Decorating with Compromise (continued)
In Washington, D.C., versatile designer Nestor Santa-Cruz helped marry his clients' very different tastes while freshening up their century-old home's traditional architecture
Among the diverse things Santa-Cruz turned into a coherent design whole were the wife's ever-expanding African art collection and the husband's bedroom bureau (repurposed as a low cabinet in the den after the designer removed the legs). Her tall dining room chests became clothes storage in their new master bedroom, and two low granite-topped coffee tables from her showroom now function as side tables for the Italian leather bed.
Santa-Cruz also fused their personal styles. The husband's tastes tend toward the more rigorously modern, while the wife's, though clearly modern too, are softer and more eclectic. So, says the designer, "in almost every room there's a Bauhaus piece, something midcentury and something more contemporary -- usually the art." The living room gathers together a Mies van der Rohe coffee table, an Eames stool, two 1960s open-back barrel chairs and a contemporary painting by William Willis. In the family room, a Barcelona daybed by Mies serves as ottoman and coffee table, sharing the room with 1960s brass lamps, tables by T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, a 1940s Moroccan carpet and paintings by Oleg Kudryashov.
The husband insists that they are now done with renovations. "Now we just buy art," he says. Still, he muses, "that may necessitate more lighting in the future." And that's really it? "Well, there are still a dozen outlets I'd like to move," he says. He also suggests he'd like to rebuild the bookcases in the den before finally conceding, "It will probably always be a work in progress."
What the Pros Know
A prior expansion of the home created three distinct zones in the ground-floor kitchen -- pantry, kitchen proper and breakfast nook -- each painted a different color (none of them relating to the rest of the house). Though it's a separate space, says Santa-Cruz, "it's still part of the flow of the ground floor" and, as such, should be in keeping "with the vocabulary of the house." So he unified the spaces using paint colors and fabrics that referenced other first-floor rooms: the soft orange of living room pillows and yellow-green of dining room chairs. "Now there's a progression of color," he says, "the kitchen becoming the brightest because it is closest to the light." A round (rather than rectangular) orange-topped table diminishes the tunnel-like feel of the space. "It makes it easier to get into the banquette and also breaks up all the kitchen's straight lines." Eventually a new pendant lamp will provide, like all the ground-floor lighting, an unexpected sculptural element.
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