Dream House Design

Challenge:

The clients are a creative couple who live in a beautiful older house. The challenge was to maintain the beauty and charm of their older home, while furnishing it in a more modern style. They wanted to incorporate their modern art collection into this home, and were looking for a comfortable, yet luxurious decor.

They also like to entertain friends for small dinner parties, and wanted to create an open, spacious feeling between the living room, dining area and kitchen.

They wanted their master bedroom decorated in a luxurious, comfortable, and more electric style, with a more intimate feeling than the rest of the house.

Finally, they wanted to update the fixtures in their master bathroom, and create a home-spa-like space in which to completely relax.

Solution:

To open up the space between living, dining, and kitchen areas, walls were partially removed, leaving short sections of wall on either side of each room, connected by an arch that echoes the shape of the arches on the front porch. Natural maple flooring was installed throughout the space to unify it, and the tones of wood furniture used in each room began with a dark chocolate. The color palette for walls and fabrics consisted of variations of shades of pale ambers, golds and deep red-oranges.

The master bedroom uses a variation of the color palette from the main living spaces, while the master bathroom gets a calming spa-like palette of watery green and white mixed with rich chocolate woods.

Then, each room was given its own ‘personality’ through the use of repetitions of an abstract elemental design motif employed in the details of the fabrics and furniture. This idea particularly appealed to the wife, a painter, who is a huge fan of Cezanne and his idea of reducing items in a painting to their simplest geometric shapes.