A Tudor's Class in Economy

WHEN Alison Hammatt first saw the 1929 Tudor home her clients had purchased in Rye, N.Y., the living room wasn't really living. Brooding, deep-brown wood floors and a somber bronze chandelier at the apex of the 18-foot barrel-arch ceiling made the room feel like a fusty time capsule.

"Tudors are known for being dark, and [my clients] were really interested in light and bright, but in a way that felt appropriate for the space," said the designer, based in Providence, R.I. Beyond respecting the home's roots, Hammatt strove for economy. The homeowners, a couple with two children, hoped to prudently reuse pieces they already owned. "This is a young family," she said. "This is their first home." How to inject a room with cheeriness without it looking cheap: Usher in color, but choose hues with a dusky undertone rather than a hard-candy vibrancy.

"A lot of these are English fabrics.

There is a kind of muted-ness to them," the designer said. Velvet in antique gold, for instance, not pure yellow, envelops the sofa.

And Hammatt chose an elegant blue-gray glazed linen to recover the two armchairs facing the sofa, thoughtfully repurposing some of the couple's existing furniture.

Would you place such traditional seats, with their scrolled arms, atop a rug with a strong grid pattern? Hammatt didn't hesitate.

"Mismatched old things make [a room] just that much more inviting," she said. To boost the space's friendly quirkiness, she inserted a true outlier-a cast-iron cake-display rack that was reimagined as an end table between the easy chairs.

Hammatt fleshed out the seating area with a rectangular bone-inlay coffee table and two simple chairs backed by the hearth. Then came a head-scratching moment: "OK," she recalled wondering, "what's going to happen toward the window?" The solution: She flanked the window with a large brutalist cabinet and a decidedly unmoody painting, a gift from an artist relative, to bring a dollop of modernity to the room. Hammatt relates the story of lucky thrift behind the edgy cabinet: "Their friends were moving and...had this up for grabs, so my client snagged it," she said.

You'll notice the room is pretty big, so Hammatt had corners left to fill. She fit, rather precisely, a banquette from a consignment store into the nook to the painting's left. She replaced the seat's original cheetah-print upholstery and added a tasseled skirt fringe.

"Then it was this 'Aha' moment of a gorgeous banquette....It just needed some love so it didn't look like just a bench." While some of us might have been tempted to keep the cheetah print, Hammatt didn't. Still, the designer wanted a pattern to avoid introducing another block of plain upholstery. She subscribes to London designer Rita Konig's argument that prints are visually soft.

"Your eye moves through pattern," Hammatt said. She recalls thinking of the bench-turned-banquette, "Gosh, it's so big, if it was just a solid, it would look really heavy."

The patterned damask upholstery and textured skirt fringe give it a lightness, she said, "that makes it inviting." To de-blank the wall and round out the vignette, she hung a vintage sunburst mirror, lettuce-ware plates and shell-shaped candle sconces. A martini table adds a touch of brass that chimes with the new chandelier.

Another of Hammatt's go-to design hacks shifts the room's feel from stodgy to welcoming. She tops old lamps, like the one behind the sofa and on the fireside antique, with shirred fabrics in petite patterns-an easy, economical and yet transformative move.

"How do you make a lamp that you've had forever look new again?" she asked rhetorically.

"Let's throw on this beautiful, colorful lampshade."