A Wellesley Family With Four Active Sons Builds a Guest Lodge and Sports Barn

The guest lodge’s main room reflects the homeowners’ favorite Vermont hotel.

When clients in Wellesley asked David Boronkay, the principal at Watertown-based Slocum Hall Design Group (slocumhalldesign.com), to create a guest lodge and a sports barn alongside their current home, he knew one of the big challenges for his team would be to maintain the architectural integrity and scale of the neighborhood and the property. Boronkay also wanted to create out-structures that related to the gambrel shingle-style home in look and feel, but wanted to add elements that made the new structures stand apart from the main house. For example, incorporating arched windows that break the cornice of the gambrel’s gable end, and barn- inspired touches to augment the aesthetic of the sports facility. This was no easy task, given the size of the new spaces: a 7,009-square-foot sports barn and a 3,560-square-foot lodge.

“We found it very important to site them on the lot in a way that didn’t feel imposing—specifically the barn, which is quite large,” says Boronkay. “We oriented the guest lodge perpendicular to the street to minimize its perceived size, and we located the barn at the rear of the property to minimize its scale.”

A deep navy blue grounds the room.

Boronkay says his firm’s mindset is flexibility. “Some people have a clear stylistic direction, while others need to better understand what their options are,” he says. “My personal aesthetic is more modernist; however, I love and respect older homes and take great pleasure in working in a more traditional palette. Many of our projects are updated versions of the architecture commonly found throughout the region, mixing in modern elements to elevate the design.” For this project, hoop dreams would become realized in the sports barn. The guest lodge features a small apartment, a garage that accommodates four cars with lifts and a great room designed as an homage to the clients’ favorite Vermont hotel.

Both buildings, notes Boronkay, relied heavily upon structural steel to manage the large, interrupted spans of space. Also, because of a high water table and the need for 12-foot ceilings in the basement of the sports barn, a heavily engineered foundation needed to be designed to manage ground water. “The foundation had to be designed as a ballast to allow the groundwater to flow around it,” he says.