Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
Susan Roof gazes from her dining room window at the Conodoguinet Creek below. In the winter, she sees “interesting ducks,” she explains. Mergansers sometimes join the parade of commonplace mallards and Canadian geese. Suddenly, a visitor flies into view and lands on the water.
“Here comes an egret,” she says. And then she spots another creek resident. “Can you see that turtle? That thing sitting on the rock?”
Sure enough, a snapping turtle is sunning itself mid-creek. The scene explains why Susan and Jeff Roof chose to turn their placid, Cumberland County home of 20 years into a construction zone last year. As Jeff says, the “real motivation” behind a project adding a great room, dining area, media room, and scullery—yes, a scullery—was the view.
“What drew us to this house from the very beginning was the view,” says Jeff, president and founder of prominent financial planning firm Roof Advisory Group, Harrisburg. “The view is why we stayed here over the years.”
The view speaks volumes. The backyard slopes down about 40 feet to the creekside. From there, the water spans about 100 yards to lush parkland on the opposite shore. The Roofs have built their lives around a shared love of the water.
Kayaks and canoes hang by the dock for evening paddling sojourns. Weekends are often spent in Annapolis on their boat. Jeff’s office overlooks the Susquehanna River.
Creekside Renewal
For years, the couple debated finding or building a new home, either in the midstate or in Annapolis. Finally, Susan said, “This is our home.” And Jeff said, “Where else in southcentral Pennsylvania can you get waterfront property?” The decision was made to stay in place—but to talk to an architect about radical changes to the 1970s-era home.
“We have lots of friends in the D.C. area, and there, knockdowns and renovations are typical,” Jeff says. “Land is so cheap around here that people just tend to build.”
The couple talked to several architectural firms but didn’t make a connection until they approached Doug Tilley, founder of TKS Architects, Mechanicsburg.
“Doug’s firm was the one that really gelled with the insight that Susan had and the vision she had,” Jeff says. “They embraced it and ran with it. They saw it as a creative challenge.”
“When you walk through the front door, the whole back of the house explodes before your eyes”
In the old house, picture windows and a four-season room limited any sense of the magnificent course of water flowing below. A cramped dining room stood on the street side of the home. A self-contained living room “was always a dead space,” says Susan. “The house just kind of ended.”
Susan had a vision of bringing the creek view and waterside feel directly into the home, but Tilley’s idea for a sunken great room and vast picture window opened their eyes to grand possibilities.
“We never in a million years would have thought to put a fourteen-foot ceiling on the back. Never, ever,” Susan says.
Still, in a home where the view is paramount, the look of that soaring ceiling took some thought. The great room’s height couldn’t block the view from upstairs bedrooms. So Tilley built a cardboard model of the home redesign with interchangeable rooflines for the great room.
“We tried sails, curves, a pyramid,” he says. “Having the models helped us all to visualize what was going on.”
They all laugh about the sails version—“Part of the process,” Susan says—but while he stands in the great room, Tilley notes that the scale models helped the homeowners and architect settle on “the least obtrusive of the roof designs and still give us the dramatic volume down here.”
The winner: An arched ceiling, with windows along the roofline creating a clerestory that feels like a lighthouse.
When that point was decided, TKS architectural designer Ethan Lee transformed model and drawings into CAD form that gave the Roofs a virtual walk-through of their renovated home.
“When we walked through on the computer, that was wow,” Susan says. “We’re in.”
The old house wasn’t torn down, but its back half was pushed out to open a circular flow among the new and old rooms. A line of black tiles around the bamboo floors defines the kitchen and dining space and alerts visitors to the steps down to the great room. The kitchen, previously updated with new cabinets and granite countertops, got a larger island adjoining the new dining room, while the old dining room became a cozy den. The Roofs wanted to turn the breezeway into a scullery—“And I said, ‘The what? Is that a real word?’” Tilley jokes—so they got their auxiliary kitchen with an oven, wine storage, beverage refrigerator, and coffee station.
“When we have folks over, they can come out here and help themselves to wine or coffee, whatever they’re interested in,” says Susan. “It added a whole dimension to using the kitchen. When you’re baking, you don’t have to say, ‘Darn, I have to wait for that tray.’” She might not do a lot of baking, she adds, but “when you do it, you do it.”
Designed for Peace
Architectural and décor details help old and new spaces blend seamlessly. The media room is a new build against the home’s old exterior, complete with a brick chimney along the wall. From there, a wide doorway leads to the former dead-space living room, where new skylights let in the sun and are covered in a stucco-like technique called “buttering” to add depth and to match old and new elements more easily than a smooth chipboard would have allowed.
Tilley says he designed an arch in the great room’s picture window so that “your eye catches the curve, and you go, ‘Oh, my gosh, look at that window.’ If it wasn’t there, we’d just look right through it.” The curved motif repeats in doors and doorways around the great room, and even in new doors added to the existing coat closet in the foyer.
The home’s entrance got a makeover, too—one keeping with the look and tone of the serene creekside neighborhood while hinting at the radiance inside. Glass sidelights flank a wide front door of Brazilian mahogany—designer Murray W. Sperling III of Interiors Furniture compared it to a fine piece of furniture—that replaced solid double doors. The foyer retained the original slate floors and became a gallery where Susan seasonally rotates works by local artists including Christiane David and Earl Blust. From there, a constricted entry to the old den was busted open to give visitors a full view of the great room and picture window with one turn toward the back of the house.
“When you pull up front, you get a hint that maybe something’s going on with the house, but when you walk through the front door, the whole back of the house explodes before your eyes,” says Tilley.
Sperling’s décor for the renovated home continued a Caribbean aesthetic that Susan Roof had already established. Colors are subdued in terra cotta, bronze, copper, and a green that required just a slight update to a brighter, cleaner shade, Sperling says. Susan credits Sperling with creating the great room’s conversation area using four black leather chairs that don’t block access from any of the room’s five entryways. In the corners, compact love seats woven from hyacinth and known as cuddlers allow Susan to curl up with a book or newspaper and still enjoy the view through the picture window.
Upstairs, the renovation gave a small master bedroom the addition of a seating area and two walk-in closets. “I picked this one,” Susan says as she shows her closet, “because it’s six inches bigger than that one.”
From the master bedroom, she steps outside and onto the new rooftop deck. The roofline of the great room is to the left, and the creek is straight ahead. The stillness of the neighborhood and the water is almost palpable. The quiet moment underscores why the Roofs chose to build in place.
“You kind of don’t realize you’re in a neighborhood up here,” Susan says. “We love our neighbors. We love the area and accessibility to everything. There’s just so much enjoyment and peace you can get out of this that you don’t want to lose it.”
Guiding Principles
Jeff Roof says that he and Susan couldn’t have followed through on their commitment to the house and its setting without some talented help. “We both have pretty good imaginations, but that only takes you so far. When you have Murray on the interior side of things, and Doug and Ethan on architecture, they put together the vision from the what-iffing. It was a fun project. Susan—it’s her project. It’s her baby. She gets all the credit.”
Susan laughs. “You didn’t contribute anything to the design. Not at all.”
Tilley returns the compliment. “It’s nice when the client has a vision and lets you sort of play, rather than just saying that they want an addition out the back. When I first came to the house and met with the Roofs and was walking around back, I pictured these different levels that went down and connected around to the living room, and they were right there going, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and letting me get away with it.”
And while protecting the creek view was the project’s guiding principle, in the end, it was all about family. For years, Jeff and Susan have hosted Thanksgiving dinner for their son and both sides of the family, but they “struggled a bit” to fit and seat nearly two dozen people, says Susan. “We always wanted to have everyone together. It’d be the most fun that way, without having to have a kids’ table.”
The renovation was completed in late fall 2010, and the family spent Thanksgiving in the new great room. “We put everyone in here,” Susan says, “so they could enjoy the view.”
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Opening up the kitchen and dining areas created a fresh space for family gatherings and parties.
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Designer Murray W. Sperling III of Interiors Furniture gave new life to the Roofs’ updated home.
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One of the most prominent changes to the house, the arch window, dominates the new great room overlooking the Conodoguinet Creek.
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The remodeled foyer gives Susan Roof space to display pieces from local artists.
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Susan Roof likes to add touches of fresh florals to her decor, including this arrangement by Blooms by Vickrey.
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Architect Doug Tilley of TKS Architects helped to solidify the Roofs’ visions for their creekside property.
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The Roofs found new life in their “dead” living room by opening up the entrances for a more welcoming look.
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Jeff’s decanter boasts his company’s logo, a compass that reflects the family’s nautical passions.
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Susan and Jeff Roof
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The slats at the back entrance play with light and shadows and eliminate bulky overhang.
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The updated front door, a wide Brazilian mahogany design flanked by grass sidelights, hints at the elegance beyond.
Story by M. Diane McCormick