A 30 Foot Living Room with Valentino s Palm Trees a Roger Muhl Painting in Locust Valley New York

This is my favorite room in the house, this living room, which has a really wonderful scale. This is another mantle that I purchased at auction years ago, but what's nice about this room is the three seating areas. It feels very intimate and cozy. You can sort of have 10 to 12 people in each seating area and the chairs and stools all kind of move around very easily. This was sort of the largest wall in the room where, you know, we wanted to anchor the room here with the seating area. This screen is something that I bought years ago at an estate sale here in Locust Valley that was Mrs. Boswick's house, and it's one of my favorite pieces ever, and it was a house that Mario Boada had decorated 30 years ago. The palm trees are pretty fantastic. I am always looking and collecting metal palm trees, but this particular pair I bought at auction. Years ago for a client in Jamaica, we purchased another pair that were identical to these, and the dealer told me there were only two others in the entire world, and they were in Valentino's house in Italy, but then miraculously I found another pair. I think one of the reasons this is my favorite room is it just has so many pieces that I truly love. There are things like, I love actually these chairs are, you know, a giltwood bamboo. We have this giltwood Asian coffee table, which is so wonderful and slender and basically allowed me to have this third seating area. Over here we've got this very pretty lacquered coffee table that has a Coromandel screen inside of it. It's just very special. I did have a piece of glass made for it so that we can put our glasses down. The pair of chairs here, I love little chairs that can be moved around. This is a fabric from Lee Joffa, which is one of my favorite. I think it's called Althea, but for years I had tried to get a client to use this fabric and no one ever did, so it was my chance to use it, but it kind of has all the colors I love that sort of pretty sea glassy blues and teals and apricot and yellow. I really love yellow. I'm having a big yellow moment these days. Then this room also sort of called out for a center table because it was sort of the thing that grounded all three seating areas and then it also gives you an opportunity to create a little scale with, you know, large branches. It's very seasonal. Over here we have, I have a pair of these antique Chinese paper panels that are, I had them in storage for 10 years before we even bought this house and I took the two best ones that were the most similar and I put them here and they have these very simple mid-century frames on them and then the other five you will see reappear in my stair hole. This sofa is, it was actually a vintage D'Angelo sofa that I just had reupholstered, but I just love the shape of it, the channeled back. It's just very interesting. So the curtains are a really beautiful Bernard Thorpe fabric that we had custom colored and sort of Icati print and I think Bernard Thorpe is now owned by Pierre Frey, but I really love this fabric and the color and it just had a little depth to it and it's a little abstract. And we wanted the curtains just to frame the windows and be pretty simple and easy on the eye because it's sort of all about the view and the garden beyond. One of the reasons that I love this house when we bought it, the windows that were existing here looked very much like this. This is a large picture window, but then the French doors were sort of what the original doors looked like in the house. We had them all remade, but they, I was very drawn to how much light they brought in with the very large glass panes. So this Louis XV style desk is quite pretty. I just loved the warmth of the wood. I still like wood furniture, you know, dark wood furniture, antiques of course, and the leather tool top is quite pretty and it's just a place where we have some picture frames and I keep my stationery actually in here and it's a nice place to sit, write some notes, do a Zoom call. So I try to, that's, I try to come in and use this room in that way a lot. This room is I think 30 feet, so the rug is about 28 feet or 27 feet and it was made in India, but what I love about it is it's jute. It's very soft underfoot and until recently we had a dog, Cubie, who loved to come in here and there were a few accidents, but I, at some point after having the carpets cleaned up many, many times, I found a painter who faux painted the stains out. So at some point I'm going to replace this carpet, but until then I think it's sort of holding up okay. This is an interesting mix here. This whole seating area was sort of inspired, I love this painting, this Roger Mule, that's one, he's one of my favorite artists. I just, I love the colors. It's just so easy on the eye. It's, he was a French artist that probably passed away about six years ago and I've been collecting his paintings for a while. I love this little pair of brass octagonal nesting tables. They're just almost invisible. They could just be moved around. It's just another place to have, to put a glass down and I love, I do love a little bit of leopard. This, this is a recent purchase from an antique store in New York, but it's, has this very pretty Scalamandre velvet on top and again it's, I love painted furniture. So this is, you know, painted furniture with a gilt detail. It's really just another place for someone to sit and I always try to do a good mix of coffee tables. This is a vintage Carl Springer one that is goatskin that has just like an interesting top detail. It's just very pretty and I like the cut corners. That shape is really nice. This is my favorite room, but let's go into the library and this is our library. This was the only original room that was left in the house. It had this very pretty detailing. It had a Serge Roche carved molding around the mantle. This is another mantle that I actually bought at an antique store in Newport, Rhode Island probably 20 years ago and it was sitting in my storage and I pulled it out and it was the perfect size. I do love a Rouge Royale mantle. The doors lead out to the terrace. It's nice that we have a desk in here where a lot of times my kids when they're working from from here they set up their monitor there and again we have two very nice seating areas. This seating area faces the television that's tucked into the paneling and we have these really super comfortable swivel chairs in a cowt and a tout fabric that I always liked. I just love this color palette, the greens and the sort of beautiful shades of kind of plumbago blue. They're just quite pretty, but I really leaned into the brown in this fabric and did a velvet striae in this very rich brown on the sofa and some of the pillows and chairs and sort of wherever we could we sort of tried to pick you know sort of echo some nice details you know on the pillows and the button tops. Sometimes when you're doing brown it's kind of nice to lighten it up by adding another color just to give it a little contrast. So this room is almost perfectly square and it it did just sort of lay itself out to have these two seating areas. I always like it when there when a desk is the side table. I feel like that's a really when you have we had a lot of space there so it sort of just tucked in there very naturally. The coffee table is a really beautiful vintage it's sort of James Mont style I would say with a great key detail, lots of carving, lots of beautiful kind of reversed église painting on top. I love that's something I'm always looking for. I like how reflective it is without being too shiny. This is a Roger Mule painting, the same artist that's in my living room but I just sort of can't get enough of his work. I'm always looking for it and this is a particularly pretty one. It's a French landscape overlooking the sea in France. So I repeated the catenin fabric on this vintage sofa, sort of a Lawson style rolled arm and it really looks wonderful. This pattern just lays out so perfectly with the three sets of cushions. So this is a wonderful Coromandel Chinese cabinet that I bought years ago and again it has just these beautiful vintage brass details and it's sort of where I keep a lot of my entertaining things inside and I love the shape of this mirror and it was just sort of nice to have a little it just catches the light up high it's a little it was a little high to have a painting there I thought so this is this is very useful. I have over the years owned many cabinets of this type and I think they they're always fitted out with great drawers and everything so this is wonderful. These niched bookshelves which are so useful. I love books I probably have too many books but I think it's just everybody needs a place to put all their things that they've collected so this for me I have pictures and porcelain vases you know a pair of these Chapman lights at the top a painting that a friend gave me years ago that he painted and it's just sort of nice to have all these things together in one place and we have this really wonderful pair of vintage standing lamps which are always useful I feel like I have a pair of standing lamps in every room that I've ever decorated. I love this Mastercraft vintage brass coffee table it was such a great scale but I like the fact that it's very light and airy and kind of lets you know you can sort of see the carpet through. I think it's important with every house to sort of create some sort of continuity not repetitive with color but I think you want to have a certain flow or thread of color or even just the saturation of color throughout the house so I feel like we were able to do that here pretty successfully by bringing in I mean I love color but we brought in you know fabrics that had a lot of pattern mix them with neutrals and I also like when the pattern is not in the same place all the time I feel like we have this lacquered room and then you wander into this hallway which has pattern at eye level and but a very subtle carpet I feel it's nice to have just a little variation from room to room of where all the interest in the room is coming from in one room you might have a really crazy carpet but then the room next to it might have a simple sisal or jute and I think it's a way of sort of balancing those things out. I feel like I'm in camouflage in this room I'm wearing my collaboration dress which is this very pretty silk caftan with a lot of wonderful gold embroidery it has a little dragon on the back and the sash has all of these wonderful little details from one of the wallpapers in my collection. So here we are in the landing of our basement there's a staircase here that goes up three flights up to the second floor and over here we have our game room which is one of the biggest sofas I've ever ordered in this great looking simple green velvet and on the walls I used one of our papers called rainforest which is which has an a b panel so it feels a little more mural like and less repetitive but I wanted something in here to give it some interest because again we didn't have great architecture I created niches where we had these pockets of space so it also just broke up the wall and added some symmetry to this room but we have a fun shuffleboard table and then this is a ping pong table that I designed for show house I did about 10 years ago that just sort of landed in my basement so we've had a lot of fun beer pong parties and ping pong parties doing that but I love these swivel chairs these were from selamat that are just really great for watching ping pong and again down here it's a lot of fun vintage furniture we've got these terrific looking asian lacquered side tables some bunny williams lamps I love her lamps also this is one of my fabrics called vienna woods which is a faux bois which just seems to work its way into a lot of great spaces because of the nature of that sort of geometric but you know leopard but not leopard kind of thing and then again another pair of these parsons chairs over here that are so comfortable the coffee table again is a vintage kroll springer that I painted white I think those the forms are so good sometimes I'll buy them even if they're in terrible condition and restore them and have them re-lacquered or repainted and then these are from made goods I believe they are just some great plaster wall art sometimes when you have a lot of pattern going on in a room but you just want to hang something just to you know break it up sometimes you know white plaster relief types of art is a great way to go and these are just sort of fun and organic and add a little geometry I love this asian cabinet it was originally in my store and it was black and I just decided to paint it but the hardware is particularly pretty and like I said I'm always looking for vintage brass accessories and I love these koi fish I have two of them but this one kind of landed itself here in front of this large brass mirror and these are from Amanda Lindroth's collection there were some favorites that are not really around anymore but they're really wonderful so this was originally the kitchen in the the house we bought we decided to flip the kitchen it's now where a bedroom originally was but this room faces the back of the house and it gets wonderful light during the day and we've sort of made it a kind of a cozy hangout room these are a pair of vintage sofas that I bought at auction that are sort of a Billy Baldwin style and again there's just like a lot of great chairs and things in here these are super comfortable in the zebra fabric from Brunchwig which is one of my favorites I've used this many times and then we have a pair of really great looking goatskin coffee tables that I found for the store and then I just had to have them so anyway they are really wonderful and I like bringing in those caramel browns into this room we have some good looking Brunchwig embroidered latouche pillows which is one of my favorite fabrics and this is an old Clarence House cut velvet that I just think is so pretty and it's also with these lucite chairs it was an opportunity to make them feel a little richer I think because the fabric is sort of heavier and richer it makes the chairs more substantial it just I really love this fabric so I went with a grass cloth in here because I wanted the texture coming off of the hallway which is wallpapered in a large-scale pattern and the bar which is just beyond this room is in a high gloss lacquer blue this was it felt very natural to me and I wanted it to be light and cheerful and I do love yellow and this is a particularly nice ochre yellow from our collection and I think yellow looks great with blue so over here we have a great looking goatskin dining table that actually has leaves and I'm on the hunt for a few more of these chairs actually but this is a great place if my kids are home my grill is right there there is a television in here sometimes we'll just sit and watch tennis and have dinner and or some football game or whatever but this is this is a very very used area of our house we have a lot of fireplaces in this house but I this is a plaster fireplace that was from Hyde Park moldings they designed this for us it's so simple it's a bullection molding and we often do something like this but I really love vintage fireplace equipment I'm always looking for interesting and irons and fire screens I think this is like an old William Jackson fire screen it's glass but really beautiful and I always try to have a big rush basket of logs by a working fireplace I wanted to hang something you know next to the television over these lucite consoles I wanted to hang art but I didn't want it to be distracting so these were really fun mid-century plaster reliefs that I found the set of four and they're just easy on the eye they have a I think a good vibe for this house and they're they add a little texture and a little geometry also so we have this great pair of Asian rosewood etageres which is a place where I keep a lot of my old photo albums and more books all my cookbooks are actually in here not that I not that I'm known for my cooking and then on top of these cabinets I have a collection of porcelain these food dogs barely fit but they're so fantastic and I just had to bring them home they were in the shop but this is sort of a fun place to put you know just odds and ends and probably says a lot about my personality but there's a lot of there are a lot of photo albums here okay so join me in the pool room this is a big hangout spot for my kids and for us we don't have a pool house so this kind of serves all of those purposes we have a fun vintage bar over there that is something I found kind of along the way I found lots of great vintage wicker from like the 1960s and 70s and upholstered them all up in a favorite fabric from my collection called ferns and this was a really wonderful mid-century sofa it's super comfortable I like that it's very low slung and this is a Beckley Brothers table that's very nice large unusual size and it has that second tier which is always great just again for books and big photo albums and things like that so first of all we painted all the floors in the basement white because I the ceilings are quite low I think in here they're only maybe seven and a half feet so it really does help in brightening the space and making the ceilings feel a little bit higher this room was originally six feet below ground and this was this wall here that faces out to the pool was a solid wall with like some tiny transom windows so we excavated outside about six or seven feet so that you could easily walk straight out to the pool as opposed to having to walk up steps and by doing that we captured so much light in here and it also just continues down the hallway and into the other room just it's a wonderful source of light and these are these nano doors that open up so it's completely open you know during the summer if we're hanging out by the pool and this is just a great little dumb bar dining table that I painted white and found these good-looking rattan chairs and you know these are performance fabrics but this is a place over the years we've had you know we've used it as a buffet for our dinner or I've sometimes done craft projects down here this is where I do my Christmas wrapping and no one's allowed to come down here before Christmas so this is a great little seating area in the pool room where again just performance fabrics and there's a I love this sort of James Mont style coffee table with a little Greek key detail and these are I love needlepoint I don't have time to do as much needlepoint as I used to but these are beautiful and these were given to us by a friend they're just so charming and special I love this fun vintage bar that is faux bamboo and I've been planning to install a sink in it for quite some time so maybe that'll happen this winter and then I love this painting I was originally going to send it down to Florida but it just it sort of brightened this room it just felt so cheerful and it's by an artist named Fred Jessup that I really love and I I don't know it just sort of speaks to me the colors I like the foliage the the types of plants he he painted a lot of plants and containers which is something I'm I just very drawn to and butterflies he always had butterflies in his paintings so it's a really fun fun one from I think the 60s and then this room is our upstairs family room which kind of links the four bedrooms there's two bedrooms on this side and two bedrooms on this side but we did some you know custom mill work here to create a little alcove for the sofa I love this Katie Ritter wallpaper it's a favorite and you might remember this room because it was on the cover of Miranda about four years ago and it's very heavily used but we still have a lot of really wonderful things in here I have this vintage brass coffee table the Carl Springer console that again I painted it in this blue to match the trim color and even these James Mont chairs that are here that look super uncomfortable they're actually so comfortable and my kids love to sit in them and they've never broken them I'm amazed how long they've sort of stood the test of time here we have a couple of swivel chairs that are always useful and comfortable I don't I don't always do swivel chairs as one of my children actually got stitches from spinning on a swivel chair in my old house and crashed into a table so anyway but they're pretty useful here and the boys are growing up now so no one's no one's doing that anymore we I love the bamboo details we have these really wonderful bamboo chairs they have this wonderful China Seas fabric on them in a sort of a caramel color and then the bamboo detail is sort of echoed here too in these very pretty Asian woodblock prints that's another thing I like to look for and then I'm crazy about this games table I painted it's a vintage brass it has backgammon board underneath we painted it again a great blue that kind of just worked with everything I absolutely love these zebra chairs they were done in needlepoint with a very pretty nail detail and I bought them this way I can't believe someone actually needlepointed these and took the time to do this so a shout out to my friend at the Red Thread Vaughn and Lisette I just think these are fabulous somebody should recreate this canvas so we have a lot of books but you know I also buy old books I just think they look pretty sometimes you know they're in good condition sometimes they're not in such great condition but it's fun to have a good mix of old and new and I have to say this wallpaper I think hanging art on this wallpaper I thought oh we're not going to be able to hang anything but I think the paintings actually look quite good against this sort of paisley pattern I love raffia shades use them a lot in wicker depending on where we are and just a good mix of pillows here it's a little repetition thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more