Urban Artifact

It’s rare to find space to build a new home in Akron’s Highland Square.

The venerable downtown-adjacent neighborhood is almost completely built-up, with homes made for the city’s captains of industry that date back a century or more.

But Don Cea, owner of Highbridge Construction in Akron, and Kara Cea, director of the University of Akron Dance Institute, discovered a unicorn property in summer 2019. Buying it presented the empty nesters who previously lived in Cuyahoga Falls with the challenge of building a new home with the modern amenities and design they wanted that still fit into one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

“We kind of blended that modern Craftsman style with a Southwestern flair,” Don says. “It’s different than other houses in the neighborhood, but it fits. It’s got character.”

The home stands out as one of the few dark-colored ones on the street, with dark blue board and batten siding and a solid black front door. Like many in the area, this two-story, 2,300-square-foot home has a front porch — only this one is raised up on exposed dark wooden columns with stacked stone bases and is made of composite decking with black metal railings. The couple still incorporated traditional details, like putting an attached two-vehicle garage behind the house, with doors that don’t face the street, an important element in fitting in with the neighborhood, Don says.

They broke ground in January 2020, with Don serving as the project’s general contractor, and moved in that October. Devising a floor plan was tough, since the lot was narrow.

“It was difficult to find a house plan that gave us the features we wanted inside, blended into the neighborhood and worked on a 50-foot lot,” Don says. “It took a lot of thought.”

The solution ended up being an open floor plan with a kitchen, dining room and living room, which can accommodate many guests while also having clear distinctions between the rooms. Rather than feeling like the rooms are overlapping, Kara likens a gateway into each area to a proscenium, the large arch that formally separates onstage performers from the audience. “There are three walls in the dining room, and three walls in the kitchen,” she says. “You have that openness, but there’s a definitive room.”

Using space efficiently became key. When the Ceas host family gatherings or cocktail parties, the kitchen ultimately becomes the focal point, and Don says they didn’t want it cluttered with a large chimney-style hood over the five-burner stove. Instead, a hidden range hood pops out from under a cabinet with the press of a button. “We wanted it to be something nobody noticed, and this works perfectly,” he says.

There’s a microwave built into a drawer in the large island at the center of the kitchen — a must-have for the Ceas, who didn’t have an island in their last home. There’s also a small countertop built into a wall for a coffee station, taking the coffee maker and its accessories off the island.

The exterior design of the windows — black frames with contrasting white trim — carries inside the house, which has a color palette of mostly whites and dark accents. The couple fell in love with Sherwin-Williams Silver Strand, which is used in the dining room, upstairs hall and throughout the house, because it seems to take on a different hue depending on the lighting.

The counters in the kitchen, as well as a bar top in the dining room, are granite but not in the traditional sense. It’s white leathered granite, a textured surface that’s not polished or reflective. “It feels softer, it feels warmer, and we fell in love with it,” Don says. “Everyone who comes in the house — the first thing they notice is the counter.” In the kitchen, it’s the nexus amid soft white custom-painted cabinets with silver hardware, but it’s more muted as the bar top amid the dark wood cabinets with crystal hardware and dark ceramic tile backsplash in the dining room.

Up an open staircase — with black powder-coated railings, a charcoal blue accent wall and a modern metal-and-glass chandelier — are three bedrooms, including the owner’s suite. The size of the home made it impossible to have a first-floor owner’s suite, but Don says “aging in place” changes can easily be made in the future. The first-floor half-bathroom is large enough to accommodate the installation of a shower, and a first-floor office can become a bedroom.

That foresight shows the Ceas are planning to stay there for the long term, themselves becoming part of the fabric of the neighborhood. In the warm weather, they are looking forward to sitting on the porch and eventually taking part in the neighborhood’s annual PorchRokr Music and Art Festival. “One of the things that was really important to us is our outside space,” Don says of the home’s front and back porches. “Highland Square is a front porch neighborhood.”

“We want to be true to the neighborhood too, and I think we achieved that,” Kara adds.