Every Room is a Stage

When we take on a Designer Show House, like Hackensack Hospital’s Show House 2017 in Saddle River, we transform a room inside of several weeks.

This year at the show house, we chose to design the Dining Room of the grand and newly built home located at 46 Westerly Road, Saddle River, New Jersey. The room spoke to us. It was very detailed with coffered ceilings, wainscoting, a Palladian Window, and it was all out of proportion and lost with bland walls and white moldings. Here is a picture of the room before we started.

Its grandness was for grandness sake and not in proportion to the room itself, which although large seemed to be overly filled with detail. So to bring everything into proportion, we painted the walls a strong navy from Farrow and Ball. When the walls were painted, I instantly knew that we were on the right track. All of a sudden the details were falling into the right proportion.

Next, I selected large scale furniture to compete with the overly large scaled architectural details. This is where the magic happened. The minute the furniture was place in this Saddle River Show House room everything fell into place. Beautiful textures that you want to touch, visual interest and layers of appointments like long hair cow hide. Warm silver leave, hand painted chandelier to blend into the texture on the walls and a twist: two lamps on the table gave the room a sexy intimate atmosphere that most dining rooms lack. 

We lacquered the table base with the wall color for unity and then found a beautiful old overdyed oriental rug in navy that showed its history in worn down areas…it was spectacular. As a matter of fact that rug is going to be the basis of a brand new project that we are designing in Manhattan.

One interesting feature that we designed is unconventional storage within the Dining Room. Every dining room needs storage from dishes to platters, from table clothes to napkins and different serving implements and dishes. We decided to make the storage serve also another purpose. We designed storage benches that hold all the things you need to entertain successfully AND the storage benches act as additional seating for extending the tables when the family spills over into additional table extensions. The benches are covered in a textural vinyl that feels like silk dupioni and in the gold/bronze tone, it is beautiful to look at and elevates the material to a work of sculptural art.

The Hackensack University Hospital Show House in Saddle River, New Jersey, was the perfect place to experiment with concepts and textures and design elements that we have never used before. This is why we participate in these Show Houses. The benefit to the potential client is that we show how expansive the vision can be and where I can take the clients home.

We all are looking for our own stamp on our homes. We spend our lives trying to create an environment that expresses who we are and what we have achieved, sharing it with family and friends.

The experience of that result is what we do best.

Are you ready to explore the possibilities of

uniquely expressing your “stamp” on your home?

Send a message to schedule a consultation