Ellington

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 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.

Each material Jan selected contributes to the home’s precise, visual impact. An unexpected choice for interior flooring, crab orchard stone lends its pale fawn hues to the living and dining rooms. Painstakingly arranged and twice rearranged, the stone is now a low-maintenance floor that even weathers the regular patter of the Robinsons’ giant schnauzer. Solid slabs of the same stone form a unique vanity with a hammered metal basin in the guest bath. On the living and dining room walls and the family room’s vaulted ceilings, pine paneling mimics the neutral tones of the stone and gives a limit to the airy expanse of the rooms.

Standing out in contrast to the light color scheme is a steel fireplace and chimney, sanded by Jan herself to a matte gray finish and extending unadorned to the 16-foot height of the living room. In the foyer and family room, floors are dark slate set inside the squares of a grid of oak planks.

Touches of much older furnishings blend with the new materials. In several rooms are antique chandeliers reconstructed by an Atlanta dealer, and Jan has antiqued several surfaces herself, such as a vintage mirror that spans the back of a centrally located wet bar.

Everywhere, the couple’s affinity for art is evident. Paintings by Mary B. Lynch and sculptures from local artists are highlights of the space as well as pieces picked up on travels, like a sizeable horse head painting by Ashley Collins and others acquired in Salt Lake City. Nashville artist John Weldon created the framed montage of driftwood gracing the family room chimney, and Jan’s own paintings of her children are displayed in the dining room. “I have loved this house,” says Jan. “It’s been fun to just add things and take things away.” In doing so, she has steadied the scale with a generous measure of personal expression balanced with a mass of good taste.