A dealership owner’s garage
I wanted something a little more unique than the standard red barn,” Alex Witkin says of his slate blue-sided, silver-roofed barn in Poolesville that, inside, is a car aficionado’s dream.
A self-described car geek, Witkin, 39, is the owner of Performance Auto Gallery, which sells specialty vehicles and manages clients’ private collections. He founded the business in 2014, and its Rockville showroom serves as its headquarters.
At his 10,000-square-foot home barn, perched on nearly 50 acres of family property, Witkin keeps his personal trove of high performance, low mileage Subarus, as well as several other classic cars and trucks he tinkers with and collects—and even a handful of vintage automobiles he stores for long-standing clients. He also keeps a couple of ATVs in the barn that he and his 9-year-old son like to drive around the property. “My wife is fine with it as long as he wears his helmet,” Witkin says.
The barn, which Witkin added to the property in 2020, was pre-engineered by Minnesota-based Lester Building Systems and installed by Rasche Brothers, a general contractor based in Taneytown, Maryland. It has insulated slab concrete flooring, an insulated roof and insulated walls, and three 5-ton commercial HVAC units that run through custom round ducting that’s visible across the ceiling. Witkin says he chose round ducting for aesthetic reasons, though HVAC experts say it moves air faster and more efficiently than rectangular or square ducting.
Witkin also added a large commercial-grade dehumidifier to keep the barn’s humidity steady regardless of the season. Cars don’t like to be too hot, too cold, too damp or too dry, he says. “It’s kind of like storing wine or a cigar if the goal is to preserve [them].”
At last count, in early January, he had 40 vehicles stored there, including more than a dozen of his Subarus. He estimates that the barn could hold as many as 75 cars and trucks, but “the most I’ve ever had in it at a given time was 50,” he says.
Witkin keeps what he considers his masterpiece up front so visitors see it as they enter: a red 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX he bought in high school, retrofitted over the years into a high-performance racing car, and entered in competitions around the country just for fun. He says he’d never sell it.
“Any show we ever brought it to we would win,” he says, adding that it has “been on the cover of four magazines,” including two international publications. “Not a whole lot of people know … about these early Subarus,” he says. “2002 was the first year that Subaru decided to bring them from Japan to the United States.”
One of his favorite things about the barn is that he has the space and tools he needs to give an old car new life, including the shell of a 1997 Subaru Impreza that he plans to upgrade with a bunch of new components. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing progress and, maybe, as cliche as it sounds, building something and doing it yourself,” Witkin says. “For me, being able to put in the headphones and just sort of focus on the punch list and say, ‘OK … we’re just pulling brake lines out today and focusing on that’ … I really find it kind of peaceful.”
A stylist’s closet
Most of my clients don’t have closets of this size,” style expert Naina Singla admits—almost apologetically—about her own clothes closet in Bethesda, which boasts a chandelier, ottoman and full-length mirror. “The goal for all my clients is [that] no matter what size their closet is … it looks like a boutique when [they] walk in, so it feels really inviting.”
Singla—who has become a voice of minimalist chic in publications including Vogue and InStyle, and whose guidance on fashion trends and “capsule collections” has made her a regular on morning lifestyle shows in the D.C. area—says a much smaller space than her own is all a stylish woman needs to dress well every day. Even a metal coatrack will work, she says; that’s what she uses when she’s putting together clients’ wardrobes in her home office.
“Most women wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time,” she says, meaning much of their storage space is filled with items they hardly, if ever, wear.
For her closet, Singla, 49, chose a baroque-style chandelier shortly after moving into her house 11 years ago. The following year, she worked with designer Joanna Abizaid of Virginia-based Cline Rose Designs to select the muted damask wallpaper and the small mirrors she installed above the top shelves to bring a sense of openness to the windowless space. All of the closet’s shelving came with the house.
If she were doing it today, the married mother of two daughters would choose decor that better reflects the minimalistic style she’s known for now, she says. One easy fix she made recently: replacing the darker, more flamboyant ottoman she originally selected with a Pottery Barn ottoman covered in subtle, neutral fabric.
“Styles evolve. … What I did in my closet in 2015 is just not representative of who I am today,” just as “what you wore 10 years ago is not … necessarily what you want to be wearing today,” she says.
Singla was born in Canada, grew up mostly in North Carolina and earned a doctorate in pharmacy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
In 2010, while working as a medical science liaison for a dermatological product line, she started a fashion and lifestyle blog on the side. Two years later, she was invited to appear on what was then WJLA-TV’s Let’s Talk Live morning show and did a segment on accessorizing your wardrobe for the holidays.
Women in the D.C. area began reaching out to her for help in organizing their closets and streamlining their wardrobes. She expanded her blog into a website offering styling services, and soon was working full time, guiding busy women on how to dress simply and elegantly with fewer but better pieces.
Singla organizes all of her clothing in her closet by category, and from lightest to darkest. “So blazers go light to dark … sleeveless tops, and then short sleeves, long sleeves, all light to dark,” she says. “When you do that, you can kind of really understand what you have.”
The strategy keeps her from buying too much of the same thing, Singla says as she scans her wardrobe, which leans heavily toward blazers, lightweight tops and jeans—her favorite go-to ensemble. “Like, I can look here and say, ‘Oh, maybe if I’m going to buy something, maybe … not another black tank or white tank,’ ” she says.
Singla keeps two woven baskets from Amazon on her closet floor: one for items that need to be dry-cleaned, and the other for things that require a quick “editing,” meaning they’ll be donated or discarded.
She hangs her jeans and slacks using pants hangers that clip at the waist, instead of folding them over a hanger or tucking them into a drawer, and she drapes her cardigans and sweaters over velvet hangers so she can see them at a glance. As for her handbags—admittedly one of her weaknesses—Singla displays as many as she can at eye level. She keeps all of her shoes on display, too. She tells clients to keep their handbags and shoes visible, instead of reserving their best things for special occasions. “Use your pieces,” she says. “Every day is a special day.”
A restaurateur’s kitchen
When Riccardo Pietrobono and his wife, Marissa, designed their custom-built home in Bethesda five years ago, he had two requests for the kitchen: a gas cooktop that heats to high temperatures, and a supersize island for entertaining. After the kitchen was completed, he added a personal touch: a wooden sign that reads in Italian: Mangia e Statti Zitto. “Eat and shut up.”
“I have a passion for cooking,” says Pietrobono, 46, co-owner of Olazzo and Alatri Bros., restaurants in downtown Bethesda, and Gringos & Mariachis, which has locations in downtown Bethesda and Park Potomac. “It was important to have a nice range … because I’m used to working in the restaurant with, like, 30,000 [British thermal units (Btu) per burner],” he says, and “we entertain in the kitchen, so I wanted a big island.”
The end result: a sleek white kitchen with a Carrara quartz-topped island that measures 50-by-120 inches with a custom-made wood base painted in Benjamin Moore Pike’s Peak Gray, and a Wolf 30-inch Dual Fuel Range featuring four dual-stacked, sealed burners that allow for a quick switch from high to low heat. One of the burners comes with 20,000 Btu—which is on the high end of residential applications, according to industry experts—but perfect for searing steaks, which Pietrobono prepares in a cast-iron skillet on the cooktop.
Potomac-based Spring Valley Builders was the contractor that constructed the couple’s house in 2020, and Stephen Schultze, the company’s owner, helped with the kitchen design and layout. Features include a Kohler farmhouse sink and a Delta pot filler.
Pietrobono didn’t set out to be a restaurateur; he majored in marketing at the University of Maryland, College Park. While on summer break one year, Pietrobono was bussing tables at a family friend’s new restaurant in California. His older brother Roberto was working there as a waiter. Shortly after Riccardo got back to Maryland, Roberto—who was still in California—suggested opening a restaurant of their own in Bethesda. Riccardo agreed, and it was only then that he took up cooking. He flew back to the friend’s California restaurant to learn the ropes and honed his skills at another friend’s restaurants in Bethesda and Silver Spring.
In 2002, when Olazzo opened, Riccardo cooked the food and Roberto pulled double duty as host and server.
When cooking at home, Riccardo, a first-generation Italian American, still follows recipes learned from his mother and grandmother, both of whom came to the U.S. with his grandfather in 1960 from a small town in central Italy.
Pietrobono puts his own spin on all his recipes, he says, and writes the modifications in a small notebook he keeps on the counter in his kitchen, where his GE Monogram stainless steel refrigerator is covered with pictures drawn by his daughter, Everly, 5, and son, Riccardo Jr., 16 months, whom everyone calls Rocco.
Pietrobono’s mother, whose Silver Spring home had served as the family gathering spot, died shortly before his son was born. Now the role of host has mostly become his. He starts his meals by offering guests a glass of wine from the custom walnut-stained wine rack in the kitchen. When the weather’s nice, he likes to open the sliding doors that lead from the kitchen to the patio so everyone can go in and out.
Though he and his brother have spent more than 20 years feeding a large food-loving clientele, Pietrobono still doesn’t consider himself a chef—he sees himself as a self-taught cook who prepares dishes he grew up with. “I was a fat kid,” he says. “I grew up eating a lot of pasta.”
A winemaker’s wine cellar
Winemaker Robert Butz and his wife, Cathy, have lived in their stately Poolesville farmhouse, surrounded by vineyards, for nearly two decades. Only in the past few months has their personal wine collection been at home with them.
Butz, 56, is one of six owners and founders of Windridge Vineyards, an estate winery with a tasting room, outdoor pavilion and production facility in Darnestown. His three brothers, along with his aunt and uncle, are his business partners, but he credits his uncle with turning them into wine enthusiasts—and winemakers. “He’s been a collector of wine for 50 years and he’s partial to French wines … so although I grew up on a working farm, [I] grew up on a working farm that drank French wine,” Butz says.
Until January, Butz’s personal wine assortment was stored in his childhood home in Darnestown, where his brother Jeremy now lives. That old farmhouse sits next to the winery’s tasting room, which was built in 2020. It’s less than 3 miles from Butz’s Poolesville home.
In the basement of the old house is a storage room where his mother used to keep the fruits and vegetables that she canned each year, much of it from produce grown on the family farm, which still operates today. For years, Butz’s personal wine was kept on the storage room floor, which was naturally cool and humid. “The wine doesn’t care” where it is stored, so long as the temperature and humidity levels are right, he says.
His bottles’ new home is a modern 11-by-18-foot, fully insulated and plaster-surrounded wine room with a barrel-vaulted stucco ceiling, a wall made of Maryland fieldstone that matches the home’s exterior, a dual-paned tempered glass-and-iron door, and a compressor that maintains a constant temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit and a humidity level of about 50%, both of which, Butz says, are optimal for long-term wine storage. His friend and neighbor, Mike Carrick of Seneca Services in Poolesville, served as the contractor.
Butz and his wife spent about a year researching every detail of their new space, including the vintage pine racking they bought on Facebook Marketplace, and the marble-topped table with metal shelving and base from Crate & Barrel. Cathy says they were looking specifically for a white tabletop because that’s the best color for studying a wine’s hue and color intensity.
The lighting was also selected with the bottles in mind. The halo-style LED fixtures the couple installed overhead have two switches—one turns on a warmer, more pleasant shade of light that mimics daytime; the other emits a brighter, whiter light that’s better for analyzing wine.
The couple’s cache includes a smattering of bottles from Windridge’s own estate vineyards, starting with its first vintage in 2017. There are hundreds more from across the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, California, the Pacific Northwest and most of Europe. The stash also includes two double magnums from the Bordeaux region of France, with vintages from 1999 and 2002, the years their daughters were born.
One of Butz’s favorite bottles will likely never be opened: a 1966 Bordeaux his parents bought more than 50 years ago from Addy Bassin’s MacArthur Beverages in Washington, D.C., for $2.25. The bottle is nestled in its original wood box, with the price stamp still affixed. “It’s been stored well, but honestly, when wine gets that old, it’s so hit or miss”—it’s better off as a memento, he says.
“It’s fun to have people over and, you know, pull out a bottle from someplace famous, and then a bottle from someplace local and talk about that,” he says. “Honestly, there is more and more … local wine that is absolutely world class. … I like being part of that.”
A spa owner’s retreat
Most evenings after dinner, Nhan Fitzpatrick makes a beeline for her home sauna, then swigs a glass of filtered water with lemon and a pinch of Celtic salt (for the electrolytes, she says) and scurries to the private retreat she created in the side yard of her Silver Spring house. With its outdoor shower, koi pond, string-lighted pergola, and white stationary bike that she bought on Amazon, the space is all she needs to recharge.
“I find that vacations [are] very exhausting,” says Fitzpatrick, 43, the owner of Little Oasis Spa in North Bethesda. She used to head to exotic climes to decompress but found that all the packing and unpacking—and the travel itself—only left her more tired.
Since discovering that she could bring home her favorite parts of travel, Fitzpatrick has vacationed less—and relaxed more. “The element that I like the most is the outside shower and being connected with nature,” she says. “When you’re near the water and there’s fresh air, and when you look up and there’s flowers and greens ahead of you, you feel like you’re somewhere else.”
Built in 2023, her outdoor shower is 4 feet square and framed in a combination of pressure-treated and vinyl-wrapped wood. It’s fitted with a modern-style showerhead that has an extra filter to remove chemicals from the water. The floor is covered with mosaic tiles that range in hue from sky to royal blue, with hints of turquoise—inspired by a trip to Vieques, Puerto Rico, that she and her husband enjoyed shortly before the shower was built.
The color palette also reminds her of the waters of Aruba and of Auckland and Queenstown, New Zealand—other places she’s been that served as inspiration, she says.
The shower is accessed from the side door of her house via a slate pathway that’s hidden from the street by trees, plantings and a high white picket fence. “Everyone laughed at me when I said I was going to [build] it,” Fitzpatrick says “They [were] like, ‘Oh, that’s only at the beach and vacation.’ ”
Married and the mother of two, Fitzpatrick says her favorite time of year in her private outdoor sanctum is during a light summer rain, when the crape myrtles are in bloom and the small yard is covered in leafy plants and flowers. “The water [from the shower] is hot, and there’s no chlorine there,” she says. When it rains, “you can smell [the ions from the rain] in the air, and it charges the body.”
Fitzpatrick’s shower was the finishing touch to a project started more than 20 years ago, shortly after she and her husband moved into their white brick and stucco center-hall colonial. Right away, they added the koi pond and some of the landscaping. “My husband managed everything, using a few contractor friends to put everything together,” she says.
Fitzpatrick says her quest for wellness began in her early 20s. She’d become disillusioned with the treatments medical science offered for acne and other health problems she encountered when she was young. She spent hours each week at the public library researching safer and more effective alternatives.
In 2006, after finding products and remedies that worked for her, she left a career in real estate to become an esthetician, with a focus on preservative-free organic products and treatments without harmful side effects. She opened her spa seven years ago, with estheticians trained in her philosophy and custom-blended product line.
While her spa offers specialized treatments such as stem cell therapy and stabilized oxygen, Fitzpatrick says anyone can have a spa day at home by filtering their tap water, adding the scent of natural botanicals—her entire home smells of the proprietary mix of Egyptian eucalyptus and French lavender that she gets blended for her spa—investing in exfoliants and lotions made of organic ingredients, and putting aside time each day for their own well-being.
That’s what she tries to do for herself. “I want to give [my clients, husband and children] 100%, even 200%,” she says. “But I can’t do it if I’m depleted.”
Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.
This appears in the March/April 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
