Modern Family

COLOR GUARD: I think in general I tend to gravitate toward color. If you were to look at the rest of our house you would see it’s a pretty wide color palette. 

SHORT STORY: We get a lot of compliments on the picture hanging in the dining room and I wish I had a better story for it. My husband always tells me we need to make up interesting stories for things that we don’t have good stories for. The reality of that picture is that it was on clearance at CB2, but he likes to tell people that it is our aunt and uncle and then people always do a double take and are like, “Wait, really?” 

TABLE TALK: We’ve had the table since 2004. It’s a Heywood-Wakefield table and I found it while browsing eBay. That mid-century modern trend was just coming into vogue with the popularity of Mad Men and all of that stuff, but I was really drawn to the clean lines and natural materials. 

SPECIAL MEASURES: There is a guy in Hagerstown who owns a place called Strictly Hey-Wake and all he does is refinish Heywood-Wakefield furniture. He does a really beautiful job and he refinished our dining room table for us, as well as another record cabinet and king-sized bed. 

TRIAL AND ERROR: I picked the chairs up on sale at Anthropologie for like $40 apiece, which was a great find. However, it’s one of those lessons in buying furniture online before actually seeing it. The way the chairs are built, the center of gravity is slightly off, so if you lean forward a little bit you end up on the floor. My chairs always come with a warning. 

AHEAD OF ITS TIME: The clock on the wall is by an Italian designer and we picked it up from a shop in Philly years ago. It was one of those things we were drawn to immediately but we didn’t really have a place to put it. When we finally finished the kitchen we found a spot where we think it worked well. 

GIVE THE GREEN LIGHT: I find lighting really hard to wrap my head around, and I just really love light fixtures. The pendants over the bar and the sconces over the stove are from Schoolhouse Electric, and the dining room fixture is from Rejuvenation. 

OPEN HOUSE: The kitchen was originally closed off and there was a doorway on the left where the clock is now. With our kids getting a little bit older, it was important for us to renovate the kitchen because we wanted to open it up and get as much use out of it as possible. I think the only downside is that we used to use the dining room table a lot more and now, because we have that bar area, we don’t as much.