“The entry is the smallest and most uniquely shaped room in the house. We lacquered the ceiling in a soft pink—Fine Paints of Europe, color-matched to Benjamin Moore’s Boudoir—and it does this thing where it catches the light and throws a glow down into the rest of the space. A small room, but it sets the whole tone. The shape of the entry was tricky, but it gave us the chance to make every inch work hard for the family: a custom curved bench with a drawer for shoes, and a white oak niche with additional shoe storage tucked below—a true drop zone in a space that had to do a lot with a little.”

“The family room anchors the main living spaces with a new limestone fireplace we designed with a subtle stepped profile. That step detail carries over into the built-in shelving on either side, so the whole wall reads as one gesture. The art in the room is a Jane Hammond piece the family loves—it’s not a shout, more of a slow reveal, the kind of work that shows you a little more each time you spend time with it.”

“We pulled the colors from the painting through the room in small ways—in accessories, upholstery, the quieter layers—so the art and the interiors feel like they’re in conversation. Anchoring the seating area are two Japanese-inspired chairs from Lawson-Fenning—a quiet nod to the wife, who is half Japanese—which we reupholstered in a warm plaid at the husband’s request, a nod to his lifelong love of plaid clothing. The chairs became a kind of double portrait of the two of them. That’s one of the best parts of this work: when a detail is meaningful to the person who lives there, it never looks like decoration. It looks like them.”

“The dining room is where a lot of the heart of the house is. At the center is a custom walnut table we designed with Michael Finizio Fine Woodworking. The clients cared deeply about this piece—it was important to them that the table be something the family would gather around for decades. Michael and I spent real time selecting the slab. Above it, artist Rafael Arana painted a mural into the dining room arch, and then applied a custom metallic finish to the other arches around the main living areas—the one between the hallway and family room, between the kitchen and family room, and at the entry to the family room. The mural isn’t loud; it’s the kind of thing you notice on your third or fourth time through the room. The finished arches pick up light differently as you move through the house. All of it feels like art that’s part of the architecture, not hung on top of it.”

“The kitchen was the big one. It was once a small family room—dark and kind of sad, one of those rooms you walked through quickly. Getting it right meant rethinking the room from the ground up: expanding the footprint, opening up the ceilings into a pitched volume, and adding generous new windows to pull light deep into the space. What used to be an afterthought is now the anchor of the whole house. The cabinetry is a mix of paint-grade in Goodwin Green by Benjamin Moore (no, I did not pick it for the name, I promise) and warm white oak. The countertops are a combination: Ceppo di Vagli honed marble on the island and in the tall arched niche, with a quieter man-made stone on the perimeter and the backsplash.”

“Mixing natural and man-made stone is tricky—undertones, veining, the way each one takes light, they can easily fight each other. But we wanted the marble to do the singing and the man-made stone to do the quiet work in the background. And the thinness of the man-made stone was actually what made the best detail in the kitchen possible: a moving backsplash that opens to reveal white oak niches for spices and oils. The husband is a serious cook, and we wanted to give him a kitchen that worked as hard as he does. Dimensional Construction pulled it off beautifully.”

“The primary suite is quieter. We wrapped the room in a soft grasscloth that picks up light in this really lovely, almost living way. There’s a custom bed, layered bedding, and an alpaca throw by Sandra Jordan that’s just ridiculous in the best way.”

“In the primary bath, we designed oval mirrors made by Hare and Arrow Arts with tassels hanging off the sides. Our lead designer was inspired by some mirrors she saw on a trip to Spain, and references like that—filtered through our own hand—are often what make a space feel personal instead of pulled from a mood board.”

“The laundry room might be my sleeper favorite. It’s off the entry, and we treated it the way we’d treat a powder bath—as a place for something unexpected. We color-drenched the walls and ceiling in Benjamin Moore’s Ocher, then carried the color onto a run of paint-grade cabinets paired with warm white oak. The fun is in the hardware: we designed integrated circular pulls that play opposites across the two finishes—on the white oak, the ocher shows up inside the handle; on the paint-grade, we flipped it, with a small backsplash detail inside the hardware itself. It’s a laundry room, yes, but I don’t think that’s any reason not to have fun.”