This Old House

The staircase sold them. Because from the outside, the house—boxy, white, small-windowed—didn’t look like much. It certainly didn’t look like it was designed for George Woodward, whose family had spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries building hundreds of Chestnut Hill’s iconic stone-walled, flat slate-roofed houses. But in 1939, Woodward commissioned Modernist architect Kenneth Day to dream up the place, and that place included a foyer that starred a dramatic whorl of tiger maple steps. One look at those stairs, and Dana and John Levitties knew they were home. John (above) worked with Michael Gruber, his partner in Rittenhouse design firm JAGR: Projects, on the interior design. Today, the house is spare, modern and gallery-like—ideal for Levitties’s collections of 20th-century British and French furnishings, modern American artwork, and sculptural Industrial Age leftovers—a perfect fit for a busy, laid-back family of four.

 Styling by Geri Radin // Photography by Floto + Warner