Watching as the sun sets behind the French-inspired facade of Jan and Weejun Robinson’s Lookout Mountain home, finely crafted gables and a rich stone exterior come into focus. A flagstone path shows the way to the elegant timber beams of the covered entrance, but the double doors open to an unlikely interior, decidedly modern with bright, open rooms and assertive, straight lines.
“I have loved this house. It’s been fun to just add things and take things away.” – Jan Robinson“I love contemporary,” Jan says. “If I designed the house again, I would go all the way contemporary.” Collaborating with prolific local architect, the late Don Wamp, Jan drew from her education in interior design and her keen painter’s eye to sculpt an atmosphere as useful as it is inspired. Though the couple built the house 14 years ago, her focused design remains fresh and relevant to their lifestyle.
For the Robinsons, comfort is less about square footage than having a handful of purposefully designed rooms that yield a living space molded to their personalities. “I wanted functional rooms,” says Jan, who gave her children, very young at the time of the home’s construction, a living room of their own upstairs in order to let the main floor living room serve its purpose.
Also vital to Jan’s approach was making use of the exceptional brow location. “I made as many rooms face the view as I could,” she says. Transomed windows and a glass door to the multilevel deck line the rear wall of the living room. The family or keeping room has the ambience of a sunroom with windows covering two walls and another glass door that exits to the deck. Accessible from the master bedroom, too, the deck includes a cozy stone fireplace for cool mountain nights.
Completely open to the family room is a well-designed kitchen, “because everyone ends up in the kitchen anyway,” says Jan. With an understanding of the kitchen work triangle and the foresight to install commercial-grade stainless steel appliances, she took a hands-on approach to the kitchen’s design. Finished with a translucent wash of sage green, the custom oak cabinets have impeccable organization capacity and harmonize with gray-green granite countertops.