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No Place Like Mom's
Elaine Ferrell knew exactly how she wanted to redesign her home in The Cove. And she knew two architects.By Roberta Klein - Photos By Bill Sanders
If there's any doubt that mother knows best, Elaine Ferrell will dispel it. when she put an addition on her Deerfield Beach home, two of her children, who are architects, provided the design.
"What's it like working for Mom?" says Wayne Ferrell, who lives and works in Deerfield Beach. " I sent her four different designs. We came to an agreement on the fifth try."
Wayne's sister and partner, Stephanie Ferrell, runs the team's office in a historic building in Ybor City, near Tampa.
"Mom's really a closet architect," says Stephanie, a historic-preservation specialist. "In another era, with a little bit of impetus, she would have become an architect. She's very spatially oriented."
Elaine Ferrell's appreciation of architecture developed long before her children became professionals. In 1958, while her late husband, a naval-carrier pilot, remained at home in Minneapolis, Elaine visited her mother in Fort Lauderdale. the plan was for the family to settle in the area, so Ferrell went house-hunting. When she saw the house in Deerfield Beach, she bought it.
The home, located in The Cove neighborhood between Federal Highway and the Intracoastal Waterway, was a "spec" home built by a small developer named John Apetz. It was a far cry from the ubiquitous "CBS" spec houses of the time.
The home's style was a major influence when it came time for Wayne to choose a career.
"I became an architect because of my mother's interest in design and the fact that she picked
Elaine Ferrell, Right, with Stephanie and Wayne
this house," Wayne says. "As I grew up seeing the cathedral ceiling with beams, I noticed how the house was put together. I would go into other people's houses and think they were confusing. Everything would be covered up. But here, everything was apparent."
After living in the house for eight years, Ferrell replaced the three jalousie windows in back with sliding-glass doors and added a 16-by-40-foot patio. then , in 1984, she remodeled the kitchen. This time she asked Wayne and Stephanie for suggestions.
Air conditioning was installed in the late '80s. but the big push came in 1992 with a new master bedroom and the addition of a pool. Ferrell turned the project over to Wayne and Stephanie, who were living in California and Tampa, respectively.
The master suite addition combined two small bedrooms and included the striking charcoal-gray lap pool and a whirpool.
The Ferrells used the 36-foot-long beams of the new rooms by letting them extend through the outside to form a visual covering for the pool.
"It's almost a psychological element," Wayne says. "It gives a sense of comfort. " The lap pool, or "moat," as the family refers to it, reaches almost to the back of the tropically landscaped property, so a fence was built for privacy.
Ferrell wasn't done yet. In 1996 the back bedroom, formerly Wayne's, underwent a transformation. Jalousie windows were replaced with sliding-glass doors, and 10-by-10 foot Roman bathroom with granite and stained block walls took the place of the old stepdown shower. Finally, last year, a sleeping loft was introduced to the master bedroom. " I call this my work in progress," Ferrell says. " I'll probably think of something again and will add more down the road."
When that time comes, Wayne and Stephanie will happily take on the design project. " She has a great eye for design," Wayne says. Adds Stephanie, " Mom doesn't pay well, but she makes up for it in appreciation."
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