ARCHITECT
David Jameson
www.davidjamesonarchitect.com
Great Falls,
Virginia
An Optimized
Architecture
In the larger of the two rectangular volumes,
a double-height living room (above) cantilevers
out into the woods. A partially enclosed terrace
(below) connects the living and dining areas.
David Jameson tailors a glassy minimalist residence
to a lovely—and tricky—woodland site.
Every architect knows that the first step to making a great
building is finding a great client. In that respect, the Alexandria, Virginia–based architect David Jameson recently
got very lucky. Not only did the owners of a gorgeous piece
of woodland property in nearby Great Falls seek Jameson
out; they were already such fans of his work that they kept
a scrapbook of magazine clippings of his previous residences.
Clients with this kind of enthusiasm (not to mention primo
property and the budget to match) are rare indeed. But though
Jameson had carte blanche in Great Falls, he did not have
a blank slate. A stream running through the site earned it
county designation as a Resource Protected Area (RPA),
which limited the scale of the architecture—essentially, the
new construction could not exceed the footprint of the previous buildings, a pair of 1970s homes connected by a breezeway. Jameson treated the limitation as an opportunity:
“We changed the spatial experience and stretched the indoor
and outdoor spaces,” he says. continued on page 28
