If you’re reading this, you clearly own a computer or a smart phone. So you’ve probably already seen these beautiful photos of North Korean interiors that look like Wes Anderson could have designed them (and that look like perfect computer renderings). But just in case you missed them, check them all out!
And while you’re at it, check out this cafe that Wes Anderson actually did design earlier this year:
By the time you guys are reading this, Tara will be almost halfway into her month-long yoga training down in Costa Rica and I’ll be freshly arrived in Mexico, armed with a new GoPro, somewhere on Orizaba or Iztaccihuatl, two massive snow-capped volcanos that are taller than anything I’ve climbed before. And I can’t wait. It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks of nonstop work as we finished up the little guest house to the Magic Egg, had Country Living come shoot the main house (!!!), and got our eight months’ worth of stuff out of there and into storage at our next job, on the North Fork of Long Island.
To say it was difficult to leave this last job would be a huge understatement. We poured every ounce of energy and imagination we had into it from February through September of this year, and couldn’t have been prouder of the finished product.
We were thrilled to have it posted on Design*Sponge in two installments: first as a Before & After and then as a full Sneak Peek. You’ll definitely want to check out those before pics! Then come back here to peruse the unabridged photo tour below.
And stay tuned for the guest house! We’ve already posted a couple sneak peeks on our Instagram, but the full photo tour is a couple months off.
Huge thanks to Rachael and Gideon, the best clients we could have asked for.
Tons more after the jump! [Read more…]
The moment has finally arrived!
Now live on Remodelista is the Chattanooga kitchen we did for Beth Kirby (aka Local Milk) way back in January.
As usual, Beth’s photos do not disappoint. Check em all out below!
Tons more after the jump! [Read more…]
Sorry, this post has nothing to do with defending Anthropologie. Who would want to read that? I just needed a snappy title that tied together Anthropologie and ancient Greek because I majored in Greek and Latin. Oh and because one of our past jobs snuck into Anthropologie’s new home catalog!
Not only that. When asked what her favorite space she’s ever styled is, Anthro’s Kim Ficaro had this to say: “To be totally honest, after 10 years of doing this, my most favorite space was on this shoot! The first week we shot in a small house upstate. We made garlands of carnations—the most underrated flowers—and hung them in the attic rooms, which had beautiful peeling wallpaper. The downstairs room of the house was a pale grey and we created a living room that you could stay in all day, using lush plants and the carnation garlands.”
That’s the house we totally redid! We rescued that beautiful peeling wallpaper from layer upon layer of tacky grandma wallpaper (and plastered over the unsightly parts so the nice parts would appear beautifully peeling)! We plastered that living room pale grey. And we did a million other things, turning that grandma house into an Anthro-worthy backdrop.
We received zero credit, so forgive me for bragging here.
More photos after the jump. [Read more…]
When we last left you, the little full-of-potential-but-currently-devoid-of-any-charm cabin in the Catskills we were working on looked something like this:
“Not great” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But now we’re done!
Actually, we’ve been done. We packed up and (begrudgingly) shipped out of the Catskills just before Labor Day, and we’ve been neglecting our blog ever since. As usual. And when I say neglecting, I mean neglecting so willfully I can’t believe I’m even doing this right now. Not that I haven’t wanted to! “I should really do a blog post” is a thought that has popped up in my mind every day and then sunk back under only to resurface just as surely the next day. But here we are! Sort of.
The entire house is going to be on Remodelista next week, so unfortunately you’re going to have to wait a few more days to see what we did with the place. It’s a shame we aren’t better about documenting the process, because I’m not even sure the before and after photos will do justice to the amount of work we did.
We moved walls–lots of them. We spent days in a crawl space no taller than a foot in some places, redoing pretty much the entire house’s plumbing since we decided the bathroom had to move. We demo’d a big ugly kitchen worth of big ugly tiles, laid some new subfloor, and then we sanded, stained, cut, installed, and poly’d brand new hardwood floors. We built furniture, modified antique pieces from Brimfield to work as kitchen base cabinets, built open kitchen shelves, and tore out the sagging kitchen ceiling. We painted, painted, painted, and painted some more. And that’s probably doesn’t even cover half of it.
In the end, we took this place, with it’s oddly-shaped, barely functional rooms…
…and turned it into this place:
So stay tuned for the after photos! We can’t wait to share them with you all.
Try as we might to plan our lives these days, our job seems to be leading the way, introducing us to new people, plopping us down in parts of the country that are nowhere on our “Places We Should Maybe Live” list. For now, it’s really the most perfect thing for us, since as the aforementioned list title might suggest, we’re a little unsure which way to point the wagon at this point. You know, the covered wagon that we’ll take to travel west, with hammers and saws and paint brushes and old mason jars falling out of the back.
So where in the world are we? Thanks to some soon-to-be famous Brooklyn restauranteurs, we are spending the summer in Big Indian, NY. A tiny little enclave up in the Catskill mountains, bursting with green trees, wildflowers, rushing rivers, and mosquitos. The project? To bring some charm and authenticity to a Catskill cabin that currently feels a bit too much like a modern condo in the middle of the woods. Well, currently it feels like a house with it’s guts hanging out, but one thing at a time here.
We are insistent that we have some time to enjoy the glories of summer, so we’ve tried to build in some time for weekends and afternoons trips to the local watering hole. (And yes, I do mean that in the good old-fashioned watering hole kind of way.) Still, we’ve given ourselves 8 weeks to take this place from an empty house with little charm, to a perfect, fully furnished and decorated, cabin getaway. As of now we’ve been here for about two weeks, and the place looks VERY different than it does in these pictures. But to give you an idea of what we’re working with, let the grand tour begin!
View of the house! And our trusty Suburban.
More after the jump!
I can’t believe it was just a few weeks ago I was working in this gorgeous home, surrounded by some of the nicest things I’ve ever seen, including a personal favorite, central air. As I write this now I am continually being swarmed by ants and mosquitos, surrounded by tools in a house with no running water, no toilet, no tub, no sink, and nowhere to sit except the very chair I am sitting on. So you can see why it seems like a distant dream. A dream that I am very happy to sink into.
We knew this was going to be a great job when we walked in and were greeted with lemon squares, crumb cake and freshly pressed coffee. Future clients, take note. Kristian (names have not been changed to protect the fabulous) has spectacular taste, so his house already looked amazing, but we needed to bring in some warmth and texture to soften up the new construction-ness of it. The whole place is open and clean and filled with light, so we knew it was going to look great, but we didn’t know it was going to look THIS great.
We used wood from Lowe’s, and washed it with Farrow & Ball’s Cornforth White. (0kay, okay, we just color matched a sample of the color. Sue me.) A few days of cutting and nailing and sanding and caulking and touching up and voila! Best darn looking living room north of Spring Garden.
It just goes to show that shiplap, like baked goods, makes everything a little bit better.
We are so excited about our feature this week with Domaine Home, a new shoppable online magazine launched by the creators of WhoWhatWear.com and led by the brilliant Mat Sanders, who brought us such wonderful things as Domino and Apartment Therapy. The site is absolutely beautiful, and our feature is running alongside a piece about Greta Gerwig, so we’re pretty much thrilled.
I’ve only been a(n instant) fan of the site for a few weeks now, but I already find myself checking it daily for inspiration and and ideas. Yesterday did not disappoint, and a few paragraphs into their My Favorite Space: Cat Deeley article I found myself newly obsessed and deep into a wallpaper hunt.
From my experience so far, this is the kind of thing that could easily go on for days, weeks, even months. Just when you think you’ve found something you love you see something completely different that makes you reconsider your direction altogether. There are just SO MANY beautiful options, and it’s incredible to see what a major impact the right wallpaper can have on a room. I spent hours looking and really only checked out a handful of websites, so beware. This will take over your life. In the best way possible.
My number one criticism of the whole experience is that way too many wallpaper website are doing things all wrong! A pattern in a 2x2inch square is one thing, but who on earth can tell how it’s going to look plastered across a 12 foot wall? Luckily, a lot of sites are clued into this, and for the ones that’s aren’t there are usually samples you can order, or perhaps the magic of Photoshop to give you an idea. This small hang-up aside, I love online wallpaper shopping as much as I love picking out paint swatches, an act that that for me is equal parts enjoyable and completely obsessive.
For now, I have yet to find a house, let alone a wall for any of these beauties, but I can’t wait until I have a space that’s begging to be covered in banana leaf print.
Check out some of my favorites from the hunt, and you’ll see what I mean.
The ultimate Martinique Banana Leaf print, made famous by the Beverly Hills Hotel. Seems to be a big favorite of Nate Berkus, who used it in his own home in Milan. Available from Hinson & Co. You can also find it at Designer Wall Coverings. I can’t seem to track down the amazing wallpaper from the image on the right, but it’s featured in Houses in my Heart by Carleton Varney.
I adore these prints by Turner Pocock Wallpaper, a London based company whose designs grow from quirky, hand-sketched ideas. I would have never thought tennis racket and zebra wallpaper could be so fantastic.
Speaking of Zebras, I’m basically in love with this print from Designer Wallcoverings and Fabrics.
These Jaipur Hand Block prints from Schumacher are so perfect to me. And there are even more options to choose from. I’ll take them all.
This kid’s series is hard not to love, and I could easily see these prints in a children’s room or a studio space.
If you basically just want someone to give you a promise that you’ll love your wallpaper, you can always rely on the folks at Farrow & Ball. No matter what they send you, it will be beautiful.
We’re unbelievably bad at documenting our work. At photographing before, during, and after projects. At posting those scant photos for the world to see.
We tend to do all the documenting in huge bursts, which–believe me–is not the best way to do it. It always means faking “during” shots, re-cleaning and re-styling for after photos, and getting so frustrated that we didn’t take more befores. Two great rules we need to start following: 1. Clean as you go. 2. Photograph as you go.
Anyway, here’s a project from a couple years ago! My personal favorite actually, and one that we did manage to photograph while it was happening. And thank god we did. I don’t know exactly how many hours it took altogether, but I’d guess at least a hundred. I still can’t believe it’s done. And that I did it. Everything from pulling hundreds of feet of thick old oak basecap molding (yes, oak!) out of an abandoned school in North Philly to spraying on the final coat of paint. None of it was easy, but the final result was worth every second. I doubt most visitors even realize that molding hasn’t always been there.
The first step was salvaging all the wood, which I did solo one snowy winter day a couple years ago. A friend of a friend had shown me this amazing abandoned school in North Philly. It had been sitting for years, slowly falling to ruin at the hands of kids, scrappers, and the weather. It was slated for demolition any day (but actually took another year or two), so I didn’t feel too bad about trying to preserve some of the unbelievable craftsmanship that had gone into building the place. (School photos from a different mission on a different day, thanks to Hilly Cribben!)
It’s not easy to salvage around four hundred linear feet of molding, let alone singlehandedly. Pulling it off’s just the first step. A lot of hallways and rooms like this one were left cap-less that day.
After I reached my linear foot goal, I had to haul all the pieces down a few hallways and stairs, across a courtyard, up a few more stairs in the gymnasium, and out one of the former windows. Defenestrated, the molding would land in the quickly accumulating snow about fifteen feet below, ready for me to circle back and pick it up in the clean black minivan I’d rented for the day.
After all that, at the end of a very long day, the wood ended up in the dining room, ready for action. If you ever need extra motivation to get a project done, just pile up the supplies in your dining room to the point that you can barely walk past, especially if your supplies still need to be denailed. You’ll be dying to finish before you’ve even started! And just like that, the room quickly started coming together.
We loved how the molding looked primed and for just a second thought about painting it light. But that felt a little too high tea to me, so we went bold!
It’s been a whirlwind April for us up in Horsham PA. Bryn of Bryn & Dane’s took possession of his new location (inside Horsham Athletic Club) on April 1st, and we had until the April 11th Launch Party to make it beautiful. There were more than a few late nights packed in there, but we did it!
And now we can finally show you where the wood from that old barn and the sign in progress ended up!
Also be sure to scroll all the way down for a couple before pics, which don’t convey nearly how disgusting it was in there. Sticky surfaces and ants everywhere, old egg on the griddle, and a walk-in fridge that smelled like death. Thank god for commercial cleaning crews.
