Access code
Incorrect password— 01
verb · past participle of hew
To shape or craft something from raw material — with precision, restraint, and a patience that cannot be rushed.
Each home shaped for one owner. A small number available each year.
01
1614 S Street NW · Washington, D.C. Sold
An 1871 historic rowhouse, its stone facade left exactly as found — cleaned, repointed, and allowed to speak. Inside, every surface was re-examined. Original proportions preserved. New materials chosen for how they will look in thirty years, not three.
02
4433 Cathedral Ave NW · Washington, D.C. Available
A thoughtful renovation that never pretended to be otherwise. The original character was the brief — the bones were right, the proportions generous. What followed was a careful editing: a powder room that stops you, a library that holds you, a kitchen that performs without announcement.
03
3525 Springland Lane NW · Washington, D.C. Sold
Brick, steel, and light. An existing structure opened up — Crittall doors drawn to the garden, a stair rebuilt in white oak, a conservatory added where the land invited it. The pool is the horizon line the house always wanted.
Project 04 · Full Reimagination
3335 Q Street NW · Washington, D.C. · Est. 1948
Mid-century bones. Contemporary resolve. Christian Zapatka's hand is felt in every proportion — the way the ceiling plane extends, the way the living room steps down as if the house is settling into the earth rather than sitting on top of it.
Built in 1948 and reimagined without apology, this is one of the few homes in Georgetown that earns the word rare. Megan Downey's interiors are warm where the architecture is precise: bleached oak, black Nero Marquina stone, natural light held in rooms that know how to be quiet. The primary suite carries a fireplace and treeline views. The kitchen is built around a single black stone island that anchors the entire open plan.
A swimming pool, a private cabana, two-car parking. The kind of things that should not need to be said, and here, don't.
Coming Soon · Late Summer 2026
1805 19th Street NW · Dupont Circle · Washington, D.C.
Project 05 · Gut Rehab · Reimagination
1805 19th Street NW · Washington, D.C. · Late 19th Century
Dupont Circle does not often give up homes like this. A late 19th-century rowhouse, its ceiling heights the kind that stop a room — not designed for effect, but simply the way things were built when permanence was assumed.
Cunningham & Quill Architects have taken the structure back to its bones and rebuilt it with full intention. Every system new. Every proportion considered. The original character of the building — its scale, its fenestration, its place on 19th Street — honoured throughout. Five bedrooms, four and a half baths across 4,600 square feet of some of the most sought-after real estate in Washington.
Available late summer 2026. Inquiries welcomed now.
Register your interest
— We will be in touch before it reaches the market.
Project 06 · Reimagination
1537 28th Street NW · Georgetown, D.C.
There are houses in Georgetown and there are houses that Georgetown is built around. This is the latter. A grand dame of the East Village — 7,900 square feet carrying the weight of its ownership history lightly, the way only certain houses can.
Cunningham & Quill Architects have reimagined the interior with the same care one gives to something that has earned its place. Purple Cherry's interiors bring warmth to the scale — rooms designed for the kind of entertaining that Georgetown has always done quietly and well. Inside and outside, the spaces flow with intention. A swimming pool anchors the garden. The whole property breathes.
Six bedrooms, six full bathrooms, two half baths. The numbers are significant. The feeling is more so. Available Q4 2026 — to the right owner, at the right moment.
Register your interest
— We will be in touch before it reaches the market.
Project 01 · Full Restoration
1614 S Street NW · Washington, D.C. · Est. 1891
Designed by T.J. Collins in 1891 and commissioned by the Noyes family — founders of the Associated Press and later owners of the Washington Star — this 21-foot-wide Gothic Revival rowhouse had stood largely untouched for over fifty years. The brief was precise: restore what mattered, reconfigure what didn't, and build for the next half-century.
The original staircase was painstakingly restored and remains the spine of the house. The kitchen is built for serious use: a 48" dual-fuel AGA range, full Thermador appliance suite, integrated stone sinks, Brizo fixtures throughout, and custom herringbone floors. Bespoke art moldings frame every room. The two primary suites occupy the upper levels — the main suite runs nearly 500 square feet; the secondary suite opens onto a private terrace facing the Scottish Rite House of the Temple.
Opening the house revealed what fifty years had hidden — light, proportion, and a rear garden of extraordinary character. Original inlaid brick and over thirty years of mature ivy enclose a private patio that lives as another room entirely. A rooftop deck extends the living further upward. Private two-car parking at the rear, invisible from the street, completes a home that offers things Dupont Circle rarely gives.
Project 02 · Renovation
4433 Cathedral Ave NW · Washington, D.C.
The Cathedral House arrived with its character intact. The bones were right — generous rooms, high ceilings, the street presence of something that had earned its place. The renovation asked a different question than most: not what to add, but what to honour.
The kitchen is anchored by a full Calacatta slab backsplash, lit softly from beneath the upper cabinets. The library — floor-to-ceiling white oak, four chairs around a single round table — is a room designed for staying. The powder room is the conversation: deep navy botanical wallpaper, a floating marble vanity, a backlit mirror that holds the pattern in its reflection.
The grand living room connects four spaces without interruption. Light moves through it from east to west across a full day.
Project 03 · Renovation
3525 Springland Lane NW · Washington, D.C.
The red brick was always the house. Everything else was a negotiation with it. The renovation opened the rear face entirely — black steel Crittall doors drawn wall to wall, herringbone oak running continuously from inside to the stone terrace beyond.
A conservatory was added to the west — lead-roofed, steel-framed, its lantern drawing a vertical shaft of light into the garden room. The stair was rebuilt in white oak with a single black rod rail. The kitchen faces inward, restrained; the sitting room faces out toward the mature tree canopy above Springland Lane.
The pool defines the garden's horizon. It was the last decision, and the one that made everything before it make sense.
04
3335 Q Street NW · Washington, D.C. Available
Mid-century bones. Contemporary resolve. One of the few homes in Georgetown that earns the word rare — reimagined without apology by Christian Zapatka, appointed by Megan Downey Interior Design.
1805 19th Street NW · Washington, D.C. Coming Soon
A late 19th-century rowhouse in the heart of Dupont Circle, gutted and reimagined from the inside out by Cunningham & Quill Architects. Breathtaking ceiling heights. Five bedrooms. A home that has been waiting for this moment for over a century.
1537 28th Street NW · Washington, D.C. Coming Soon
One of Georgetown's grand dames — 7,900 square feet of provenance, reimagined by Cunningham & Quill with interiors by Purple Cherry. A home that has held its place in this city's story for generations, and is about to begin its finest chapter.
— Bespoke
Beyond our portfolio of renovated and restored residences, HEWN works with a select number of clients each year on something more personal — homes conceived from nothing, or reimagined from the ground up.
Renovation, restoration, or new construction. The scope is defined by what the project demands, not by a service menu. What stays constant is the standard: every decision made with care, every detail resolved before it becomes a regret.
These engagements are not advertised. They begin with a conversation.
Renovation · Restoration · New Construction
Washington, D.C. Metro
$4M — $15M+
Limited · By inquiry only
— Philosophy
Restraint is the first decision. We remove until what remains can carry the weight of being looked at every day.
A home should fit the life inside it. We build to the owner — not the market, not the moment.
Execution is the language of luxury. Our trades are partners of ten and twenty years. Standards are held, then raised.
We build for fifty years, not five. No trends. No catalogue finishes. Only choices that earn their place over time.
A home should feel as good as it looks. The details you cannot name are the ones that matter most.
We take on a limited number of projects each year. The work is slow on purpose — measured in decisions, not days.
We listen before we draw. The first conversation is about life, not square footage — how you move through a morning, what you've outgrown, what you've never said aloud about the way you want to live.
Site, light, materials, life. We translate the brief into form — sketched by hand, tested in model, held against the way a morning feels in this particular place at this particular time of year.
Every drawing is a decision. We revise until nothing can be taken away. Materials are specified to the millimeter; samples held in the light of your street, not a showroom.
Our site team is small, senior, and present. Quality is inspected weekly — not photographed at the end. When something is not right, it comes out. This is not negotiable.
We do not leave at handover. A home takes a season to become itself. We return — to listen, to adjust, to see what the light does in November that we did not expect in April.
Cleveland Park · 2021
— The Studio
HEWN was founded on a belief that has not changed: the best homes are not the largest or the loudest, but the most carefully considered.
After a decade building across Washington, we saw how rarely luxury meant care. Too often it meant volume — spectacle, surface, the impression of quality rather than the thing itself. HEWN exists to work differently. To treat each home as a singular work, held to a single standard, built by the same hands from first drawing to last detail.
We take on between four and six projects a year. It is the only number at which we are able to do the work the way we would want the work done for us.
Why the smallest object in a house is often the one that tells you most about how it was built.
A visit to a small mill in the Shenandoah, and the case for letting a floor take its own time.
On the difference between a choice that will age well and one that will simply age.
— Inquire
Two ways to work with HEWN. One standard, either way.
Washington, D.C.
By appointment
info@hewn-studio.com
+1 202 555 0184
There is a moment, early in every project, when we ask the client to close their eyes and describe the feeling of walking into their home. Not the look of it. The feeling. The weight of the air, the sound of their footsteps, the resistance of the front door as it opens.
Almost everyone, eventually, mentions a door handle.
It is the first thing you touch. It is the last thing you touch when you leave. It is touched hundreds of times a year by everyone who enters, and almost no one can tell you what it looks like. They only know how it feels — the temperature of it, the give of it, whether it makes them feel, in that half-second of contact, that they have arrived somewhere considered.
This is not a small observation. In our experience, a house that has been built with real care almost always has hardware that rewards attention. Not expensive hardware — considered hardware. The hinge that is flush rather than proud. The lever that returns slowly rather than snapping back. The pull that has been chosen for a drawer rather than inherited from a catalogue.
Conversely, a house that has been value-engineered — however beautiful its photography — usually gives itself away in the same place. The handle that wobbles. The knob that catches. The door that requires a second push because the latch has not been mortised correctly.
These things are felt before they are seen. They register somewhere below conscious thought, in the part of the brain that is constantly assessing whether a place has been made for you or assembled around you.
Most builders specify hardware early — it appears on a line item in the budget, a category to be priced and closed. We do it differently. Hardware is specified last, after every door and drawer has been located, after the lighting has been designed, after we know how a room moves and what a hand will reach for in the dark.
At The Stone House on S Street, the door hardware is unlacquered brass — chosen to age with the house, to develop a patina that will look, in twenty years, as though it was always there. At 3335 Q Street, the kitchen pulls are blackened steel, almost invisible against the cabinetry until the light catches them. In both cases, the choice took longer than it should have by any efficient measure. Both are correct.
"A house is a sequence of small decisions. The ones you cannot name are the ones that determine whether you feel at home."
We think about the doorknob because we think about the person who will reach for it, every morning, for the next fifty years. That is the job. Not the photograph. The feeling.
Get the small things right and the large things take care of themselves. Get them wrong and no amount of marble will compensate.
We drove out to the Shenandoah on a Tuesday in October, when the light was low and the valley was the color it becomes before it loses its leaves. The mill is a forty-minute drive past the last town that has a coffee shop. You would not find it unless someone told you where it was.
The owner — third generation, no website — took us through the drying shed without ceremony. Planks stacked head-high in rows, the air carrying the particular sweetness of fresh-cut white oak. Some of the wood had been drying for two years. Some for four. None of it was in a hurry.
Kiln-dried oak is faster and more predictable. It can be milled, delivered, and installed in a fraction of the time. For most projects, it is entirely adequate. For our projects, it is almost never what we choose.
The difference is in how the wood moves. All wood moves — it is a living material, even after it has been cut, and it responds to humidity, temperature, and season. Kiln-dried oak moves quickly and unpredictably, because the drying process has stressed the cellular structure. Site-dried oak, given enough time, reaches an equilibrium with its environment. It has already done its moving. Installed correctly, it is remarkably stable.
More than that: it looks different. There is a depth to the grain of slowly dried oak that kiln-dried wood simply does not have. It is not something you can easily describe in a specification. It is something you see when you walk across a floor at the end of an afternoon and the light is at that angle.
"Good materials are not expensive. They are patient. They ask only that you give them the time they require."
The herringbone floors at 3525 Springland Lane came from a mill in the northern Shenandoah. Four-inch white oak, site-dried for thirty-one months, hand-scraped before installation. The process added six weeks to the schedule and a meaningful line to the budget.
We have not spoken to the owners since handover without them mentioning the floors. Not the kitchen, not the Crittall doors, not the conservatory. The floors.
That is what patience produces. Not a feature. A feeling that the house has been there for much longer than it has — that it grew from the ground it stands on rather than being assembled on top of it. This is what we are after, every time. It is worth the wait.
There is a conversation we have had, in some form, on almost every project. The client arrives with a folder — a collection of images saved over months or years, the visual language of what they want their home to feel like. The folder is a gift. It tells us a great deal.
What it sometimes also tells us is how much of what they love is, in the language of the design industry, trending. Fluted cabinetry. Limewash walls. Bouclé everything. Arched doorways. These are not bad choices — several of them are genuinely beautiful. But they are choices that carry a timestamp, and a timestamp is the one thing a home built to last cannot afford.
A trend is a collective response to a cultural moment. It rises because something about it speaks to a shared hunger — for warmth, or simplicity, or a texture that feels handmade in a world that increasingly is not. This is not trivial. Trends often begin as genuine ideas.
The problem is not the idea. It is the adoption curve. By the time a detail appears in mass-market design publications, in new construction across the country, in the renovation portfolios of a thousand builders — it has been extracted from the context that gave it meaning. What was once a considered choice has become a signal. And signals age.
Limewash walls, done with care and intention in the right house, can be extraordinary. Limewash walls chosen because they were the finish of 2023 will look, in 2033, like exactly that.
"We do not ask what is current. We ask what is correct — for this house, this owner, this light, this life."
Our material palette tends to be narrow and consistent across projects: stone, oak, plaster, steel, unlacquered brass or blackened iron. Not because we lack imagination, but because these materials have proven themselves over centuries of use. They improve with age. They are not trying to say anything beyond what they are.
When we deviate from this palette — when a project calls for something more particular — we ask a single question: will this choice be more beautiful in ten years than it is today? If the answer is yes, or even probably, we proceed. If the answer is uncertain, we return to first principles.
At The Stone House on S Street, the Calacatta marble was not chosen because it was fashionable — though it is. It was chosen because it is a material with three thousand years of use in domestic architecture, because it improves as it ages, and because its veining is specific to that slab and cannot be replicated. In twenty years, it will look like a decision someone made with great care. It will not look like 2025.
The hardest conversation we have with clients is not about trends. It is about restraint. About the moment we suggest that the thing they love — the detail they have been imagining for years — may not belong in this particular house.
Washington is a city of extraordinary architecture. It is also a city full of renovated homes where every surface has been maximised, every wall activated, every room given a feature. The result is often impressive in photography and exhausting to live in. A house that is trying to be interesting in every corner gives you nowhere to rest your eyes.
The homes we are most proud of are the ones where the restraint is invisible — where you are simply comfortable, without knowing why. Where the rooms feel, somehow, larger than their dimensions. Where the light is always right. These effects are not achieved by addition. They are achieved by knowing what to leave out.
That is, ultimately, what we mean when we say we build for fifty years. Not that the materials will last — though they will. But that the decisions will still feel correct when the world looks quite different from how it looks today. That is the only standard worth holding to.