This Little Italy House Was Designed by an Award-Winning Architect

To enter the property at 2067 Random Road in the Little Italy neighborhood, you must pass through a brown gate with a perforated pattern. After crossing a courtyard-style driveway and walking through the front door, you’re already at the foot of a wooden staircase, with white railings crafted in the same pattern.

“The wood used in the house is bamboo,” says realtor David Ayers of The Agency Cleveland. “That pattern is the negative space between the bamboo plants, digitized, then put into sheet metal.”

Continuity of this kind is one of many selling points for the home, which is listed at $1.995 million by Ayers and fellow Agency realtor Nick Zawitz. Each of the four bedrooms boasts the same white walls, acrylic cabinets, drawers and paneling. The five bathrooms employ similar white-and-silver marble fixtures and grey concrete flooring.

The white halls jut at sharp angles, and each wall displays a work of art staged in partnership with District Gallery in Shaker Heights. While supplying unique flair to the space and echoing the homeowners’ love for the arts, all the work is also available to purchase, making the experience of touring or visiting the house both marketable and immersive.

“You can come in and literally feel like you're in a museum,” Ayers says.

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The residence also uses Savant home automation, a smart feature that lets a homeowner control temperature, lighting, shades and other utilities from a smartphone or tablet. It put the 2016 home, built from the plans of Robert Maschke, ahead of its time.

The local architect’s decades-long career has been defined by a Cleveland Arts Prize and several awards from the American Institute of Architects. His residential and commercial work is notably boxy, clean-cut and almost futuristic; much of it is located across the Gordon Square neighborhood, where there are prominent pockets of that contemporary style of architecture. But even in a place like Little Italy, dominated by brick buildings, brick roads, historic design and institutions that span centuries, Maschke’s work maintains its integrity without disrupting the area’s existing flow.

“The people that built this house were Italian craftsmen,” Ayers explains. “So even though it is a very modern structure, the amount of old-world knowledge that went into doing all of this is massive.”

From the street, it’s simply a gray exterior with a flat roofline and a few windows.

“It's very unassuming,” Ayers adds, “because it sort of opens up as you go through it.”

One of Maschke’s foundational building principles is a “compression and release” technique, which does, by design, open as you go through it. The layout of small walkways into expansive living areas is often associated with midcentury modern design, attributed to architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. Also true to Wright, Maschke’s spaces emphasize geometric design and exposed wood and stone. 

“There are all these amazing angles that bounce light off them and kind of tell you how to enter and exit a room,” Ayers says. “The house really informs you to go up the stairs.”

The 4,129-square-foot home is built tall and narrow, leading you up three flights of stairs that pass directly through the kitchen/living area and gallery walls — with bedrooms, bathrooms, a laundry room, a gym and an elevator tucked further down the halls — before culminating in a sprawling rooftop patio overlooking the cityscape.

“When you walk into, you know, the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Ayers relates, “you have this sense of serenity. I would say that's what this house conveys.”

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