Giving up a lot, however, doesn’t mean you can’t (ultimately) get what you want. Even if that means a major renovation to meet your family’s needs.
The house, a spec builder’s gut rehab, had been turned from a Victorian-era two-flat into an updated yet traditional single family home. But the project was not well done, a point driven home by the fact that it wasn’t selling, even though “it was priced pretty well at a time when things weren’t really priced that way,” notes Sue Auerbach, the couple’s architect.
The finished design also wasn’t what the couple wanted, in the broadest sense. “When we were walking through it, I was thinking of ways to make it feel modern because it was so obviously not,” observes Ruthie Alan, the project’s interior designer. “What they did like about the place was the space and its malleability. Sue and I knew we could rework it and use every square inch.”
So the wife made an offer that was turned down. A few weeks later, after hearing that another offer on the place fell through, she upped her bid and threw in all the fixings. “I told the developer he could keep all the cabinets and fixtures, right down to every last sconce and sink. And the master bathtub too,” she confides. “We didn’t want them, and I figured (the builder) could reuse them in his next project.” Her instincts proved correct.
With the sale secured, Alan and Auerbach were charged with fulfilling the family’s exacting wish list; “we wanted it to be fun, interesting, open, contemporary, colorful, clean-lined and unexpected,” the wife says. The couple also planned to use the midcentury furniture from their prior homes and showcase their burgeoning contemporary photography collection.
Leaving the traditional facade of the house intact accomplished one goal: “When you walk in the front door, the streamlined architecture and all their modern furniture and graphic photography is the last thing you expect to see,” Alan says. Yet that is precisely what you get, thanks to the way Alan and Auerbach renovated the builder’s gut job.
To be fair, “it was more of a moderation” than an out-and-out double gut, notes Alan. “We were undoing design elements, not really starting from scratch.” Still, there was plenty to do.
Down came layer upon layer of what Auerbach characterizes as “goopy moldings” and “goopy stairway banisters,” raised panel doors, burnished nickel hardware and the kitchen wall. The fussy cabinetry, plumbing fixtures and decorative lights were already gone, and the oak floor was nonnegotiable. “It would be too expensive to rip it up, so we redid it,” notes Alan, who custom-mixed the rich espresso stain they used to change it.
In went structural features and decorative fixes to streamline the architecture and reconfigure the spaces.
First is what Alan calls “the airlock,” Auerbach “the cube” and the wife “the foyer.” In reality, it is all three and gives the home an immediate dose of decorative flair as well as providing a wind-sheltering formal entryway where there was none. Alan dreamed up the pristine white glass entry alcove, overlaid with a geometric espresso wood grid that pays homage to modernism, the first time she laid eyes on the space. Together the design team shaped it into a defining element that guided the project’s decorative tone.
The stain color became the foundation they used on all the floors and the bathroom cabinets. Auerbach carried the motif into the stairwell, which transverses all three levels of the home, by designing a banister that repeats the elements.
Other strategic changes ensued logically, and were dreamed up collaboratively by the designers. Ceilings, windows and doors were edged with precise drywall returns instead of molding, and windows were given chunky windowsills stained the same color as the floors.
Out came an ornately framed fireplace in the front room, “which was useless. It was just a decorative element to make the space look like a living room and didn’t even work,” explains Auerbach. Instead, the team decided to flip functions, using this parlorlike area — which had lost a bit of width to the new airlock — for dining, and siting the formal living area in the larger space beyond.
The kitchen followed, separated from the living area by new bamboo and glass cabinets configured in varying heights, but never reaching the ceiling. Alan’s mix of materials, which also includes stippled gold and gray marble on the island and pristine white Caesarstone on the counters, gives the area visual muscle, while the floating cabinet tops makes the space feel airy and open.
For unity’s sake, Alan painted every wall — save for the bedrooms — in Sea Lavender, a quirky shade of ultra-pale blue-gray made by Fine Paints of Europe. Alan says the product’s “puddinglike texture gives the walls sumptuous depth,” while the unusual undertone is “a great backdrop for really bright hues of orange and blue.” Both colors figure prominently in the home’s furnishings, which blend things the couple already owned, such as vintage sofas recovered in plush new fabrics, and newer pieces, such as an austerely elegant, improbably square dining table designed by Alan.
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A final and imaginative layer of decorative lighting by Alan took the decor from attractive to inventive. These include vintage Arredoluce glass and brass pendant fixtures in the dining area, a living room chandelier designed by Alan who was inspired by architect Gio Ponti’s 1964 version for the Parco dei Principi Hotel in Rome, curvy track lighting in the family area and colorful 1960s blown glass globes made into pendant lamps in the kitchen.
The impressive array enhances the tailored furnishings the way a dazzling necklace gilds a sheath dress, but for Alan, it was just another way to fulfill the clients’ mandate. After all, the lighting is fun, interesting, contemporary, clean-lined and unexpected. In short, exactly what they wanted.