“It’s rare to get the chance to run an intelligent design process that isn’t based in historical preservation,” Kotchen says of the ground-up plan he conceived for his client, a married couple with two teenage children. After performing initial zoning studies, he and the WAPD team demolished the existing residence and inserted a modernist glass-and-steel town house, encompassing 7,000 square feet and four bedrooms across six floors. “We didn’t set out to take up every inch of buildable square footage,” Kotchen continues. “The focus was on creating comfortable, livable rooms.” Leveraging ideas from past projects with this client, he has devised, in its “calming simplicity,” an exemplar of the contemporary urban home.