Cool House Panorama

Dining Room

Great Room

Kitchen

Playing with the Panoramic feature on the phone.

Picked from the yard: Casual Hydrangea arrangements in the dining room

Black and White in Summer

The dining room, the space I declared finished in January 2006 and that we decided to add to the kitchen renovation, finally got its new clothes thanks to some design help from the Awesome Designer and a shopping trip to Kravet's Bethpage, NY showroom one rainy day back in April.


The drapery fabric Solarte from Kravet Soleil, is a retro-vibe indoor/outdoor fabric that should stand up better to dog affection than the Dupioni silk that hung there before.


Although it looks black & white in the stock image, there is a lot of subtlety in the shading - ebony, stone, mocha and a silvery pewter.


The rug, Cap Ferrat, is, like the Chinese Chippendale now in the den, a design by Windor Smith for Kravet. The seafoam color marries well with the grey-green Benjamin Moore Titanium walls and the dark brown ovals are almost the exact shade of the beams and the mocha shading in the drapes. (Black, seafoam and the sun seem to have been a big part of this recent renovation. I think I'll have to invest in some black and white tea towels for the kitchen!).


All we need now are those pesky baseboards...

Hot Lava

Once the fabulously decorated great room, it's now full of furniture from the kitchen and dining room - the perfect place to challenge the peeps to a game of Hot Lava!

Sunday Brunch: Eggs Benedict or Joe's O's

This is Sunday brunch over at the awesome designers' cottage. Eggs Benedict, stuffed tomatoes, asparagus, coffee cake with two kinds of homemade preserves and mimosas.


This is breakfast at The Cool House. Every day. The fact that it is served on Sunday morning does not make it brunch. I am starting to suffer from a massive inferiority complex. However that will not deter me from eating over at the neighbors' at every opportunity. Hell, I might even move in there permanently. Who could blame me? Everything is better over there.

Dining Room Update

Houseblogs.net, the community for those obsessed with home improvement, is running feature stories this month on four topics, one of which is the dining room. We loved the dining room when we first saw the house, it was large, lofty and had a great beamed ceiling but it was beige - beige ceiling, beige walls, beige carpet and beige vertical blinds. I could have lived with the beige while we tackled more urgent projects but when the previous owner removed her furniture she left behind those bright blue patches on the walls. A tad unsightly, no?



The off-white walls had grey grime where they met the ceiling. For a long time I worried that this was where the roof leaked but it proved to be just where dust from the heating system settled. There was a matching line around the edges of the carpet.



Not attractive, but at least it wasn't a major structural problem. Apart from this the room was dark because the rhododendrons and pine trees outside the windows totally blocked out the light,



and the dusty, vinyl vertical blinds had to go.



We hung framed museum prints we had from our last house over the blue rectangles and had the electrician rewire and hang our 1970s Tre Ci Luce Cesare Lacca "Alien" pendant lamp that we had lugged from Belgium. It had spent the last four years in a box because we didn't have a space in the last place for it but it goes perfectly here.



For three months we couldn't see out of the window



But eventually we chopped back the shrubbery elevating the light levels a gazillion times.

Originally I wanted a sand color on the walls and we pinned up lines of swatches from Benjamin Moore but nothing spoke to us. We progressed to buying try-out pots of paint in golds and shades of café au lait but they all seemed to make the room dingy. I'd been avoiding the greys because I didn't want the dining room to be cold or sad but when I came across Titanium I knew we had a winner. Titanium is such a bright modern-sounding word, isn't it? When we slapped the Titanium over 1968 beach blue it just looked right.



The Guy gave that wall two coats, I touched it up, and touched up the Navajo white on the adjoining walls as far as I could reach. We couldn't paint the rest of the room without buying a long ladder, and we didn't trust ourselves to paint the ceiling without dripping on the beams. We ended up living with this odd colour combination for over a year.



Meanwhile I had a "Eureka!" moment when we took out the built-ins from the boys' bedrooms.



I cannibalized the desk parts to make a new cabinet for the dining room.



Then I went to the local stone fabricator and had tops cut to fit in Carrara marble.



This worked so well we got over-confident and ordered a second top for the cabinet in the den. Unfortunately we failed to measure this accurately so we had a 4' piece of marble hanging around doing nothing. A few weeks of searching and we found this wrought iron wine table in Crate and Barrel that fitted perfectly. It's taller than the console so it's not too matchy-matchy.



The room was coming together but we knew that we had to replace the windows before long so we held off doing more.



In 2005 we put in new windows and I spent a couple of weekends getting the stain right on the frames. The first go at getting window coverings for the room was a bust. We ordered red dupioni silk roman shades from Smith & Noble but they came in with white splodges on the crimson.



We now had curtain rods but nothing to hang on them. While we searched we had the room professionally painted using the Titanium on the walls and BM Cloud White on the ceiling and baseboard. So much better than buying a ladder or scaffolding and they did a great job. In the end the wall with the prints on got a total of five coats of Titanium (two by Steven, one by me because I wasn't happy with his brushmanship, and two by the painters) and the other walls just got two coats.



In the end I found an even better solution than the roman shades, drapery panels in red silk, darker with an almost invisible pattern that gave a depth to the drapes. Even better, these were on sale at Pottery Barn.com and cost less for 6 panels than one of the wrought iron rods we had had to pay full price for at the Pottery Barn store.



Last year I found a great painting on ebay and had it framed at a local store. After some discussion we hung it in the dining room because we loved the way the colours in the painting complemented the grey, white and red of the room.



Three years after we started we consider this room "done". Well almost. Home improvement is never really finished, is it? At some point we want to change the carpet but that will have to wait until we are certain about the plans for the den and the kitchen floors.



Right now we have a dining room that we love, great colours, great light and warm enough to eat in even in winter.

Red rhododendron

This one is outside the dining room window. I'm posting it now because it's forecast to be 90F today followed by thunderstorms so I don't know how long they will last.
Here's a shot of the purple azaleas outside another dining room window. They are all just about over.



And here's what we used to see outside that window.



We call that progress.

Marcellin Dufour '83

Marcellin Dufour '83
Originally uploaded by modernemama.

Yesterday I got a call from the picture framers to say the painting I bought on ebay before Xmas was ready. It's oil on canvas so it had to be stretched, I chose a matte black wood for the frame and it came out beautifully. When I got it home I realised the background colour was very similar to the Benjamin Moore Titanium in the dining room, and it has deep red splotches, the same colour as the curtains. I'd originally bought it for my office but it seemed to want to hang in the dining room so that's where I nailed it. And for once I only had to make one hole in the wall.
It was meant to be.

It's really finished this time

I know I said we called the dining room done but soon after this photo was taken Magritte fell off the wall and cracked his frame. This poster from the Surrealism: Desire Unbound holds great memories for us. We bought the poster in 2002 after we had seen the exhibition at the Met in New York, we also saw it at the Tate Modern in London and we lived in Belgium for many years and saw the Magritte exhibition there too. So I had to get it professionally framed and for three weeks there was an empty space on the dining room wall. But today I picked it up and re-hung it, and all the drama has returned to the space. And now we are definitely done.

We pronounce it done

Finally put the curtains up in the dining room this morning. We had ordered roman blinds in October but when they arrived they had bleached out splodges on each of them so we sent them back. It took until January 11 for smithandnoble to tell us that this was normal on silk dupioni and we could either have them remade or choose a new fabric. Huh!
I've seen silk dupioni samples and fabric bolts from many sources and never seen a splodge on any of them, this looked like a bad dye job to me. Anyway, would you trust them to make up a new batch? I thought not. No explanation for the six dressmaker pins left in the fabric either.
So I gave up on the idea of shades and after three weeks of looking I found these red silk dupioni panels and while they are more formal than I wanted, the colour is great - better than the shades, in fact and the best is that there are no weird marks on them. Ha!
Anyone need a reminder of what the dining room looked like eighteen months ago, before the new windows, furniture, paint and curtains? This is it Finally put the curtains up in the dining room this morning. We had ordered roman blinds in October but when they arrived they had bleached out splodges on each of them so we sent them back. It took until January 11 for smithandnoble to tell us that this was normal on silk dupioni and we could either have them remade or choose a new fabric. Huh!

I've seen silk dupioni samples and fabric bolts from many sources and never seen a splodge on any of them, this looked like a bad dye job to me. Anyway, would you trust them to make up a new batch? I thought not. No explanation for the six dressmaker pins left in the fabric either.

So I gave up on the idea of shades and after three weeks of looking I found these red silk dupioni panels and while they are more formal than I wanted, the colour is great - better than the shades, in fact and the best is that there are no weird marks on them. Ha!

Anyone need a reminder of what the dining room looked like eighteen months ago, before the new windows, furniture, paint and curtains? This is it.

Too nice just to eat in

We just had the dining room painted (Benjamin Moore Titanium and Benjamin Moore White Cloud) and it looks beautiful. The painters were really impressed with the colours, too. It seems no-one had chosen them before, there seems to be a lot of magnolia, or Navajo white as it is called here, around, otherwise it's pale yellow, sage green and coffee colours: espresso, capuccino, mocha.
Anyway, it looks excellent and would look even better with the crimson shades we ordered but when we hung them we noticed that the dye process had gone wrong and there were bleachy splotches all over them. They have been returned, and we are eagerly awaiting the replacements. Until then a photo of the window hardware..........