Text: Lydia Somerville | Photography: Gordon Beall
When Wayne and Gloria Knox called on the Washington, D.C., design firm of Solis Betancourt & Sherrill to renovate and decorate their newly purchased home in Arlington, Virginia, they tasked the team with two major objectives: to rescue the 1950s interior of the Tudor-style house and to provide an appropriate backdrop for their extensive collection of French and Swedish antiques.
The house was built in the 1950s and showed its age with a choppy layout, aggregate floors, and paneled walls. Wayne, who worked as an engineer for the U.S. Navy before becoming a residential developer, proved to be a dream client. Not only did he buy in to the design firm’s ideas for raising ceilings and opening rooms, he knew the engineering possibilities. “We’d suggest a skylight, and Wayne would say, “Let’s open the whole ceiling,” recalls Sherrill.
