Proof that neutral interiors needn’t feel boring? This vacation rental, housed in a former bank in Germany. Just take a look at this bedroom, layered in materials and textures to keep the eye moving. Here are the key sources (and some lookalikes). Photography courtesy of Our Food Stories, as seen in St. Oak: A Stripped-Back […]

Steal This Look: A Star London Chef’s Kitchen
Michelin-starred London chef Skye Gyngell presides over one of the city’s most ethereally beautiful new restaurants, Spring at Somerset House. At home, her approach to design is equally winning. She recently gave us a tour of her remodeled West London kitchen, which salutes classic English detailing while taking the look in a soulful direction. Here’s how […]

5 Favorites: Blankets for Cool Summer Nights
Extend your end-of-summer nights outdoors with a lightweight warm blanket; perfect for draping over a chilly guest or to layer on your bed as the weather cools to fall. Above: Swans Island’s summer weight Corriedale Grey Teal Stripe Wool Blanket is hand-dyed and hand-woven in Maine using domestic wool; $595. Above: The Swedish Knit Blanket […]

‘Weirdness and Charm’ in an Upstate New York Farmhouse
How to combine a humble 19th-century farmhouse and an edgy contemporary art collection? Husband-and-wife architects Maria Berman and Brad Horn of Berman Horn Studio, members of the Remodelista Architect & Designer Directory, approached the job in stages. Step 1: Shore up the house. Step 2: Situate the outsized art. Step 3: Devote three years to assembling […]

Kitchen of the Week: A Boundary-Breaking London Remodel
In a newly remodeled Victorian terrace house in Hampstead Heath belonging to a family of four, the kitchen’s wall of colorful cabinets extends all the way up to the study on the mezzanine above. And steel-frame windows connect table to garden. The bold design is the work of Melissa Robinson of MW Architects, who was […]

A Revived NYC Garret with a Space-Saving Bed in a Box, Before and After
It’s easy to see why Kay Lee and Jonathan Chong fell for their West 11th Street garret apartment. In addition to offering a living area with a 22-foot-tall ceiling and giant skylight, it bore the ghost marks of the previous occupants: for decades an artist couple had used the space as their studio/crash pad—and painted […]

Nordic Beauty: A Brooklyn Townhouse Reinvented with Style—and Restraint
Commissioned to overhaul an 1840s Brooklyn brownstone for a Swedish-American family of four, architects Solveig Fernlund (who also happens to be Swedish) and Neil Logan masterfully turned it into a house with dual citizenship. They tackled the five stories—each 24.5 feet wide, approximately 980 square feet, and largely devoid of period detail—by editing out the extraneous, walls included, […]

Beyond Bed, Bath & Beyond: 18 Dorm Room Essentials for the Back-to-School Set
College costs a fortune. And it doesn’t stop at tuition, room and board fees, and course materials; once you’ve got that taken care of, there’s the yearly dorm room shopping list. “Each school’s list is slightly different but they’re all ridiculous, full of unnecessary items,” says one of our editors, Margot (she should know; she […]

Kitchen of the Week: A Before/After Remodel in Sydney, Australia
Sydney interior designers Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke have been lauded by the Australian design press for “tearing down the walls of conservative design and replacing them with color and layers of sophisticated style.” A good example is their remodel of an early-20th-century house in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. We particularly like the kitchen with its […]

Kitchen of the Week: Going Big with Color in a Small Space
Not everyone wants a huge kitchen with fancy equipment and built-in everything. Take the owners of this Victorian home (currently for sale on The Modern House) in the Ferndale neighborhood of London. According to designer Adam Bray, who took them on as clients when they decided to renovate, character and efficiency were the priorities. Prior […]

Steal This Look: An Architect’s Guest Bedroom
Spotted on Freunde von Freunden: a monastic gentleman’s bedroom in the San Francisco home of Nir Stern. The son of two architects, Stern moved from Tel Aviv to the Bay Area to study architecture but found himself in the tech world doing interface design. He designed his home, a renovated Victorian situated on a hill […]

A Long Winter’s Nap: An Innovative New Bedding Line from Japan
The secret to happiness? A good night’s sleep, in our opinion. On our wish list for 2017: a new line of bedding from Japanese collection Rikumo that merges “the naturally absorbent properties of washi paper” with 100 percent cotton. The result is a “superlight, crisp, lightweight sheet that allows air to circulate throughout the fibers, helping you maintain […]

Before & After: An Airy Summer Bedroom in a Catskills Farmhouse, Transformed with Paint
We’ve been enamored of florist turned writer Lisa Przystup’s pared-back 1800s farmhouse in the Catskills, with its simple bones and tumbleweeds as sculptural decor, ever since we featured it back in July. (See The Catskills Farmhouse of Two Brooklyn Creatives.) Particularly impressive is that Przystup and her husband, Jonathon Linaberry, have done much of the remodeling themselves […]

10 Favorites: The Unexpected Appeal of Plywood
Does the versatility of plywood have no limit? From boats to furniture; plywood is flexible, inexpensive, easy to use, and reusable. Made from refashioned pieces of wood that have been bound together, forming a building material that is stronger and stiffer than the sum of its parts; plywood came into its own in the 20th […]

Kitchen of the Week: A DIY Ikea Country Kitchen for Two Berlin Creatives
When friends offered Nora Eisermann and Laura Muthesius the use of an apartment in a farm village just beyond Berlin, it came with a shared garden and a challenge: Set in an 1880s romantic ruin, the flat hadn’t been occupied for more than a decade and lacked a kitchen. The couple longed for a retreat from Berlin but couldn’t live on […]

Hotel Âme: A Minimalist Mom-and-Pop Guest House and Café in Rotterdam
It was the faceted pink counter tiles that first caught our attention. We also loved the cloud of flowers hovering over the café. And the lime-washed tranquility of the guest rooms with century-old moldings. That was before we learned that Rotterdam’s 14-room Hotel âme is beyond boutique: it’s a mom-and-pop establishment created and run by […]

Atelier Vime in Brittany: An 18th-Century Childhood Home Lovingly Updated
Our story begins in the early 1960s with a hot tip in a doctor’s office: “My father was a dentist in Paris and a patient told him to have a look at this little hamlet lost in the valley—he had heard from his Breton family that the farmer wanted to sell,” Benoît Rauzy tells us. […]

Living with Color on the Edge of London: 8 Tips from Paint Wizard Nicola Harding
Interior designer Nicola Harding approaches remodeling projects with a one-two punch: “The first thing I do is plan the use of space, quite often reorganizing the way parts of the house are used,” she tells us. “Then I assign paint colors. I understand this is different from the way most decorators work, but, for me, […]

Kitchen of the Week: Calamine Pinks in a Converted Barn Kitchen by Plain English
The owner of this Plain English kitchen until recently lived a stone’s throw away, in a farmhouse in rural Suffolk, England, that had been in her husband’s family for nearly a century. Newly widowed and with three children who would soon all be away at university, she decided to downsize without having to uproot: she’s […]

Manufacture Royale de Lectoure: An Abandoned Tannery Turned Retreat in Southwest France
French interior design journalist, stylist, and set designer Christèle Ageorges and her husband Hubert Derlance fell in love with the small town of Lectoure, in the Gers, while walking a stretch of the ancient Way of St James in 2017. Long-time Parisians on holiday, the couple had no real plans to move until serendipity knocked […]

A Mountain Hotel Fit for Royalty
Sweden’s oldest mountain hotel, the 1,700-acre Fjällnäs Reserve, was built in 1882 as a retreat for Swedish royalty to experience the drama of what Fjällnäs calls “the eight seasons.” The hotel is surrounded by a stark landscape of birch forests and barren mountain peaks; rooms feature slate and scrubbed pine surfaces and are simply outfitted […]

Kitchen of the Week: A Mexico City Makeover in Apple Green
We recently visited Libia Moreno and Enrique Arellano at Utilitario Mexicano, their Mexico City emporium devoted to celebrating humble everyday objects made in their adopted country. After falling in love with their shop, we asked to see where they live. The two—she’s a textile designer, he’s a graphic designer, both originally from Colombia—happened to have […]

Kitchen of the Week: Resurrecting Modernist Design in a Landmark Brooklyn Heights Townhouse
Here’s more evidence that kitchens that are more akin to living or dining rooms than everyday cook spaces is a rising trend. This singular Brooklyn Heights kitchen is the work of Ian Starling (of Starling Architecture), but the inspiration for its design comes from the mid-century modern home’s architects, and original owners, Joseph and Mary […]

Kitchen of the Week: A Closeup of Jess Thomas’s Crowd-Pleasing Brooklyn Kitchen
As we try to fathom the fact that it’s already November, we’re revisiting our most popular post of last month, architect Jess Thomas and director-producer Hagan Hinshaw’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, townhouse redo—see The Sentimental Minimalist. Today’s focus: the kitchen, which Thomas, the co-principal at Shapeless Studio, slotted into what had been a long, narrow bath on the first floor. […]

Before & After: A Low-Cost Summer Guest Room Makeover, Cape Cod Edition
This week we’re combing through the Remodelista archives for some of our all-time favorite summer stories. Here’s one: A few summers back, Julie realized she had to do something about the neglected guest bedroom in her Wellfleet, Massachusetts, summerhouse if she wanted repeat visitors. Formerly used as a study, the room had seen better days: […]

Steal This Look: A New Cabin Kitchen in the Hamptons
We’re an easy sell for a renovated kitchen in a characterful space. Take this new kitchen in a 1970s A-frame house in Springs, New York, for example. The owners worked with Space Theory, a simplified and affordable offshoot of Henrybuilt, to design a modern kitchen within the existing knotty pine paneling. Here’s a list of […]

DIY: Pipe Bed Frame
Looking to add an industrial edge to your bedroom? This DIY project, spotted on Simplified Building, will do the trick—best of all, it shouldn’t cost you more than $300. To see a full tutorial, go to Simplified Building. Above: Sally and Mark Bailey of Bailey’s Home & Garden in the UK use a galvanized pipe […]

Expert Advice: An Architect’s 15 Essential Tips for Designing the Kitchen
With more than 50 kitchen projects under his belt, Jerome Buttrick of Buttrick Projects (formerly Buttrick Wong Architects) is a veteran of kitchen design. One of those designs was for Julie’s Mill Valley, California, kitchen, which serves as an ongoing testament to his thoughtfulness on how to create a meaningful space in what has become the hub […]

Kitchen of the Week: Tartine’s Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson at Home in San Francisco
When Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, co-owners of the Tartine empire in San Francisco, moved into their circa 1960 Castro district home back in 2015, they were the first occupants after a gut remodel—so they neither got to choose what filled out their new kitchen nor know who designed it. Regardless, they put it to work […]

Steal This Look: Moody Monochrome in the Scottish Highlands
The Killiehuntly Farmhouse is an estate in the Scottish Highlands restored by and designed by owner Anne Storm Pedersen as luxury vacation lodging. One of the Killiehuntly guest rooms, the Birch room, features a dozen design details to steal including a coal-colored jute rug and a monochromatic Shaker peg rail. Here are the key elements […]

Casa Vipp: The Danish Design House Opens a Mountain Hideaway in Andorra
Vipp, the Danish brand that started with a steel pedal bin in 1939, is now synonymous with modular metal kitchens and, of late, furniture and lighting for every room. To show what it has to offer, the design house—still owned and run by the originator’s family—has created a memorable range of lodgings in some of […]

Plykea in London: Stylish Plywood Cabinet Fronts and Worktops for Ikea Kitchens
A new entry in the Ikea cabinet-front hack category: London company Plykea. Founded by Tim Diacon, a digital product designer, and Adam Vergette, a furniture designer and Vitsoe alum, Plykea offers good-looking premium grade FSC-certified birch ply cabinet fronts that can be faced in either birch, oak, or walnut as well as three choices of cabinet […]

Maximum Light in a Narrow Los Angeles Home
Transforming space constraints into opportunities for good design is a favorite theme of ours; in this instance, LA-based Kevin Oreck (a Remodelista Architect/Design Directory member) has created a flexible, light-filled 1,500-square-foot home on an extremely narrow site (39 feet wide) with a limited budget. Oreck’s thoughtful placement of windows maximizes light and views of the […]

The One-Month Makeover: Beth Kirby’s Star-Is-Born Kitchen
“A cast iron skillet and a camera” is Beth Kirby’s moniker. But that only begins to touch upon what she does in her kitchen. Out of her decade-old, “generic little house built by a builder,” in North Chattanooga, Tennessee, Beth works as photographer, stylist, writer, recipe developer, teacher, and blogger (see Local Milk). She needed a […]

Remodeling 101: What to Know About Installing Kitchen Cabinets and Drawers
Installing kitchen cabinets isn’t a job for your average homeowner. Think about the total weight of all the ceramics, glassware, and appliances stored in your wall-mounted cabinets—and how disastrous it would be if those cabinets came tumbling down. Enough said? Let’s leave installation to the pros. But if you’re planning a major kitchen remodel, trying […]

The Simple Life: A Montauk Beach House for a Creative Couple
When Elisa Restrepo, cofounder of the shoe line Dieppa Restrepo, and her husband, Dylan Dodd, who owns NYC restaurants Karasu, Walter’s, Walter Foods, and Barrio Chino, went looking for a place to escape the city, they chose a three-story split-level house in the “sleepy surfing town” of Montauk and hired Brooklyn architects Space Exploration to overhaul it. They’d worked […]

“Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside
It took me a while to realize that my new pen pal, Hironobu Kagae, is an emerging lifestyle guru. He and I met on Instagram: I sent him a message admiring his entryway and we struck up a halting conversation. I don’t speak Japanese and Hironobu was relying on Google Translate. But he shared intriguing […]

Steal This Look: A Considered Kitchen in an East London Townhouse
When couple Paul West and Michelle Bower began renovating their 1717 East London townhouse, they took on a full transformation of a basement kitchen. The kitchen they started with “wasn’t in good working order,” Paul describes, so they enlisted UK kitchen design company deVol to see out their vision. Here we’ve profiled the key elements, […]

Steal This Look: An Authentic Midcentury Modern Bedroom
When Carla and Niall Maher bought a 1950 suburban ranch house in Westchester, New York, the couple made a commitment to midcentury style. Built into a hillside among other midcentury houses by Roy S. Johnson and Stanley Torkleson, the house was sheetrocked and whitewashed by previous owners (and an Ikea kitchen to boot). The Mahers […]

Shop Owner Makié Yahagi’s Charm-Filled Loft in SoHo, New York
Designer Makié Yahagi opened her pint-size children’s clothing shop on SoHo’s Thompson Street in 1999 calling it, simply, Makié. The daughter of a seamstress, Makié was making clothing for her two sons (they’re now just a little older than her shop) when she got the idea. We’ve been adherents of her brand (that now includes […]
