Beth Diana Smith couldn't help but speak up. The designer was hired as a remote consultant to help zhuzh a living room but spotted an eyesore in the background. It was a bad, bad foyer, complete with an exposed closet organizing system that was so unsightly it took the fun right out of function. "I said, 'I absolutely have to address this," Smith recalls. "This is the first impression. It's the first thing that people see when they walk inside your home. So it's where you want to set the tone."
Essentially, your entrance hall is like a taste test at the ice cream parlor and it can either be a spoonful of humdrum vanilla or an addictive sea salt with caramel ribbons that you can't get enough of. "I want someone to feel like, I gotta come in and see what the rest of the house looks like," says Smith, who recently installed green and white hexagonal floor tile, oversize Buddhas, and a shagreen console table in a client's Colonial Revival in New Jersey.
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Esta historia es de la edición September 2022 de Elle Decor US.
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The Empire Strikes Back - A 19th-century gem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gets a tour-de-force restoration thanks to Frances Merrill of Reath Design.
Is it possible to simultaneously go back in time and leap forward? This was the challenge a couple set for themselves upon purchasing a salmon-pink 1869 house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Longfellow House, the National Historic Site that served as George Washington's headquarters during the revolution. We loved all the beautiful old details of this house, the homeowner says.
Just Like That, But Cheaper. -One writer tried to replicate a classic ELLE DECOR interior in his apartment. Could he do it for $500?
It was all about the green curtains. In 2008, to my great surprise, I was offered a ninemonth fellowship based in New York City. I had lived there twice before, both times unsuccessfully, meaning I had failed to create any kind of significant social life, and so this was a chance not only to do research for my new novel, but also an opportunity to get things right. I swore I wouldn't let the city break me a third time.
And How! - Decorator Nick Olsen transforms a Sag Harbor home into a Hamptons retreat with an irreverent humor.
If you must go to the Hamptons, however-because it is devilishly good fun, after all-you may notice an apparently modest, low-slung cottage on Sag Harbor's Main Street and think, with a comfortable sort of feeling, Now that is how a house should look. Nestled amid the Botox bars, helipads, and club-staurants, it could almost set the sordid world aright both a rebuke and a solution to the chaos that surrounds it. A real home.
