The Well-Concealed Kitchen on Houzz!

Another ideabook by yours truly just went live on Houzz.com – ideas for cozying up your kitchen with furniture from other parts of the house! Hope on over to Houzz.com to read it:
The Well-Concealed Kitchen.

Harlem HOUZZ Tour

I don't usually post on the weekends, but I couldn't resist publishing this right away because I'm so excited! I recently wrote a quickie post on houzz.com, the site that allows you to find ideas from designers and DIY-ers all over the country. I'm so honored to share with you the wonderful story about our New York apartment (prior to our Austin move), Houzz Tour: Killy and Oliver's Hip Harlem Apartment: Color, Clever Storage and Editing Turns a Tiny Apartment Into a Gem, written beautifully by Houzz contributor Lily Gahagan.

This is by far the most in-depth look at our (beloved) former apartment, complete with small-space decorating tips and explanations of the driving forces behind our design decisions. Sending out a huge thank you to Lily and the Houzz team!

All photos by Frisson

Sunnyside Bathroom on Apartment Therapy!

Thank you to Aaron Able at Apartment Therapy for publishing a bathroom renovation I completed for a client in Sunnyside, Queens! Check out the full post.

I had a wonderful client who, as is often the case, became a friend over the course of the project. She came to me initially because there was a serious mold problem in her bathroom caused by a perpetual leak from a neighbor's bathroom upstairs. We toyed with saving certain elements of the original bathroom, but ultimately, we decided a gut renovation would provide her with the new, bright, clean bathroom she wanted, and would dispel all remnants of mold and mildew lurking behind the tiles and under the tub.

As I mentioned in the Apartment Therapy blurb, we worked on a tight budget, but my client was flexible with things that were important to her; she loved the glass tiles and wanted a pocket door to open up the room a bit, so she splurged a little there, but the floor and penny tiles were extremely affordable, she kept her sink/vanity and we took advantage of my trade discount on all the finishes.

Comments from Apartment Therapy readers certainly run the gamut! Most think the bathroom is a wonderful improvement (thank you!) while a few are a little more...critical. Don't get me wrong, I'm open to constructive criticism, but comments like, "this really didn't need that ribbon of penny rounds" are entirely subjective and opinion-based. Of course, everyone has a right to express their voice, but at the end of the day, the final design was a result of the choices and compromises  between my client, the contractor and myself.

Some Apartment Therapy readers protested against ripping out the original tiles. As I wrote in my response to some of the comments, I highly value historic preservation, but it can be quite costly. In this case, the fact that the tiles were old/original did not make them better. Not only were they moldy, but they had seen better days. Additionally, the ceiling and walls were puckered from years of leaking from above, so in order to fully repair the damages, the walls had to be demolished. More importantly, my client wanted a new bathroom, and since it is her house, she has the right to change what she wants! She fell in love with the penny rounds and glass tiles, which made the whole design feel serene and clean. It is her opinion that matters most in this situation.

Here's what the tub area looked like before – does this look worth saving to you? It doesn't to me.


The rest of the bathroom, before:


My client's father, who visits from time to time, has a physical disability that makes small spaces difficult and uncomfortable for him to use. We increased the size of the bathroom slightly widening the door opening and by replacing the traditional swinging door with a pocket door. The addition of the larger door required demolition of one wall, further making the preservation of wall tiles moot.


The quality of workmanship on the tile installation, specifically where the penny tiles changed direction at the corners, caused quite a bit of controversy among AT readers! As I wrote in my brief response, penny tiles are challenging when it comes to changing directions (in this case going from a horizontal border to a vertical one that wrapped around the shower while maintaining the same width for the band). By changing the band to a vertical application, we hit a roadblock at the corners, as they do not come together cleanly.

The offending photo:


If you look closely at the photo below, perhaps it is clear that there is only one direction in which to install the mesh-backed tiles in order to achieve a clean, straight edge. It is even clear in the photo above that the natural tile angle is not at 45 degrees and the two edges just don't meet in the corner!

I spent a couple of hours laying out the different options with the contractor and we came to what we considered to be the best solution. Perhaps there were others, but we decided to cut some of the tiles in order to avoid large areas of tile-free grout. As one of the AT commenters wrote, "nothing is perfect," and while we strive for it, budgets, time and all sorts of other constraints are contributing factors to the final result of a project.

At the end of the day, I was very pleased with the overall transformation, as was my client and her family. It was a successful project and I'm proud of it!



Click on images to see larger versions, or hop over to our website!

Kips Bay Decorator Show House 2010

Photo courtesy The Washington Post

A lot of drama was associated with this year's 38th Annual Kip's Bay Decorator Show House, a fundraiser for the Kips Bay Boys & Girl's Club. The first property chosen to host the showhouse was sold and the new buyer wasn't interested in letting a bunch of decorators have at it in his multi-million dollar abode. Can't blame him. The annual event, which is usually open for one week in April, eventually found a new host home – a six-storey, 25-foot wide mansion, which is listed for a cool $28.8 mill. Ouch! Taxes alone are $100,000 a year!

The recently rehabbed 1876 limestone townhouse, located at 106 East 71st Street was the blank canvas for 18 hand-picked design firms (in addition to artists, photographers and landscape designers), which outfitted 17 spaces in the 10,000 square foot house overlooking Park Avenue. The show house will be open through November 11th, so any New Yorkers (or visitors to New York) still interested in going should check it out this week!

We went a few weeks ago. Overall, I thought everyone did a great job – it's always fun to see what designers do with spaces when there is no client and they have the opportunity to realize their vision without any restraints. I always think some of the rooms could be pushed a little further, though. A few designers go all out and make a splash, while the majority create nice, reasonable rooms in which most people could imagine themselves living. Let's take a little stroll through my favorites! (Unfortunately, photographs are not allowed – and I wasn't invited to attend the pre-opening as a member of the press. Humf! – so I've selected images from other publications.)

While every room is vastly different, common threads always pop up. This year's designers really thought about all surfaces – ceilings included. Almost every room had a ceiling treatment of some sort, whether it was a shimmery gold or silver leaf, lacquered or hand-painted. There was also a good showing of hand-blown glass pieces and lots of contemporary artwork.

I'm often drawn to some of the smaller spaces because they tend to feel the most finished and precisely styled. These little gems are usually tucked away in basements, side rooms, or in odd little hallway nooks, but the designers transformed many of them into showstoppers. Case in point:

Katie Ridder's entry foyer (above) welcomes visitors with in with boldly painted coral doors and mouldings and walls covered in her own Pagoda wallpaper (available through Holland and Sherry). Talk about doing a lot with a little; she really makes this little area sing! I wish more rooms in the house had such pizazz. (Photo courtesy NY Times)

Brett Design created a fun little office on the ground floor, using their own wallpaper and acrylic Niedermaier furniture, although the choice of brown carpet was a little odd. I like that they didn't shy away from putting art on those already busy walls. A repeating pattern tends to recede and often makes a great background on which to layer imagery without becoming too busy.

Photo courtesy Brett Design

Aman & Carson designed one of those rooms that gets better and better, the longer you explore it. It was a fairly small space, envisioned as an art collector's room, that was packed with details and special moments. Note the glossy ceiling paint and bookcases with mirrored backs to enlarge the room, and, of course, a variety of art to enjoy.


Photos by Laurel Petriello for Daily Fix

Rod Winterrowd drew the first and second floor stairwells and landings, which he transformed expertly. The stairwells on the upper levels of the house were completely overlooked and bland. Mr. Winterrowd's were warm and inviting, with well-curated collections of art and photography on the walls, mouldings and managed to carve out interesting beautiful niches in the hallways:

Photo courtesy Heather Clawson

In the tub, Coffinier Ku Design hung a glass installation by Suzan Etkin Enterprises & Zoli Change, and Glenn Palmer Smith created a cloudy-bubbly mural on the ceiling:


Photos courtesy Daily Fix (top) and NY Times

Nancy Boszhardt Inc. created a real gem with her small-ish sitting room, made more luxurious by drapery at the door:



Robert Verdi and Deirdra D'Elia created the coziest little nook out of a fourth floor landing featuring hand-blown glass sconces by Lindsey Adelman, a gorgeous cane-patterned rug, black lacquered ceiling with sunburst light fixture, and textured black walls with tacks. Note the use of contemporary art, as well. And the peacock toss pillows on the blue velvet sofa.

Photo courtesy NY Times

Of course, the highly sought-after larger rooms are worth mentioning:
No stranger to luxury, Noel Jeffrey created a warm and inviting bedroom with an array of subdued textures and patterns to feast our eye upon, but I'm always disappointed when rooms are roped off so visitors can't walk through and look closely at things.

Photo courtesy Daily Fix

I did appreciate the use of drapery throughout, which softened the corners of the room, making it feel a little more enclosed – a risk in a New York home, where every square inch counts. I think it was a successful element, and the softness of the sheer curtains played off the drape-y lightness of the chandelier above. Again, all this softness was offset by dramatic artwork.

Sherril Canet's fifth floor sitting room is nothing short of awesome. The photo really doesn't do it justice. There are so many subtle details worth looking at.

Photo courtesy Daily Fix


We spent a good ten minutes in there, discovering different elements that made the room really stand out. First off, I love the use of blue paint with stripes created by applying a clear gloss over the underpainting. I am completely stealing that idea in our next place. The Missoni-esque rug is a great contrast in scale, and the zig zag is enlarged as trim on the roman shades. I don't love the art over the sofa, but generally, the room has so many great accessories and pieces of art.

I'll conclude this little tour with Nina Helms', Sculpt Du Fleur, a plaster sculpture applied to the curved wall leading into Darren Henault's his-and-her dressing rooms:

Photo courtesy NY Times

Rising star/tastemaker Nick Olsen recently went on record to predict that raw plaster is a trend on the upswing. I think he's onto something; there was no shortage of plaster art in the show house this year, from wall applications to busts to figurines.

Our DIY Office Nook on Apartment Therapy!

There has been a lot of buzz lately about offices carved out of closets and other small spaces in peoples' homes. Oliver and I jumped on the bandwagon with photos of our own workspace and today it is being featured on Apartment Therapy! Thanks again, Janel!

As many of you know, Oliver and I work from home most of the time, and while we do our best to keep work and life separated, it's a bit of a challenge in our less-than-400 square foot apartment. Our living room came with a somewhat irritating-at-first nook due to a protruding section of wall that contains the "Sprinkler Control Valve,"complete with industrial signage. The nook when we moved in:

As it turned out, that nook was the perfect width for an Ikea table top. Oliver and I painted the gray walls and yellow and white stripes, then Oliver and handy brother of bathroom fame mounted the table top to the three walls and added one central support leg. Oliver and I hung two overhead shelves and painted it all Benjamin Moore Black Satin - a charcoal-y dark gray.

As I've mentioned before, Oliver is a master of organization, and it doesn't stop at paper; he has some experience with network architecture, so he can set up a fully functioning, but very self-contained wireless office. All the computer-related mumbo-jumbo is hidden neatly under the desk, and while we have office stuff scattered throughout the apartment, I've done my best to cover it all with home-made fabric remedies. We also mounted computer speakers and holders for rolls of trace paper, which I'm constantly using.

We didn't want too much clutter above us, but we couldn't imagine not utilizing all that vertical wall space, so the shelves actually hold our collection of vintage milk glass vases and bowls, which we used for flower centerpieces at our wedding. I thought I would sell them after the wedding, but I had become attached - it look a year to amass the collection (there is more) and I think they're so beautiful. So, I'm thrilled to have a place to display them! Some of the pieces even hold office supplies, so they aren't solely decorative. We found the little cut glass lamp at Target, and it works great for evenings when we're burning the midnight oil. We found the pair of vintage Pollack chairs at Two Jakes in Brooklyn. The clock belonged to my Grandmother and is by Syroco Inc., the company that essentially invented plastic in the 1950s.

Even though the office space is fairly pleasing to look at, sometimes we just want it to go away. For those occasions, we hung West Elm curtains on an Ikea track and can close the office when we have company, or when we want a visual barrier from work. The curtains also conceal that pesky Sprinkler Control Valve sign and soften what used to be a very ugly corner in the apartment. I made those new pillow covers just in time!

Kitchen Redux

We've chattered on a lot about kitchens, haven't we? Oliver posted about our spice rack(s) a while back, I wrote about small kitchens that make big statements, and I've mentioned them in passing in other posts. Well, I'm bringing kitchens into the discussion again, but this time, we're talking about ours. You could say our kitchen falls into the "small" category – it's literally one strip of wall in our living room. We have 28 square inches of counter space. You read that correctly: 28 INCHES. So, don't complain to me about your ginormous country kitchen with 55 overhead cabinets and 87 base cabinets! Por ejemplo:

Dual islands, a double oven, a desk...I don't want to hear it! 
Here's what we were working with when we moved:

What's with the mirror in the kitchen, you ask? I have no idea. A generous leftover from the previous tenant. Thanks?
Despite the small size, we use our kitchen to make nearly every meal we eat (self-employed+home office+people who like to cook=lots of meals made and eaten at home). It works quite well now, but it took some work. With no where to hide pots and pans, it was pretty cluttered on top of the refrigerator for a while:

We knew we needed a pot/pan/lid solution, but unfussy, affordable wall-mounted pot racks are hard to come by! Eventually, we came to terms with the fact that we would have to make it ourselves, which is where the pegboard came in. Diamond Life allows you to specify the size you want and they cut it down. They also sell the hooks for super cheap – the whole thing cost about $30.

Before painting the board, we laid out the pot/pan configuration:

Oliver painted the board with leftover gray paint from our walls so it blends in and provides a fantastic backdrop for the luxurious Le Creuset pots and pans we were given by some extremely generous wedding guests.

We've managed to get as much stuff on to the walls as possible, since our storage space is limited and, while there's no way to hide the fact that we have a kitchen in the middle of our living room, it seems to work without being a complete eyesore.


UPDATE: My colleague Thomas was kind enough to point out my fuzzy math skills regarding our countertop space. We actually have 2.3 square feet of countertop. That's more than 28 square inches, but not exactly spacious! Regardless, my apologies for the faulty calculations. 

Laboring on Labor Day

Me, laboring, on a gorgeous sunny day

Americans observed Labor Day this past weekend, a national holiday instated in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland following the deaths of several workers during the Pullman Strike, a nationwide conflict between labor unions and about 3,000 employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company over reduced wages. Technically, Labor Day is celebrated with a street parade to exhibit to the public the strength of trade and labor organizations, followed by a festival for workers and their families. Most Americans now celebrate the holiday with a Monday off from work, a bbq or two, and lots of beer, as we bid farewell to summer and welcome fall. While I found some time to relax with Oliver and some friends (I even hit the pool in Central Park for one last sunning session) I was a very busy bee this Labor Day weekend: I took my first stab at sewing and made some things for the house I'd been wanting to make for a while.

I've had a sewing machine for six years. It was a thoughtful and generous hand-me-down from a dear friend, Jeremy Waterman, back when Oliver and I lived in San Francisco. In those six years, I've touched the sewing machine four times: 

1. The day Jeremy gave me the machine. I promptly broke the needle, had no replacements and rendered the whole thing useless. A year later, we moved to New York and, due to space constraints, the sewing machine was relegated to the attic of my parents' cabin in New Jersey.

2. In 2009, Oliver and I were making the rounds to various libraries and Salvation Army, donating things we hadn't used in forever and he snuck in the sewing machine, thinking I wouldn't notice. A mini-quarrel ensued: he insisted I would never use the sewing machine; I somehow convinced him I would. I was so convincing, in fact, that he let me bring it back to New York so it could sit high on a bookshelf (aka: "upstairs") and taunt us both. 

3.  During our last visit to see Oliver's family, his mom gave me a quick sewing lesson on her machine. I came home, fully intending to practice but never did. A few months ago I retrieved my sewing machine from it's high-up hiding place, and managed to play around with some practice stitches on a scrap of fabric. That spike in productivity was brief, and the sewing machine soon found its way back to the top shelf for safe keeping. Oliver kindly kept his trap shut about the fact that I still had yet to make anything with the sewing machine. 

4. Fast forward eight months to Labor Day Weekend 2010: I was suddenly stuck with the need to use the three yards of linen I bought months ago at Mood. And use it, I did! I busted out four short curtain panels to conceal office-related junk and other sundry items in our open shelves and five pillow covers. In the words of the great Liz Sullivan, "in your face, Oliver!" 

Our hall console has two drawers and open shelves. It houses our fabulous, but very unsightly printer, some paper, office supplies, and all of my project binders. I made a panel for each drawer, so we could still open them at different times:

Please excuse my sneakers and the poor photo quality, I did not style these shot at all, and I took the photos toward the end of the day, when the light was disappearing. Better photos will be taken soon!

Our kitchen is in our living room, and our Ikea shelves perform several important duties: they provide a visual divider between the kitchen and living room while storing extra dishes and dry food on the top and middle shelves, and magazines, papers and more office supplies on the bottom shelves (office supplies are scattered all over our apartment). The office stuff is very cluttered looking. So, the new panel covers all that business! 

Would it kill me to iron the panels better? No, it would not. Apologies.

Using my new Dritz pliers, I poked holes in each newly sewn panel, clamped a tiny grommet in the hole and hung the panels from 5/8" cup hooks Oliver drilled into the drawers and shelves: 

We've had the same garish pillows for way too long. I kept talking about replacing them with cheap-o ones from West Elm or some such store. But, after sewing all the curtain panels, it dawned on me that I could make my own pillow covers using extra project fabric, leftover linen from the curtains on the back. I just re-used the inserts from the old pillows. A few online tutorials made it clear that creating a simple envelope flap on the back of the pillows would be easiest. It was, indeed, easy:

This video was instrumental in my success – thank you, Crafty Gemini! 

Fabric, from left: Duralee 20953 in Graphite, Kravet (Lisena in Gull), Duralee 42030 in Buttermilk, Kravet (Sommers in Driftwood)

Fabric: Osborne & Little 

At the end of the day, I threw in another panel for the other side of the kitchen/living room divider: 

All the new textiles have really refreshed the hall and living room. I'm so happy with the results! After this marathon weekend of sweatshop labor, the sewing machine is resting "upstairs" now, but I can't wait to get it down and make more stuff soon! 

Project: Cork Board Makeover

Please forgive my messy hair. My Aunt Barbara would be so embarrassed for me. She always insists that "the Scheers don't look like ragamuffins!" Well, I kind of do here. Sorry, Aunt Barbara!

Oliver and I have carved out a little workspace for ourselves in our living room. It's a perfectly well-appointed spot,  and while Oliver has done a whiz-bang job of making us a clutter- and paper-free office, I tell ya, a lot of STUFF comes with my work. I'll saunter over to a very clean, neat desk in the morning, and within minutes I'm overwhelmed with papers, samples, notebooks, invoices, etc. He has no trouble at all; his side of the desk is a beacon of tidiness. While working on a project, most interior designers like to see all the elements of a room – or the whole house/office/hotel, for that matter – together to be sure everything works cohesively. Between fabric samples, trims, tiles, paint and images of furniture, there's a lot to pull together and it's nearly impossible to do that without making a bit of a mess, and, in my case, completely taking over the whole living room. As much as I try to stay neat, by the end of the day, it looks like I'm sitting in the eye of a tornado.

For the longest time the wall next to my end of the shared desk was blank, beckoning for a cork board or something to pin up notes, reminders, samples, bills, etc. while I'm still working on them and before they get filed away. On a recent jaunt to Target in New Jersey, we found cork board that would suffice:


But it was ugly and we have a cute desk area, so I couldn't let some bare board bring down the whole look! I had a fabric sample (ok, I have a million) that a client rejected and it was big enough to cover the board. We got some little black carpet nails from Home Depot and set about covering the board.


As if I could keep it that bare for long. Here's what it looks like normally:


I don't know how I got along without it!