the garage doors with glass-paned doors in the style of a carriage house. He also installed a Spanish tile roof to match the architecture of the main house and added outdoor lighting with a vintage look.

“The gardens are multiple, beautifully layered spaces to spend time in,” Ballard says. “It’s a wonderful place for her clients to visit, and we call it ‘the office in the garden.’”

He also helped Everett add a new patio to the right of the building. A new French door leads out to it, and two new windows face the gardens. Two tables on the patio provide space for work or meetings on nice days. One of the patio tables was a clever repurposing project — Everett hung onto her marble island countertop when her kitchen was renovated. Then she had a favorite shop, RT Facts in Kent, Connecticut, make a base for it.
Ballard + Mensua Architecture
An understory of ‘Autumn Brilliance’ apple serviceberry trees (Amelanchier x grandiflora ‘Autumn Brilliance’) provides dappled shade, color and sculptural forms. These trees provide year-round interest with their beautiful smooth gray bark, berries, flowers and brilliant fall color. Perennials and shrubs provide a wide variety of color and texture underneath. To the right of the trees, a row of boxwoods (Buxus sp.) forms an evergreen line in the garden, separating the shade-loving plants from an herb garden full of thyme, parsley, rosemary, mint and clover.

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Ballard + Mensua Architecture
In addition to gardens, Everett’s design talents extend to interiors, and she completed the interior design of the space. At first they’d hoped to stain the existing concrete floor, but it was not in great shape. Pouring a new slab gave them an opportunity to raise the building’s floor, which fixed existing drainage issues. For the floor, Everett chose a durable large-format porcelain tile that looks like distressed concrete. “We come in here in muddy boots — the rusted-looking edges of the tile help hide dirt, and it’s easy to clean,” she says. A vinyl floor cloth, which warms up the area under the table, is also durable and easy to clean.

When they removed the ceiling, they found that the rafters were not as attractive as they’d hoped. So Ballard took Everett to Vintage Lumber outside Frederick, Maryland, to source replacements. They found beautiful reclaimed beams to replace the rafters and reclaimed pine paneling for the walls. “I loved the idea of using the very old wooden beams,” she says. “The pine paneling was too busy with them, so we painted it. This quieted the space and made it look more uniform. But they still have a lot of texture that’s more interesting than drywall.”

Custom built-ins hold books, binders and drawings. In the back right corner is a small kitchenette. The door on the left leads to a utility room that provides additional storage space. The door on the right leads to a full bathroom.

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Ballard + Mensua Architecture
In addition to the natural light, lighting comes from track lights on cables, desk lamps and two vintage-looking pendants over the table. Everett had R.T. Facts make the table of smoked glass and metal. She found the fun furry chairs at a garden show in Nashville.

Ballard designed a soffit around the ceiling to integrate the new heating and cooling ducts into the architecture. He also covered the ceiling in the reclaimed pine paneling. “There isn’t any drywall out here,” he says.

In the kitchenette on the right, Everett used the floor tile as a backsplash. The reclaimed metal mesh on the cabinet doors was another find at R.T. Facts. Everett also had them fashion a cover from the same material for the studio’s new air conditioning unit in the garden. “This made another connection between indoors and out,” she says.

Pendant lights: The Urban Electric Co.

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Ballard + Mensua Architecture
The full bathroom is convenient for the office and also means the space could easily transition into a guest cottage in the future. The bathroom has a hand-baked terra cotta-colored ceramic tile floor and decorative Spanish tile over the sink to nod to the Spanish Revival architecture of the main house.
Ballard + Mensua Architecture
To make space for everything that had been in the garage, Ballard looked to a crawl space underneath the home’s wraparound porch. It was only 3½ feet deep — its dirt floor was about at the level of where the countertops sit now. But it also had beautiful brick walls and wonderful round windows.

They excavated, poured a slab for the floor and added underpinnings, making the most of the beautiful existing brick and stylish windows. The duo had also fallen for some beautiful antique oak flooring at Vintage Lumber that Ballard added underneath the countertops.
Ballard + Mensua Architecture
“The crawl space turned out so well that she decided to make the main section a showroom for clients,” Ballard says. Everett displays samples of things like pavers, decking and paints as well as antiques, bespoke pieces and other garden objects she picks up for future projects as she finds them. The two sides that flank this area provide space for storing bikes, gardening tools and supplies.

Everett is thrilled to have moved her work space from her basement to the new garden studio. “It couldn’t be better. It’s a room of one’s own,” she says. “It’s a very happy building, a great use of space, and it’s wonderful to look out to the garden.”

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