Dreamy Home

I'm loving this house in Poland!

With a fairly neutral color scheme, the decor is simply dreamy and glamorous without being "too much". You will love it too.

Pretty fabulous, right?!

via:nicety

A Cozy Retreat

Susan Ferrier on Creating a Cozy Lake House With Dark Colors

The designer explains how she blended light and dark in a Lake Martin, Alabama, house.

By Lisa Cregan

House Beautiful

Susan Ferrier: Dark walls illuminate everything — even people. There's no need to be timid with black! To experience the full beauty of light, I really think you need the presence of darkness. This house is on a peninsula with a cove on one side and a big lake on the other. Because the windows are the brightest things in the rooms, they catch your eye, and sparkling water seems to be everywhere. You're totally in the landscape; you don't shut the door and leave the lake behind.

Natural wood darkens over the years, so these ebony-stained pine walls imply age; they give the house instant history. This place is meant to look like it might have already been here in the 1920s or '30s — and that was my directive. The husband asked me to re-create the cabin from the movie On Golden Pond.

The colors are purposely atmospheric — faded, foggy tones with only small pops of white to add crisp outlines. The little bit of white in the lampshades and curtains stands at attention here and keeps things percolating.

I think colors should blend, not jolt you awake; I never want to add anything bright. Stark contrast would have taken the power out of these muted, washed-out shades of green and blue. A color like orange, for example, would look synthetic, unrelated to what's natural here — the way the mossy green of the living room screen picks up the undergrowth beneath the trees, and the way the grays feel like an extension of the fieldstone walls. The blues even have a little bit of a green undertone, like lichen on a stone.

The coffee table in the living room lifts up and down, so it can be used for games and puzzles. I never think a low, square coffee table engages the center of a room enough — this clover shape gives people a reason to congregate. This house was designed for family interaction. Fabrics are mostly carefree linens, and the living room furniture is straightforward, not overembellished, so it's inviting. There's a wonderful screened dining porch and even a bunk room for the children and their friends. It's all very low-key.

We thought it would be nice to make the kitchen cozy and dark to encourage quiet conversation. It has a lower ceiling than the rest of the house, and that makes it feel even darker, which I like. The wife's parents have a home nearby, so we designed the room with visiting family and friends in mind. The dining chairs and counter ottomans are the same height to be interchangeable, and you look up from them to the working island and out to the lake. It all flows up. This kitchen shows how I feel about dark spaces — if the room is dark, go darker. Just go with it.

I like to use all the colors in my palette in the heart of the home, then edit, using some of those hues as I work out from the center. The guest room is where blue landed, but it's a greenish gray-blue, much cooler than navy. And the brown isn't a chocolate, it's more gray. There's not much contrast, so it's peaceful

I think what people enjoy most is the boundary — the place where land and water meet. You can say you love the water, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to live on a boat, right? There's a romance to being on the shore and looking out at the water, being close but observing it from the warmth and darkness of the earth. That's what this house is all about. When I have clients who say they don't want dark walls, I bring them here. And they always say this is exactly what they want.

House Beautiful

A loving touch brings an old home to life.

A Blank Slate, With Fig Trees

LOCATION GERS, FRANCE

By SANDY KEENAN

To Kevin Singer and François Richard, the American predilection for renovating an entire house as quickly as possible is confounding. And ill conceived.

Mr. Singer, a Canadian, and Dr. Richard, who is French, prefer the opposite approach. For them, the joy of transforming old and often derelict homes, as they have done repeatedly in their 25 years together, is in the conjuring and mulling of various creative options, the stuff of daydreams. The passage of time is a crucial design element.

Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

In this way, they have slow-roasted an Art Nouveau apartment in Paris and an abandoned stone farmhouse in Burgundy (a place they eventually found too damp and chilly — the temperament, that is, not the natural environment).

Their most recent transformation, now 16 years and $400,000 in the making, lay in ruins when they bought it for $125,000 in 1998, a 250-year-old house with a few odd outbuildings in the Gers region of southwest France, where Dr. Richard grew up.

No one had lived there for 50 years, so it was the ideal blank slate. The mature olive and fig trees were an added bonus.

“This is it,” Dr. Richard, 60, remembered thinking when they toured the property.

Mr. Singer, 50, added: “Nobody wanted this place, but we loved that it had something solid and noble to it without being too fancy.”

As time allowed, they would travel from Paris, where they were living, and work on restoring the property, inside and out.

“We are happiest when we are making something together,” said Mr. Singer, an international brand consultant who often advises companies on how to do business in unfamiliar cultures. When the couple is in Gers, he is the outdoors expert, the one who created the dozen distinct gardens, each with its own vista and atmosphere, while Dr. Richard focuses his efforts in one of the two kitchens, making thin-crusted fruit tarts in the summer and foie gras or duck confit in the colder months.

During their years in Paris, Dr. Richard was a reluctant plastic surgeon and ear, nose and throat specialist who often talked his patients out of the nose jobs and face-lifts they sought by assuring them of how beautiful they already were. Then he would go home and sketch their textured faces from memory.

“I like for people to age the way we are, in the face and in the brain,” he said.

When Mr. Singer’s work and their desire to have a child through surrogacy compelled them to move to the United States in 2012 (surrogacy is illegal in France), Dr. Richard welcomed the opportunity to try something new.

Now, he has an art studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and his paintings hang in their apartment in Chelsea, over the crib of their 2-year-old son, Joachim, and on the old stone walls of their property in France.

When friends and family visit them there, fathers and son move into what they call the “pigeon house,” a modest three-story tower on the grounds. Mr. Singer’s well-practiced theory on how best to coexist with houseguests is “to never see them over breakfast.”

Given Joachim’s endless curiosity and energy, not much progress is being made on the property at the moment. “At the end of the day,” Dr. Richard wrote in his diary this summer, “the plants are still in need of a drink, and so are we.”

And there is another distraction on the horizon: the couple recently bought an abandoned 10th-century house on the coast of Tunisia. But for now, Mr. Singer said, they have decided to “let it sleep.”

That doesn’t mean they can’t start thinking about it, though. As he likes to say, “When all is done and perfect, what do you have to dream about?”

NYTimes