Innehållsförteckning för Oct/Nov 2021 från House Beautiful

BOBBY MCALPINE has a way of pushing the perception of what an outdoor room can actually be. This screened dining porch was functional as an outdoor room, but it certainly has a more elegant and relaxed aesthetic than just a bunch of outdoor furniture thrown together. And that stone floor in combination with the rustic antique wood table, it really speaks to when I first really came to know Bobby’s work. He combined those materials in any given project. In the mid-’80s, Bobby was a professor of mine at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, and I began interning with his firm the next summer. I always marveled at the extraordinary collection of talent that existed then in Montgomery, Alabama. They weren’t in New York, they weren’t in California, they weren’t…

THE IDEA OF MOVING “upstate” from New York City sounded absolutely maverick. People went to the Hamptons, or to Westport, Connecticut, but I didn’t know of anyone who bought 13 acres in the Hudson Valley and filled it with… animals. Then again, Sheila Bridges never was about trends. By the time I met her, Sheila had sold this house, which overlooked the Hudson River, and was planning her next adventure. But as we grew closer, I heard many stories about the home and read avidly about it in her book The Bald Mermaid. Even looking back on it today, the space exudes élan and elegance. In the living room, I see Sheila’s signature stripes: the blues, grays, and soft greens. There is a perfect mix of antiques and new pieces,…

MOST OF US have carefully accumulated our furnishings over the years, refining and replacing as our tastes (or budgets) change, which makes the experience of outfitting a room from scratch a one-way ticket to sticker shock. The Internet has begun to alter that, with some designer rates now posted online. Yet ambiguity remains. The cost of design hinges on so many variables—the size of your space, where you live, even your designer’s level of expertise and their business model. With that complexity in mind, we surveyed hundreds of working design professionals nationwide to get real about money. A SAMPLING OF HOURLY RATES 600-800 HOURS How long one designer estimated it would take her to design a 3,500- to 4,500-square-foot house. (A house that big might have 3–5 bedrooms and baths.)…

FOUR O’CLOCK IS SUZANNE STEFAN’S FAVORITE TIME OF DAY. “AS THE sun tracks around the building, it hits the water and you get all these sparkles of light in the different rooms,” explains Stefan, who works as a principal at Studio DIAA, an architecture and interiors firm in Seattle. The home she shares with her husband, Raanan Schnitzer, and their three-year-old daughter, Ava, is enveloped in this glittering light show—because it’s a floating house, built on a foundation of 100-year-old logs in Seattle’s Portage Bay. Constructed in the 1920s as inexpensive lodging, the city’s remaining float homes number around 500. Schnitzer owned this one for years before he and Stefan, newly pregnant, decided to renovate and move in full-time. “Most families, especially with a little one, wouldn’t opt for a…

THANKS TO OUR PROJECT SPONSORS ACME BRICK, ARCHITECTURAL GRILLE, ARHAUS, CAESARSTONE, CIRCA LIGHTING, CYNC, ELKAY, FABRICUT, FARROW & BALL, FIBREWORKS, GARAGE KINGS, GROTHOUSE, LG STUDIO, MORRIS & CO., PHILLIP JEFFRIES, SCHLAGE, SERENA & LILY, SIGNATURE HARDWARE, SIGNATURE KITCHEN SUITE, STEARNS & FOSTER, TENCEL, TRANE, THE RUG COMPANY, WALMART, WELLNESS WITHIN YOUR WALLS BUILDING A HOUSE IN A PANDEMIC IS NOT EASY—BUT IT IS ESSENTIAL. Ask any designer, contractor, or homeowner who’s done a renovation in the past two years. Product and transit delays, material costs shifting weekly. It’s enough to drive a design crew mad. But we had our mission—build the fourth annual Whole Home in just four months. Like so many families filing construction permits and navigating skyrocketing material prices this year, we kept reality in mind: It’s never…

Listen to our new podcast, Dark House, to hear more about these horrifying homes. housebeautiful.com/darkhouse. Villisca Axe Murder House Villisca, IA A quintessential farmhouse built in 1868, it was the site of eight grisly murders in 1912. The new owners turned it into a museum, overnight stays optional. Jean Harlow House Los Angeles, CA This 1930 Craftsman was once home to the bombshell actress and her MGM exec husband, Paul Bern, who died in it by suicide—or, as rumored, might it have been murder? Mercer-Williams Museum Savannah, GA Designed in 1860, this Italianate revival that inspired Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil played host to three untimely deaths and is supposedly built, like much of the city, on top of unmarked graves. S.K. Pierce Mansion Gardner, MA Built…

DAVID HICKS, MY father, found excitement in design concepts the way I do bungee jumping—but Villa Verde was the leap of all time, a freefall assignment that never stopped. Amin and Nahid Ghani, the clients, allowed his imagination full flight in what was certainly the most comprehensive project of his career. He became the architect, interior designer, and landscaper. He commissioned the paintings and drawings, and designed the furniture for specific positions. The villa, created in the mid-1980s, took three whole years to complete. Madame Ghani’s suite, comprising a bathroom, bedroom, and boudoir that ran the length of Villa Verde, was a fairy tale of apricot cotton. The tester bed is lined with that fabric; the walls of the suite are entirely hung with it, pleated; and recesses to con-ceal…

Should You Build-In a Cat Tree? Goodbye, fuzzy beige thing! Yes, if you can’t stand the look of the alternative. When one of Washington, D.C., designer Joe Ireland’s feline-loving clients moved into a sleek penthouse in Logan Circle with floor-to-ceiling windows (above), “cat castles were not going to cut it,” he recalls. So he designed a wall of glossy stained walnut for her two rescue tabbies, George and Fred Weasley, with tunnels and cubbies tucked inside. Guests are none the wiser: “From the living room, it looks like a built-in for art,” he says. “But inside, a maze of connected tunnels let the cats jump to all these different perches.” Think Long Term A food-and-water bowl drawer and orb bed from Meyou Paris were built into this laundry room, but…

WHAT IF YOUR BUDGET ISN'T BIG ENOUGH? A designer who typically delivers six-figure kitchens will probably pass if you call to inquire what they can do for $30,000. That doesn’t necessarily mean your budget isn’t big enough to hire a designer; it just isn’t big enough to hire that designer. But if you find that several pros have told you that your budget and your vision are not aligned, it may be time to adjust your expectations.“We do not ascribe to a budget minimum,” says one New York–based designer. “During the initial meeting, I let the client know if their expected budget is aligned with the scope of work. If it is not, if they have unrealistic financial expectations, I will politely tell them that their numbers are not in…

“IT HAPPENED ON ACCIDENT.” When Karlee and Weston Marsh renovated an RV for their family in 2018, they posted the process on Instagram just for fun. “But people started coming to us, saying, ‘Could you do this for us? Could we be your clients?’” Karlee recalls. “It just took off.” Eighteen custom RV renovations and three years later, it’s their full-time job as cofounders, partners, and vloggers at Marsh & Sea. So when homeowners Kate and Tadd Wagner decided to sell their place in Ohio for a simplified life on the road, they of course reached out to the cool couple they’d seen renovating RVs on YouTube: the Marshes. It was important to the client that their new camper feel like a real home, not a temporary crash pad. After…

I HAD THE GREAT PLEASURE OF KNOWING the late Albert Hadley, one of the most celebrated designers of the 20th century. A beloved teacher and true master of his craft, Mr. Hadley heavily influenced American design for more than three decades—notably as the cofounder and president of the legendary Parish-Hadley design firm, where he worked from 1962 to 1999, and later with his namesake firm. Mr. Hadley beautifully combined traditional and contemporary styles in his work, and was never afraid to dial back the drama and show some restraint—even in the homes of high-level clients like former vice president Albert Gore, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the Astor and Getty families. Mr. Hadley’s motto for decorating was: “It’s really about creating a quality of life, a beauty that nourishes the soul.”…

IN MY 20S, I FOUND THIS house very grand. It was lush and luxe, but also airy and bright—which is not what you would assume when you think of lavish. You don’t think crisp. The idea of a tiled dining room feels sterile in theory, right? But this one has a warmth and a brightness, and you felt that going into that space. What jumps out to me is the exuberance, the ambition. It’s not laid-back. It is unapologetic and unabashedly decorative. I saw things in that house that I’d never seen before, and maybe haven’t since. And in the design, there is a lovely tipping of the hat. You can see Charles de Beistegui in the tiled room, like the tiled room at Château de Groussay. For a young…

MANUEL CANOVAS decorated this flat when he was at the peak of his creativity. It was a beautiful two-story apartment in Paris, opening up to the Champ de Mars gardens between the École Militaire and the Eiffel Tower. The rooms had great exposure to sunlight, which made the colors vibrate. He was always inviting professionals and artists to visit. Pali, a signature pattern of Maison Manuel Canovas that’s still offered in the collection, can be seen in the bedroom. It’s upholstered on the walls, coordinating with the moiré stripes of the canopy bed. Monsieur Canovas believed that big motifs were best used in small spaces to magnify a room. This juxtaposition of various fabrics, like silks and velvets, was at once luxurious and opulent but also intrinsically linked with a…

THIS WAS ONE OF Bunny’s first projects. She found the first five botanicals and Pamela Kay, the owner, went and found the rest. That’s something that, to this day, Bunny loves to do with clients. She’ll say, “This would be wonderful here.” And they say, “Oh my gosh, yes, I love that.” And then on their travels, they start collecting. Earlier ’80s, a lot of people used white tablecloths. But Bunny started using printed tablecloths, embroidered tablecloths, even taking a vintage piece of fabric and putting it on the table. Just creating something special and unexpected. She’s very good at that layered look, and she’s not afraid to experiment. That sideboard table at the end of the room, and the lamp and all the books and the boxes below it—we…

PERCHED HIGH IN THE CHILTERN Hills of Berkshire, England, this 121-year-old building was born out of a rivalry between two neighboring landowners, each bent on constructing the superior cowshed. Over the years, it was used for stabling horses and general storage, and later as the site for Young Farmers’ Clubs dances. But it’s perhaps most famous for a 2007 stint on the silver screen, where it served as a school dormitory in the comic reboot of the British film St. Trinian’s. When it came to turning the 4,500-square-foot Victorian barn into an inhabitable dwelling, Luke McLaren and Robert Excell—cofounders of Central London studio McLaren. Excell—sought to preserve as much of the original as they could. (And not just because English Heritage, the organization that manages the landmarked edifice, levied a…

AFTER A FEW YEARS spent clearing vines, non-native plants, and debris from the forested half of her multi-acre Hudson Valley, New York, property, Beverley Kerzner saw an unexpected underbrush emerging. “It was like a fairy-tale land of beautiful ferns and meadows,” she says. “It became so magical that you needed to be there and sit comfortably.” No matter that this glorious part of her parcel was located a roughly 30-minute walk from the main house. Kerzner set her mind to creating a space where guests could soak up, with minimal impact, the mesmerizing natural environment. “We erected a platform with a view of the island and rapids below where two streams converge,” she explains. Onto that went a 280-square-foot, bell-shaped cotton tent “that would add to the romanticism of the…