A 1960s party pad gets a new gig


Howard Katz found the place on Craigslist. "I know you don't want to move," he told his wife. "But you gotta see this house."

Katz and his wife, Marianne Matheny-Katz, were living in a rehabbed rowhouse next to Patterson Park. Matheny-Katz commuted to D.C., where she worked as an economist at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army; her husband ran a commercial laundry company and dabbled in real estate. (The couple met when he sold her a house: "I conveyed with the washer and dryer," Katz says.) City living agreed with their urbane lifestyle—Matheny-Katz moonlights as a jazz vocalist at local clubs—but this house was something else.

Built in 1966, the low-slung residence, tucked into a sloping lot in the Lake Manor neighborhood near Lake Roland, was equipped with substantial local color: The original owner was a Runyon-esque restaurateur/bookmaker with a taste for showbiz-style entertaining, and the house itself resembled a transplant from the canyons of Los Angeles: long, low, and angular, like one of architect Richard Neutra's Hollywood hillside dens. Longtime neighbors recalled that the place lived up to its aura of Rat Pack swank—Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were rumored houseguests. But the house's partying days were long gone.

"It was a mess—nothing was done for twenty-seven years," Katz says. Along with the space-age bachelor-pad appointments—which included a koi pond and waterfall under the ground floor staircase—came a host of less-desirable features, including a decrepit basement sauna, a neglected front-yard pool, a profusion of High-Vegas-style gold-patterned wallpaper, and a multitude of small rooms that chopped up the home's 5,400-square-foot space.

"It had such great potential, but it was all walled in," Matheny-Katz says. "When we started pulling walls down, it started making sense."

During the several months of renovations, the house was partially gutted. On the second floor, vaulted ceilings and skylights opened up the master bedroom and living room, radiant floor heating was installed, and the kitchen—complete with new eucalyptus cabinetry and a Wolf range—was exposed to the living/dining room, creating a huge indoor-outdoor space lit by a long wall of floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening onto a balcony. The rectilinear house is bisected by the prominent stonework chimney, fed by a pair of working fireplaces, one on each floor—plus a built-in outdoor fireplace/grill on the patio. "That's what sold me on the house," Katz says. "I'm a grill man."

The couple parted, reluctantly, with the swimming pool and sauna, but the reborn house retains its party-friendly heart—a vast ground-floor clubroom serviced by a big, curving bar. The room serves as the stage for a monthly series of house concerts, dubbed Jazzway 6004. Local and visiting jazz artists perform for up to sixty-five guests who pay $25 to reserve tickets for the concert, or $40 for dinner and a show. (Matheny-Katz cooks the meal herself.) On show nights, the bedroom wing is closed off, but guests have the run of the rest of the house and grounds. The third Jazzway 6004 season opens on September 26 with bass clarinetist Todd Marcus and his quartet. (For ticket info, go to www.jazzway6004.org.)

Welcoming that kind of a mob every month might give pause to the average home-owner, but the couple seems to accept that serious entertaining is what this place was designed for. "You have a house this big," Katz says, "you have to invite people over."

—David Dudley is Urbanite's editor-in-chief.

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• The ground floor clubroom, outfitted with a complete bar, hosts a monthly series of live jazz concerts.

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• With two patios and a long second-floor porch, the house is made for indoor-outdoor living.

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• Removing interior walls during renovation opened up this large living/dining space to the kitchen.