CHRISTMAS HOME TOUR | A Stylish Home in Boston with Historic Charm

Hi Homeworthy, I'm Larissa Mills. Welcome to my home in Massachusetts. Come on in. This holiday season get ready to unwrap the most magnificent holiday homes with Homeworthy's 25 Days of Christmas. For the month of December, we'll take you inside the most heartwarming houses decked out for the holidays in true festive fashion. From twinkling lights and elegantly trimmed trees to sparkling ornaments and cozy holiday charm, these homes capture the warmth, wonder and beauty that make this season so special. So join us as Homeworthy celebrates 25 Days of Christmas. The magic starts now. Raise your glass. Cheers. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. You're watching Homeworthy where we believe every home has a story. Hi Homeworthy, I'm Larissa Mills. I'm excited to show you around my home today north of Boston. So I am a content creator or an influencer, which I kind of hate that term because I don't really want to influence someone per se. It's more I wish I could rename it as an inspo or maybe I like to provide inspiration but not necessarily try to influence but that's the name that people seem to call it. Before I was doing influencing work, I was in marketing and I was on my way to a meeting and my daughter was on her phone just said mom before you go can I just take a quick video of you just you know walking from the kitchen and it's awkward. I didn't know what she was doing. I kind of looked confused because I was confused and that was it. I was on my way went to my meeting and I came back. She had posted this video and it went viral. It was just a trend. It was show your mom and then show your pantry and your house and apparently I matched our pantry which I don't even know what that really means but apparently I matched it but somehow the outfit that I was wearing that day, it sparked something that people wanted to know where my coat was from. They wanted to see more of my outfit or outfits on a more regular basis. They were kind of like show us your mom, can you show us more outfits and it was just a completely crazy thought it was a one-off and didn't think anything of it and I think maybe two days later it just kept going and my daughter said can I just take a quick video of you in my bathroom upstairs which now has sort of become the place that I film everything which I will show you and she just kind of said you know what are you wearing or outfit of the day and kind of went through my my outfit which was nothing. I still really I'm still I don't understand but it just it took off so my husband and I were in living in Boston. My daughter was two years old and we had my son Henry was on the way. I was about I don't know six or seven months pregnant with him and we kept looking at homes in another town outside of Boston and we looked oh my gosh we probably looked at I don't know it could have been like 60 homes I think over the period of two months. It was ridiculous. I feel so badly still for this realtor. It just nothing fit. I think we put an offer in on two homes they they fell through it just some somehow it just wasn't clicking. My husband and I went to a wedding and someone said have you looked at this area of north of Boston it's sort of a beach town it's a little bit sleepy and have you looked there and we said no they said we I really think you guys should check it out I think you'd like it and the next day got in the car we drove through the area it was pouring it was dark and dreary and pouring and both my husband and I said oh my gosh this is if we like it in a rainy day this is crazy what we are loving this place this was the first home we saw and we put an offer in so she loved it that was that that realtor was that she had never had that experience before we got the home we I don't know I just it was one of those things that I feel like I remember seeing the listing and thinking that's it that's the one I just I don't know we had a we had a connection this house and myself we had a connection so um we have lived here now for 18 years and I we it's this house is built in 1890. We have tried to find more information on it but it looks like it was actually moved so I don't know where it existed in this area but it got moved to where it currently sits and we can't even find out exactly when but it somehow pops up but we're not sure but every every inch and ounce of this house we have touched and redone and there's still more to do there's always more to do in an old home it's definitely been a labor of love I think every piece of all of us is in this house at this point so I'm very connected to it if you can be connected to a to a home I'm connected um I remember when we were closing and the floors were a mess just everything was just a mess and I remember like being in the home alone and this is going to sound completely crazy but um I just sat on the floor and just spoke to the house I don't know if anyone else does this but um I had a little conversation I just was like we're going to go through a lot but I'm totally going to take care of you and I don't know we had this great conversation and it's worked out we've had a lovely relationships it's um so yeah so this area actually just got finished about a year and a half ago this this was one of the conversations I had with the house when we moved in 18 years ago I wanted to have a banquette area and we finally did get to do that and um it just for some reason when I remember walking into this house and thinking that corner needs a really cozy nook and everyone fought me on this idea just for the record um and so we put various tables in fact there's a table that's actually in the dining area that was here but it's a little too big we had smaller tables we had round tables we put rugs and um I had actually read a feng shui book one time because my mom had it laying around and I had nothing else to do so I read this book and it it really stuck with me because it sort of pointed out that if there are spaces in your home that are kind of like dead spaces that no one ever wants to go it's a sign it's there's something off and no matter what we did in this corner no one ever wanted to be in it there was something really uninviting and no matter what I did it just didn't seem to work finally built all this in built the the cabinets more storage area there's storage underneath all of these which was fabulous and since I put it in everyone is around this couch everybody I this is not this area has not been used more in 18 years than it has probably I mean this past year it's it's where everybody hangs out now so it is it's probably one of my favorite areas of the house now because we just all live here it's definitely very inviting so this is my tablescape at the moment the plates and um the tablecloth this is where the fashion world and home decor really had a meeting because my daughter and I were invited to a Diane von Furstenberg event in New York super excited got to meet her got to meet Talita her granddaughter and the event was catered and all of the placewear and the linens were from this company Carolina Irving Daughters and it's out of Portugal and I became so obsessed with it that I decided to have my my everyday this is our everyday and I just love it so much that I use it every day fancy it's just what we use I love having obviously different patterns different textures but hopefully making it work there's something about it that just is again inviting and also just interesting just a little bit more interesting these all have been filled most everything I would say ever almost everything in the house has a story that's definitely something that I guess that's probably partly why there's such a connection with the house because every item and everything has some sort of story to it um but like for instance this is my baby cup from as a baby this is my son's baby cup just sort of collecting things like I love different trays so like Hermes and Gucci so sort of that fashion end of things but then it becomes decor I would say things are from travel so you know things like this was from a visit that my husband I took in Prague like 25 years ago and Italy my son did Legos and I really particularly loved that mini the dark green I think it actually informed the color of our cabinets which is a really dark coach green so the Lego informed the design so this kitchen also a conversation I had with the house when I first moved in it was in desperate need of an update we could not afford to update it the way that I wanted at first so we did in the beginning we did some sort of cosmetic things we painted cabinets and we redid countertops but finally it just got finished last year the kitchen that I knew in my head always wanted to have I grew up the house that my parents had we had a house in Maine and there were no cabinets up above which has become a thing again everything cyclical but that's what I grew up with and I love the fact that my mom put artwork on the walls as if the kitchen was just like any other room in the house and especially with the fact that we have this open concept I really just like that the kitchen felt like oh that's a kitchen and then there's the rest of the house I really wanted this to be sort of to meet the level of the rest of the house so finally we're here everyone said you're gonna what are you gonna do you're not gonna have any storage we actually have more storage just because it's a lot more thoughtfully done so we have no problems with storage and artwork I like sort of that juxtaposition so you have marble and a dark green so of course I don't want to go too traditional because it feels like it's a little bit more classic here so this photograph is actually she is a photographer that I have coveted a piece of hers for a long time her name is Jessica Craig Martin and she is an event photographer so she goes to Vanity Fair, Vogue, New Yorker, a lot of the sort of high society parties and she just has such I always loved her her eye and sort of where she hones in on these events I don't know it's it sort of sums up my again my ethos it's like it's sparkly and pretty but it's also really real you have you know a half-eaten pie the tablecloth is now end of the night like it's the most fun part of the night after the glamour and the glitz is kind of worn off this is reminds me of like you know is you and your best friend chatting about how the night went and it's sort of that like oh like just the sort of the download of the whole evening and that's kind of the most fun part it's like the getting ready and then the download after that's what it reminds me of and also just fabulous shoes so had to have so this is our main family area this is open concept and as you can see there are many places to take a nap which my dog is doing because he knows that he knows the drill in this house so this is blue one of our many animals in the house and he completely gets the vibe of the house he sleeps on everything and our bed but no couch no chair is off limits for animals or humans and he very successfully shares his home with five other cats which some days he's not as happy about but today he's okay with it so when we moved in this starting with literally this line this is the new part of the house and then this going into this area is the old part you can see the floorboards are wider so they made it this open concept which we did love and it's lovely but that being said i do like to have spaces that kind of have their own sort of coziness or just some delineation between the spaces i would say this is a little bit more formal of an area of the house if that's possible in our house and it's interesting because our house has such a flow we live the beach is a block down the road and in the summer our house is very heavily used in this part of the house so the backyard you know a lot of outdoors the windows all open and sort of like ocean breeze coming in and this section kind of it kind of gets it gets neglected a little bit in the summer and then as soon as it starts to get cold everyone starts to shift obviously we have a lot of fires going but there's such a sort of this immediate shift that happens and of course then when the christmas tree up goes up everybody wants to be in this area don't look too closely i just want to say if if you don't want your furniture to get completely wrecked don't have five cats just i just just want to say that especially silk just don't don't have five cats but i don't know i think it gives it a little patina that's what i'm going with just shredded anyway um these were my mom's parents but then like that couch over there was this was my grandmother's couch that i had just like like to make it a little bit fuller it was definitely a little bit because i mean this was probably this couch was like the 30s so i had it kind of built up a little bit and then covered um but the quality of them is so solid i mean this was like a wedding present for my parents so this was these were they're just really old but i just find that like the shapes the um the the scale of the furniture i had a really hard time finding furniture that wasn't so oversized um and because this house is an older house the scale of the furniture it just it fits so um and i love the fact that i could just reuse what we already had and i will be recovering them soon because they're trashed from cats with these same thing these were in my living room as a kid and i love them love the shape had them covered the ottoman same thing again i like the i do feel like animal prince leopard in particular is a neutral so it's sort of an easy way to add some texture to a home and it it doesn't really fight with anything it just goes and but have to have a little feminine have to have a little color so like i said before i definitely like that sort of combination or juxtaposition between sort of traditional classic but also a little bit of modern or something that might be unexpected and this would be an example this coffee table definitely a more modern sleek minimal design put it up against a more traditional couch and obviously you know fireplace mantle and um but it just makes it gives gives it a little bit more personality a little bit more interest so this is our christmas tree and every year new ornaments get added to this tree so it's definitely it's getting fuller and fuller my grandmother started a tradition when i was a little girl that every christmas eve she would give me a christmas ornament so her intention was that once i was 20 years old or whenever and i had my own apartment in my own tree that i would have like a starter set of christmas ornaments so um if you look there are ornaments on here like this little ornament that is from when i was like seven years old that she gave to me because i was in the nutcracker and um there are other ones like this she had it engraved with my name this is like when i was nine and i got a kitten um and so i have done that tradition with my kids as well so every christmas eve they get an ornament like this one uh is this is like a little fashionable lady um from bendles and i gave it to ella when all of this influencing things started to happen and her tiktok grew and so i gave her this one so they always will have a bit of a story we also every time we travel i will get an ornament and i honestly find that i don't go through a lot of pictures all the time but every year when i am taking out all the christmas stuff a flood of memories come back because of the ornaments on the tree so for instance this is a trip to scotland um my husband and i went to norway so a biking ship we went to sweden swedish horse um there are a few things like i have an obsession with the tutors so you know i had to have amblin and king henry the eighth he's there somewhere um but like the eggs those were from prague i think literally most of the ornaments on here are going to have some story whether it was something that was relevant to my kids that year that it was given to them or a travel so it just keeps growing and i have a star on the top because my parents my mom always had like i felt like she did this very tasteful angel and it used to bother me that other people could have like a brightly lit um star and i really wanted a star my mom said we don't we don't we're not doing stars so i have a star there's no angel there's a star um and i do need a real tree because i need to smell it when i come down in the morning and make my tea and uh so we have a real tree but at the end it makes me sad when when it's on its way out but we do we have a beach that's a block away and there's a bonfire at the end so all the trees go and there's a nice little send-off so i feel better about that this was sort of more the formal dining area um we would have we'd have dinners we'd have more formal stuff entertain but ever since i put the nook in everybody crowds doesn't matter how many people everybody crowds into that little nook so this table was sort of bare for a while and i finally said all right that's it nobody nobody is coming into this area as much so i'll make it at least pretty and i can grab some of these books sit by the fire and enjoy my pretty books and not have them hidden in the library so that's what it is for now i will take all this down when we have guests for like christmas brunches and i sort of set up a buffet on this table because people grab food and they can sit wherever it's a very casual affair um this is probably if if there was a fire this may be the piece i would have to somehow haul out of here i was actually helping a friend of mine who lived in new york she i don't know she thought i she liked my style and i was helping her with clothing and then she said well can you help me decorate my apartment in new york and i said sure and we were at a an outdoor sort of new york art market and i saw this this man had two of these available they were like it's a canvas he said it was in um subway it used to be in the subways that they had these posters in new york um and i just i was so nuts over this and i wanted her to have it and she did put in her apartment but she surprised me and got me the twin and i i just it makes me so happy i love this so much i mean i'm a big fan of pink and it's the perfect color pink it just chanel is the whole thing so so this is the library and butter is a very big fan yes you are honey i know she's a huge fan of the library um we all are actually so this room i think i manifested it because when we moved in there were no bookshelves or anything it was this room was a disaster and it was actually where all the legos were and if anyone has kids and they've had legos they understand what i'm talking about everything no matter how much you try to clean it up legos were all over the floor um the walls were sort of half like it's almost like wallpaper got torn off of it i don't know but i just kept calling it the library even though it was clearly a playroom i insisted it was the library so over time it did in fact become the library and we had the shelves put in built in the bookshelves um and it's really while again like i said i like an open concept for some of the time i also really like having space that we can we can get away from each other and sort of a cozy um space that just is a little bit smaller and it's great in the wintertime we have our tv in here um it just gives you a little separation which is a healthy thing okay so this is actually my a neighbor she was like a mom and she's a neighbor up the street and she likes to draw and sketch and do whatever and she had a big sketchbook this was in it just sort of throw away things and i asked her if i could have it so that i could print it i mean that i could frame it and i love it i think it's so fabulous so yeah she's just she just kind of does it for fun but i think she should do it more professionally i think too like i think one of the biggest things i notice is that i pack furniture so it's sort of like i feel like you walk in and you think only one couch could fit but in reality two or three can fit and i i i like the sort of almost stuffed um look as opposed to sparse i i think i'm not a minimalist is what i've realized okay so we're going to go upstairs to my bedroom and where all the content creation happens so this is the bedroom it is part of the this is the new part of the house so the previous owners had done as you can see a vaulted ceiling which not my favorite um just in a new england climate because it's cold i like to have the ceilings a little bit lower just for a little bit of a cozy factor but um we tried to make it work we put in this bed just to sort of meet this incredible height happening and when i when originally this bedroom when i first did it was yellow i had a lot of chintz in here um and i don't know through the years i think because this is where i get dressed i have a lot of color and pattern in my clothing that the backdrop of having all the color and chintz and florals was almost too much my brain needed something a little bit more um serene for my bedroom so that's why this palette is a little bit it's i mean i sort of i add in patterns with bedding but i keep it really clean just because when my closet opens it's it's an explosion of like i said color pattern and i just kind of need that to be the the color focus so it's more about my clothing um than the color for the room so if you follow me this will look familiar um but this is where i do all my get ready videos in the bathroom so this bathroom was renovated probably about six years ago now and i really just wanted some texture but really clean just have it be bright i wanted light in here just because i do my makeup in here get ready in here so i didn't want any color to mess with makeup application especially since i'm getting more blind so um i needed just really good backdrop for just neutral palette and functionalities it just so happens that this very neutral and clean background became a perfect backdrop to get ready in front of my followers on instagram every day and so i have it closed when i do my own videos but when i do videos tiktoks with my daughter we do outfit of the days we have it open and i'm usually leaning because i don't really know what to do with myself so i lean in the doorway which people comment and sometimes they make fun of and that's okay so people often ask me um if i could show them my closet they also ask me how i keep everything organized and the answer is and i i have told people i do not organize it i am a terrible organizer of closets and i'm letting you look at this which is i mean there's a teddy bear from when i was three i can't get rid of it so it's in my closet just sitting there um i have a little rhyme or reason at least up there there are there are sweaters but we have you know like a ball gown-y type thing happening um coats there's summer stuff it's not organized at all so but somehow it's like i know where everything is and i i know how to pull it so it works for me but i don't recommend this for most people so i'm going to show you though a few outfits that i have been loving and wearing for the season holiday time some great pieces um so first yes it's obvious but i have to tell you this set i recently wore this if anyone saw it's it's a mini skirt but if you put it with tights or i wore it with socks and slingbacks and a great coat it's such a beautiful red it really came alive once it was on and um you can add lots of layering here if you want um i don't know it's like it's the seasonal color but it's done in a way that's very chic minimalist but very flattering so this is by hansen and gretel j crew this season has been hitting it out of the park and um i've been talking about this because i love it so much and i wanted my friends and obviously followers if they want something like this this jacket this season from j crew is it's perfection so and we know that i like leopards i like it in clothing and i like it in my house so um they also this tulle skirt i am wearing it i wore it with a gray sweater and loafers actually um but it's definitely a little bit more fun a little bit more whimsical but super comfortable really comfortable and warm so it's a good one now this is for the less colorful but still adding a little bit of fun um it's kind of i i thought this was a really fun piece just because it's kind of like it has the plaid so there's this sort of nod to i don't know plaids are always kind of nostalgic for me but just sort of um this classic look but then of course with sequin palm trees i like this juxtaposition happening here it's um i wear it with a really cozy sweater and then just a great jacket so this would be something that you could wear going from i don't know like office to dinner party and it would transition well um this is essential antwerp the skirt and this is just a fantastic jacket by marfa stance um it's elevated but again there's a lot of detail and there's a lot of texture going on with this coat functional and fashionable so this is the back of the house um when we originally moved in this was a sliding glass door and we had absolutely no space for shoes my both my son and my husband still play hockey so it was really fun in the winter time because we basically had that much room that you see there for booths and hockey equipment it was so much fun it was so much fun so luckily after i don't know i think maybe 10 years into it of living here i finally got to build a mudroom and i definitely have you know teapots and tea cozies and i don't i just like pictures and colorful things so i needed a space to put them so i had them build shelves a lot of the items in this i think i got these i know i got these at anthropology when i was 20 years old or 23 years old something like that i wanted to create a mudroom too that this kind of goes back to that functionality i saw people doing cubbies and drawers and all that kind of stuff but i know my family and my family is if it's not really easily accessible it will somehow not be hung up or get into the cubby so i have baskets like you really couldn't be any easier meanwhile they do wind up on the floor sometimes but hooks easy to throw on and baskets throw the shoes in so that's it really simple really functional but also pretty it's kind of the point a home to me means um it's personal i guess that really is the most succinct way for me to describe what home means i think a lot of times people think home is where family is or home is where the people you love yes true but i think you can still create a home let's say you were completely by yourself i still think you can create a home and really it's about making it personal to you i definitely think there are beautiful houses that are perfectly decorated and magnificent just works of art and photographable and just gorgeous but that's not necessarily what makes a home so i guess really it's about that sort of personalization to me that is the key thanks homeworthy for hanging out with me today i hope you have a happy holiday and i'll see you next time thanks for watching go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content and shopping guides