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A separate peace

Two additions let a Newton family enjoy both a quiet library and a 21st-century media room.

The husband had always wanted his own library. The master bedroom was at the front of the house, on a busy street. And with four teenagers at home, the husband and his wife wanted more space, including a larger family room.

But they decided not to leave the 80-year-old Georgian-style house in Newton where they had lived for 20 years. Instead, they asked architect Adolfo Perez for a redesign that would meet their needs and their dreams.

The new family room, they agreed, would be off the kitchen. At the other side of the house, the existing family room would be enlarged to accommodate the library. And upstairs, the master bedroom would be redesigned.

In residential projects, Perez likes to incorporate wood and stone into the design. "Natural materials give you a lot of potential for detail. The grain, the texture, the color, give you a lot of options," he says, "and create a visual richness."

The husband, a business consultant, "had a serious collection of books, about 10,000 of them," says Perez. So in the library, "it's all about the books." The room is lined with bookshelves veneered in sapele, a mahogany wood with a flame-patterned grain. Natural light comes from clerestory windows on three sides and from a skylight.

To accentuate the reddish mahogany, Perez used black trim on the shelves and black granite atop the map cabinets. Interior designer Celeste Cooper also chose colors to blend with the wood: pin-striped rose upholstery on the chairs and a black rug with multicolored flecks.

In the family room addition - an 18-by-32-foot space with an adjacent octagonal tower housing a game room - Perez created two seating areas, one facing the media wall and one grouped around the black slate fireplace with its black granite mantel. The entire family likes modern technology, so the room is equipped with a large-screen TV, a DVD player, and a sound system. Perez used pearwood, a light wood with pink and orange tones, with borders of maple for the built-in cabinetry.

The 17-by-22-foot master bedroom is now a quiet oasis, with walls upholstered in a gray-green fabric. Formerly, the bed was positioned at the front of the house. Perez used that wall for a fireplace of green marble and moved the bed to the back wall.

The cabinets are made of two light woods that Perez likes to combine, pearwood on the bottom cabinets and Australian lacewood on the upper.

The couple can control the lighting everywhere in the house from tiny computer keypads on each side of the bed.

"The very interesting thing about these clients," says Perez, "is that they are very traditional, and the house is traditional in its look, but they wanted a contemporary interior with modern technology."