Haven: Parked on their carriage-house porch

For Ron and Virginia DiLeo, adding a 400-square-foot screened side porch last year was the final step in the 11-year-old transformation of their Pipersville arts-and-crafts carriage house into their ideal home.

The porch isn't just a porch - it is now the focus of the DiLeos' Upper Bucks County retreat. No ordinary appendage, it features stylish couches backed in black metal, chairs, a full bar, and a table that can accommodate up to 16 people. The screens allow the couple and their guests to face either the countryside or a road leading to the Delaware River.

"We use the porch 10 months a year. Even in the winter, we have a bar set up, and people use it and have drinks there even if it is cold," Ron says. "It is my favorite room in the house."

Virginia, who is originally from New York, met Ron, a Philadelphian, when they were administrators with Rosenbluth Travel. She now works in real estate; he is an executive with AirPlus, a division of Lufthansa airlines.

Ron and Virginia have owned the 3,000-square-foot frame house since 2002. They bought it as a weekend home while they lived in Old City, and Ron commuted to New York.

After a few years, he was transferred to London, where they lived about three years before returning to the States and deciding to live in Pipersville full time.

"It is easier to commute from Bucks County than from Philadelphia," Ron says.

This is home now, and both he and Virginia volunteer with local preservation organizations.

The idea of creating the porch was born after the couple had owned the 90-plus-year-old dwelling for about nine years and had renovated it extensively. When they first purchased the property, the structure had room for two cars on the first floor, kitchens upstairs and downstairs, and other reminders of its former life housing four carriages and a gardener.

The DiLeos had already converted the former garage into a spacious living room with a stone fireplace and exposed ceiling beams. They had opened up the kitchen to add dining space with seating for 12 people, and located two bedrooms upstairs.

But finally, they decided, the irritants that were their wasted first-floor patio - used for storing lawn chairs, building materials and equipment - and their unusable second-floor deck finally needed to be addressed.

At a party two years ago, the couple met architect Peter Miller and described the remaining issues with their otherwise prized carriage house, suggesting that a new plan might include a mudroom on the first floor.

Miller created the porch and a bedroom, but he balked at the mudroom, saying it would interfere with ventilation.

"The DiLeos agreed, and the porch and the new room on the second floor now provide light and ventilation on that side of the house," he said.

"At first, we were going to have the new room on the second floor serve as a sitting room, but I love it so much and it is so bright and cheerful that we use the room as our bedroom and our old bedroom is now a sitting room," Virginia says of the converted second-floor deck.

Still, their delight in their new porch and bedroom doesn't take away from their pride in the carriage house, originally part of an estate built about 1920. Virginia saved the original four carriage doors with their clover cutouts, removed from the front of the house, for use in other parts of it.

The original doors were replaced by light-paned windows as a first step toward making the house brighter.

For the hall next to their living room, Virginia prepared a wall display consisting of letters she cut out from a poem by Maya Angelou: "The Ache for Home Lives in All of Us – a safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."

"We love the house now, and we are glad we waited to make some of the changes," she says. "Sometimes, you have to live in a place for awhile before you start changing it."