Houzz Tour: Sophistication and Humor Go Hand in Hand - House-ToursBlogs

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Kamis, 04 Agustus 2016

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Houzz Tour: Sophistication and Humor Go Hand in Hand - “Life is so serious, and I don’t want my children to have to live in that,” interior designer Henrietta Southam says. “Home is a safe place where you can’t take yourself too seriously.” So when Southam found this 1876 Victorian in the New Edinburgh area of Ottawa, Canada, she immediately envisioned a new home for her family furnished with finds from around the world, as well as pieces handed down from her parents. She also kept the home’s small rooms (no modern open plan for her), decorating them to highlight their distinctiveness with a sumptuous playfulness and eclectic joie de vivre.

Henrietta Southam

Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: Henrietta Southam, her three children and their dog, Lava
Location: New Edinburgh, Ottawa, Canada
Size: 2,000 square feet (186 square meters)
Designer: Henrietta Southam

Henrietta Southam has lived in various styles of housing, including apartments and two condos she decorated. But this Victorian is her first detached home. She purchased the property in part because she “liked the rhythms in the house,” she says, and redoing the house would challenge her with her most complicated projects to date. She moved the front door — originally located inside the house — to the exterior, and replaced all of the windows across the front with a gridded style more appropriate to the home’s age.

Henrietta Southam

Small entries or foyers, Southam says, “are where you can express the funnest part of you.” Here, she whimsically paired an iconic Cole & Son wallpaper pattern of bare branches festooned with golden pears with a rustic console table of twigs and birch, two 1940s Italian chairs and an 18th-century mirror of her mother’s. White porcelain antlers by Jason Miller hang overhead: “That had to be in the entry because you always find antlers in the woods, yes?”

Vintage pink Murano glass leaf sconces from the 1950s introduce the soft color into her home. “As a single parent, the ability to use pink in the entry and throughout the house was me saying, ‘I’m claiming my space,’ ” Southam says.

Henrietta Southam

The foyer opens into a sitting room at the front of the house. The curtains were in her late father’s study. The table was a find in Ottawa and has an onyx inset. The wheel on the table was a hand-carved toy for a child that once ran on electricity. Southam’s passion for collecting chairs is reflected here in two simple Chinese farm chairs rendered in gold and silver, which she calls “very Hollywood.”

Henrietta Southam

The foyer also opens into the dining room, where shiny metals and pink reign supreme. A contemporary chandelier by Toronto’s Brothers Dressler, spangled with Swarovski crystals “like ice dripping off the trees in winter or spring,” Southam says, hangs over a table from Anthropologie that features a patchwork of mixed metals and is surrounded by Billy Gaylord dining chairs. The linen curtains were her father’s and feature a pattern of pink palm trees. The rug, which Southam says took more than a year to weave, is from Pakistan.

Henrietta Southam

In the formal living room, a multipanel screen featuring a Marco Polo scene sets the tone, informing what Southam calls “a moody, sexy, dark” color palette of cerulean blue, ochre yellow and terra-cotta red. “This room is perfect for dessert and coffee after dinner, and feels like turn-of-the-century Paris,” she says. The light fixtures, fabricated from gold-painted driftwood, “bring in the organic elements I love and tie back to the antlers, wallpaper and console in the front entry.” She found the pillow fabric in Tanzania while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Henrietta Southam

The family room and kitchen are one long space connected by the green barn-wood ceiling. “These ceilings are about 7½feet high,” Southam says. “So to put dark on the ceiling was a dare. But emerald green is one of my favorite design colors and reminds me of my Norwegian heritage. And in Canada, barns are painted red, green or black.”

She replaced a window overlooking the garage with a wall where the ceramic mantle, found in Atlanta, and a painting now reside; she had cabinets put in and painted the same blue as in the painting. The linen-covered couch gives the room a relaxed look and contrasts with the more formal chairs, which were her father’s.

Henrietta Southam

In the kitchen, Southam opted for a clean, white, modern look. “I like bringing contemporary into the mix,” she says. “It can and does work.” She enhanced the Ikea cabinets with leather pulls. The chairs are from BluDot. The cowbell pendant light is byHay Design in Denmark.

Henrietta Southam

Southam’s son’s room —which is also used as a guest room — is in a refurbished space in the former garage, with French doors leading to the courtyard-patio. “It was wall-to-wall carpet on a concrete slab and unusable in the winter,” Southam says. The wood floors, which are heated, are covered with another rug from Pakistan. An eclectic mix of furnishings contrasts with the daybed.

Southam also added a small galley or en suite bathroom on one side. “It’s pretty easy to enhance the value of a house by adding a room,” she says.

Henrietta Southam

The courtyard-patio, modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, was “originally a mud patch,” Southam says. She designed the dark green wood pergola with arches that frame hydrangeas planted in urns. The Brazilian limestone patio was laid in a patchwork. The stainless steel egg table brings an organic shape into the mix. The furniture comes from West Elm, the cushions from Target. “Because the house is small,” Southam says, “the patio is an extension, an outdoor-indoor room. It’s unbelievable how much we use it.”

Henrietta Southam

Before purchasing the house, one of the first things Southam noticed was that the floorboards were laid across instead of vertically. “They’d been mislaid in the wrong direction, which really disturbed me,” she says. She relaid the floor in the correct direction — using ash felled during the emerald ash borer epidemic — in planks 5 inches wide. Then she raised the grain in a cream color and put gray over the planks, a process she calls “double pass.”

Henrietta Southam

In one of the children’s rooms upstairs, Southam placed a spool bed from Anthropologie and a Persian rug. The heavy English linen curtains were her father’s. “In decorating I try to be fearless,” she says. The blush-colored closet doors bring the pink from the downstairs upstairs.

Henrietta Southam

The master bedroom is a calm, elegant space. Again, the curtains were her father’s. The table came from Target. A modern fan overhead and a landscape painting add to the eclectic decor.

Henrietta Southam

Contemporary style boldly appears in the master bathroom. The mirrors were created by driftwood pickers in Florida. The floating vanity is from Ikea. GoldBarbara Barry sconces bring the metallic shimmer from downstairs into the room, as does the tree trunk table in gold adorned with a blush-colored vase. The pendant light is lined with photographic paper that brings another organic element, a sense of the outdoors, inside.

Henrietta Southam

Throughout the house, including in the bedroom she uses as her study, Southam incorporated large moldings. “Huge volumes can work in smaller houses,” she says. “They help with passages to make the doors appear thicker, and thicker walls help the house seem more grounded and sturdy.” The floor-to-ceiling bookcases, painted the same blue as those in the family room, also ground the study, displaying art and decorating books Southam has collected over the years as mementos and inspiration.

Tag : Houzz Tours, Modern Home