Tim McKeough

The first time Matthew Bremer saw the listing for the church he would eventually buy in Phillipsport, New York, it arrived like so many unwanted emails, as inbox-clogging spam. But rather than immediately hitting delete he scrolled down the email while eating lunch and was intrigued by what he saw: a simple white clapboard church dating to 1823 that was so untouched by time its only bathroom was an outhouse.

“It was this sort of perfect, almost child’s drawing of the idea of a church,” said Bremer, 51, the founder of Architecture in Formation, a Manhattan-based firm. “The white Colonial box.”

Fantasizing about converting it into a private country escape, he and a friend took the two-hour drive north from New York City for a look.

“It was in this bucolic setting,” he said, and had impressive architectural bones, as well as 14-foot-tall, triple-hung, divided-light windows that gave it a magical sense of light.

The following weekend, he returned with his partner, Shaun Skura.

“I was like, ‘You’re crazy,’” said Skura, 40, a relationship manager at LinkedIn. “However, I also saw instant potential, and I knew he would do something extraordinary with it.”

The reality at the outset, Skura added, was clear: “We knew it was going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”

Before committing to buying it, Bremer wanted to be sure that the church could legally be converted to a private residence and that a septic system could be added so they could have indoor bathrooms.

After studying the half-acre property, he came to the conclusion that there was nowhere he could reasonably add a septic system. But he noticed an awkward vacant lot across the street with only a billboard for Shadowland Stages, a theater in nearby Ellenville.

“I reached out and said, ‘Hey, is there any way that we could share this property,’” Bremer said. Eventually he struck a deal with the theater that allowed him to buy the property to use for his septic field for next to nothing, with the promise that the billboard would remain.

Then he spent the better part of the following year working on getting his unconventional plans approved by local authorities.

“It took a somewhat masochistic architect to go through and get four very specific variances to legalize the disused church to a residence,” Bremer said.

Two years after he first visited the 2,200-square-foot church — a United Methodist Church that had been vacant for several years — Bremer finally felt confident that a conversion was possible and bought it for $100,000, in the spring of 2017.

He and Skura had contractors largely dismantle it down to the enormous structural timbers, in order to add the insulation, HVAC, plumbing and electrical systems it needed.

“It was ostensibly an old pole barn, uninsulated,” said Bremer, who sought to keep the basic character of the building intact while “channeling Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark and a little bit of John Waters.”

In addition to adding the basic systems the building needed, they cut a hole in the floor for a staircase leading to the basement, which previously had only an outside entrance. On the lower level, they carved out three bedrooms and a bathroom with a subterranean shower illuminated by a ground-level skylight.

Upstairs, they designated the altar as the dining area and cut a large opening in the wall, to create an enormous picture window that also reveals some of the building’s original framing. They tucked a stainless-steel kitchen under the loft, which they converted to an office and media lounge with a retractable projection screen. And they built a second bathroom behind the kitchen with a one-way mirror that allows occupants to look out over spice jars to see activity in the main living space.

Because there was no fireplace, they suspended a shapely steel Fireorb — a product more commonly associated with modernist glass boxes than old clapboard churches.

“I’m interested in how we, as a culture, have sort of moved beyond binaries of sacred and profane, and public and private,” Bremer said. “Of course, when converting a church, all of that comes to the fore.”

To furnish the place, Bremer and Skura repurposed many of the pews as headboards and footboards for beds. They scoured vintage stores and flea markets to find pieces like a large Harvey Probber sectional sofa and a walnut-and-galvanized-tin bathtub, which they installed in the open living space. To finish it off, they collected smaller, whimsical curiosities, including an old elevator sign from Macy’s and a black-velvet Jesus painting.

After about a year and a half of construction, during which they spent more than $500,000, the couple moved in just before Christmas last year, and invited about a dozen friends to celebrate.

“We had nothing set up, and the table wasn’t there, but we had a giant Christmas dinner with a lot of friends,” Bremer said. “It was sort of the christening.”

Still, the project, he conceded, isn’t completely finished. After rebuilding the exterior entrance to the basement as a black box holding a neon sign that reads “House of Dog” — Bremer’s employees gave him the sign as a 50th birthday gift, in tribute to the couple’s Italian greyhound, Geoffrey — he is considering building a few more black boxes in the landscape.

“One is a swimming pool, one is a raised planter bed and one is an outdoor shower,” he said.

“We will be working on it forever,” he added. “It’s the perfectly unfinished, forever project.”

This article originally appeared in

It Was the Ideal Antique Building. Who Needs Bathrooms, Anyway?

(On Location)

If you’re going to build a house, deciding where to put it is usually key. But the location of the house that Nirav V. Patel and Carla Lañas built in Austin, Texas, was ultimately determined by the flip of a coin.

The couple had been living in a condominium in the West Campus neighborhood of Austin for years, and wanted to stay put. But “it was this bachelor pad,” with a single lofted bedroom, said Patel, 46, who works in marketing at Oracle and had bought the apartment in 2005. By 2014, with their first baby on the way, they were on the verge of outgrowing the space.

So it seemed serendipitous when a representative from the neighborhood association got in touch with Patel, Lañas and other neighbors in their building to say that the owner of a house on the next street was looking to sell.

There were a few problems: The house, which dated to the 1930s, was unremarkable and had been used as student housing. And it sat in the middle of a double-wide lot, which made it expensive.

But another couple in their condo — Ernesto Cragnolino and Krista Whitson, both architects — was interested as well.

Before long, the neighbors came up with a plan: The two couples would split the $520,000 cost of the lot and either transform the existing structure into a two-family home or demolish it to make way for two separate houses.

Shortly after closing on the property, they determined that the best option would be to raze the old house and start fresh. “The plan was to subdivide the lot so that we each got a half and could do a house independently from one another,” said Lañas, 44, who trained as an interior designer in New York and now works in administration at the University of Texas at Austin.

It wasn’t until later that they realized the two halves of the lot weren’t exactly equal: The northern half seemed preferable, with a slightly higher elevation and more trees and open space relative to the next house on the block.

To determine who got which lot, the couples met in the street for a best-of-five coin toss. Patel and Lañas lost, and got the southern half.

That was probably for the best, said Murray Legge, the architect Patel and Lañas hired to design their house. “As I started to work on it, I realized it was actually the better lot, because we had this opportunity to work with the southern light,” he said.

Patel and Lañas shared images of what they hoped for with Legge, including photos of courtyard houses designed by Luis Barragán, the Mexican architect known for designing colorful homes with simple geometry.

“The lot is long and narrow, so it wasn’t practical to do a true courtyard house. But we took the elements of a courtyard house,” Legge said, and remixed them. He also took advantage of every opportunity to play with light.

Facing the street, the two-story stucco structure he created is largely opaque for privacy, with an entrance courtyard hidden behind a low wall. Along the southern side, however, the house opens up to a yard and deck, with a long span of windows on the ground floor and a recessed deck above.

At the top of the 1,950-square-foot house, some sections of the roof rise higher than others, with periscope-like windows designed to channel sunlight. Inside, the ground floor is largely open, with Douglas fir cabinetry separating various living areas but stopping short of the ceiling, so light can flow between the spaces.

In the kitchen, one small window is positioned near the floor. “We call it a ground light,” Legge said. “There’s a lot of light that bounces off the ground, and it’s quite beautiful because it will pick up the color of plants or gravel.”

It also functions as a peephole for the couple’s sons, River, 4, and Mateo, 2.

On the second floor, where a bridge-like hallway connects two bedrooms at one end and the master suite at the other, a void funnels sunlight into the kitchen below.

To keep costs down to about $500,000, Patel and Lañas coordinated the construction with Cragnolino and Whitson, who built their own house at the same time. They used the same general contractors, Green Places, and many of the same tradespeople to economize on utilities, foundation work, framing and oak flooring — although the two houses are very different.

After a delay of more than two years — waiting for city approval to demolish the original house and subdivide the lot — the construction took just over a year. Patel and Lañas moved in last July, and are still pleasantly surprised by what Legge created.

“What I’ve really appreciated, now that we’ve been here through a few seasons, is the way there’s different light in the house in the winter and summer,” Patel said.

And with a variety of small exterior spaces rather than a single central courtyard, he added, “I’m outside as much as I’m inside throughout the day.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/realestate/in-texas-a-whole-house-on-half-a-lot.html" id="5dc9b4ee-6462-355c-a98a-d03c2b1662e3">The New York Times</a>.

In Texas, a Whole House on Half a Lot

Like many architects, Aurora Farewell relishes stripping spaces down to the studs, and rebuilding from scratch.

“I have an obsession with change,” said Farewell, 36, a Yale-trained architect who worked at Richard Meier &amp; Partners Architects and Shelton Mindel &amp; Associates before establishing her own firm in New Haven, Connecticut, last year. “I look at floor plans and get really excited by the thought of moving walls and turning things inside out. It’s a mental game for me.”

So when she and her husband, Santiago Mejia, began casually looking for a Connecticut house to buy between 2015 and 2016 while living in New York City, they viewed most of what they saw through the lens of what could be achieved with the help of a sledgehammer.

In 2017, they found something they hadn’t expected: a well-maintained, 3,200-sqaure-foot house built in 1915, with a procession of interior spaces that seemed nearly perfect as is.

“In the other houses we saw in New Haven, there were always things we wanted to change,” Farewell said. “But we both walked into this house and — with the way that the floor plan was laid out and the way the rooms were tied together — it just felt right. I didn’t want to move walls.”

The kitchen and powder room needed updating, and Farewell wanted to move one wall in the master bedroom to expand the closet. She and Mejia also wanted to add a central air-conditioning system and refinish the hardwood floors, while adding their own decorative touches.

“We both grew up in old homes,” said Mejia, 40, a commodities trader specializing in coffee, who was raised in New Haven. “Aurora grew up in an old farmhouse, and I grew up in a house from around the same time period. We liked the idea of a house that creaks a bit.”

They closed on the home in January 2018 for $725,000, a few months after the arrival of their son, Julian, who is now nearly 2.

Although the house didn’t need a gut renovation, Farewell and Mejia knew the changes they planned to make would be disruptive, and decided to complete most of the work before moving in.

Facing the space pressure of living with a newborn in a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment (where the entrance hallway had become a makeshift nursery) and the time pressure of a planned sale of the apartment, Farewell had Bello Property Management lined up to begin the renovation on the day of the closing.

“We started construction that afternoon,” she said. “We were so anxious to be here.”

“We were threading the needle a little bit,” Mejia added. “We had sold our place in New York, and there was a narrow window for moving out here.”

Farewell directed their contractors to gut and rebuild the kitchen with hexagonal black-marble floor tiles, new cabinets painted a greenish-black hue and an island with a counter made from reclaimed heart-pine boards, while retaining an existing vintage schoolhouse cabinet with glass doors

She designed a new wet bar just outside the kitchen, overhauled the powder room and specified new paint and wallcoverings throughout the house, including wallpaper with a cloud pattern by Fornasetti for Cole &amp; Son in Julian’s room. She added ductwork for a new air-conditioning system, and gas inserts in fireplaces that had been sealed off by previous owners in the master bedroom and a home office.

The major work was completed by the beginning of April, when Farewell and Mejia moved in, although finishing touches took another few months. In total, the renovation cost about $175,000.

They furnished the house largely with pieces they already owned, including a vintage teak credenza Farewell had found at a flea market when she first moved to New York, an armoire from Room &amp; Board they had acquired in Manhattan after running out of closet space and a Saarinen dining table they had stored under their bed because they had nowhere else to put it (it now serves as their kitchen table).

“Miraculously, the majority of our furniture was in our one-bedroom apartment,” Mejia said. “If you were to ask us to fit everything back into 600 square feet now, we’d have no idea how to do it.”

Their new house, which has four bedrooms and two home offices, gives them much more breathing space, as well as room for family and friends who want to stay overnight.

That generous amount of space, Farewell said, makes life a little easier with a toddler.

“In large part, we moved here for him,” she said. “There are stresses, of course, but we can raise him without the added stresses of what our life would have been in Manhattan.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/realestate/an-almost-perfect-house-in-new-haven.html" id="264ce565-c9e0-36c1-a042-85bc64fbbeaf">The New York Times</a>.

An Almost-Perfect House in New Haven

When Kim Hammond was a teenager in the late 1960s, his parents bought a proud stone house on a hill in Baltimore County, Maryland, and he immediately recognized it as remarkable.

Built in 1920 by a prominent architect named Laurence Hall Fowler, it originally served as a stately guesthouse for an even grander home that is now part of St. Timothy’s School, a private high school for girls.

“He built these works of art surrounded by nature,” said Hammond, 67, a veterinarian who was profiled in The New Yorker for his work with fashion designers’ pets but is also known for tending animals on the sets of films like “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Green Mile” and “Catwoman,” and is involved in efforts to save endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It’s such a special house, and just one of those homes that you can’t duplicate.”

So after his mother died in 2014, he and his wife, Carol Elerding Hammond, now 50, decided to move in, with their daughter, Stella, now 12.

But first, they wanted to make a few changes.

After nearly a century of wear and tear, the house needed updating and a few spatial alterations to accommodate a more relaxed way of living. As Carol Hammond said, “The library is formal, the living room is formal, the dining room is formal, but we’re pretty casual people.”

For help, they called on Kim Hammond’s longtime interior designer, Mona Hajj. Hammond was one of Hajj’s first clients in 1994, after he saw a room she designed in Baltimore magazine and hired her to decorate a bedroom on the third floor of his parents’ house.

“I asked her to design me my own English gentleman’s suite, where it’s just lovely to curl up and read a book,” Hammond recalled. “She designed something that was so reflective of what I wanted, I was just overwhelmed, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Over the years, that room has remained unchanged. And ever since, Hammond has called on Hajj for help decorating whatever home he happened to be living in, including a series of downtown Baltimore apartments. He even credits her with helping him look his best for Carol Hammond, whom he began dating in 1999.

“Mona’s décor really attracted my wife,” he said. “My wife thought I knew what I was doing.”

By now the secret is out — and has been for some time — so Carol Hammond had the opportunity to collaborate with Hajj.

All three agreed that the original windows, woodwork and plasterwork should be preserved. “We didn’t want to jeopardize the essence of the house,” Hajj said, although “it was not built for the kind of living that they wanted, which was something comfortable.”

The challenge was walking the line between restoration and transformation. Hajj left most of the house intact, reproducing moldings where they had gone missing and restoring the remaining woodwork to its original luster. But she also proposed a few surgical changes to the floor plan.

On the ground floor, they expanded the kitchen and added a porch along the back of the house, accessible by French doors from most rooms. On the second floor, they converted a bedroom into a bathroom to create an enlarged master suite and added a cathedral ceiling, opening the room up to the third floor, which once housed servants’ quarters.

“It was my mother-in-law’s room, so I wanted it to have a different feel,” Carol Hammond said.

A substantial addition to one side of the house contains a double-height family room, a powder room and a three-car garage on the ground floor, with a large recreation room above.

To finish the five-bedroom house (which is included in Hajj’s new book, “A Romance of East and West,” published this month), the designer put together an eclectic mix of furniture and objects spanning centuries and cultures. The living room is decorated with ancient pots from Latin America and Asia, a 17th-century Turkish Ushak rug, Louis XVI-style armchairs, a Cy Twombly lithograph and a tufted sofa that Hajj had custom made.

“I wanted that look — warm, global, collected — because the house afforded it,” Hajj said, and because it reflects the way the Hammonds live. As Carol Hammond put it, “We travel all over the world, and acquired this taste for things that are unique and unusual.”

The design-and-construction process took about two years — the Hammonds moved in toward the end of 2016 — and cost more than $6 million. It also involved significant changes. But at its core, the house remains the one Kim Hammond has loved for most of his life.

“I look forward to coming home every single day,” he said. “It evolved beautifully.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/realestate/in-maryland-remaking-the-family-manse.html" id="30ca040d-1fe1-3fa1-a62a-b898cccc9df0">The New York Times</a>.

(On Location: Baltimore)

A Gentle Rejuvenation for the Family Manse

When Robin Brown bought an oceanfront property in Prides Crossing, a neighborhood in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 2011, her life was in transition.

She had been living in Manhattan for nearly three decades, during which time she had founded and sold Clay, a boutique gym and spa near Union Square. She had also married and divorced, and raised a daughter who would soon be leaving home.

With so many changes, “I just needed a place to go and figure out what my next move was — and who I was without the relationship, parenting every day and my business,” said Brown, 58, a health coach.

Smitten with the beauty of the rocky coastline northeast of Boston, where industrialists like Henry Clay Frick had built lavish summer estates more than a century earlier, she knew where she wanted to put down new roots. But browsing listings for houses in the area revealed a common problem: “They were just so, so big,” she said.

When she finally heard about a smaller house for sale on a lot of less than 2 acres that had been part of a larger estate, with terraced gardens descending to the ocean, she didn’t hesitate. “I raced up here and bought it as soon as I could,” she said, paying $3.3 million, although the house itself wasn’t much.

“They advertised that it was in the Walter Gropius style, midcentury modern,” Brown said. “But it was really just a not-very-well-built home.”

For a few years, she used it as a second home, knowing she would eventually replace it. Then she asked Chris Kofitsas, an architect and the president of New World Design Builders, to knock it down to make way for a new house that would become her primary residence.

Brown had met Kofitsas a decade earlier when she was contemplating building additional Clay spas. Those projects didn’t pan out, but the two had become friends and shared similar ideas about design.

At Clay, she said: “The architecture, to me, was as crucial to the concept as the weights, the cafe and the spa, because I am a firm believer that what you surround yourself with, and visually look at each day, has a huge impact on how you feel. That translated into the spot we created here.”

She also liked that Kofitsas was a one-stop shop, providing design services, construction, millwork and custom furniture out of his workshop in Clifton, New Jersey.

“Having done many, many renovations in my time, I was very impressed with the way he operated,” she said, noting that it resulted in fewer changes and surprise expenses than she had in previous experiences, when the design and building responsibilities were split between an architect and a contractor.

For the new house, Kofitsas envisioned a place that blended modern, minimalist architecture with layers of warm, inviting finishes, while maintaining the footprint of the original house so the foundation could be reused. “One of the most expensive things in construction is the foundation, and the foundation of this house was perfectly fine,” he said. “The floor plan is completely different than what it was, but the footprint is the same.”

The only exceptions were two additions: an attached garage and extra space for the master suite.

The resulting 4,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house uses a steel structure, locally quarried stone and plenty of glass to dissolve the barrier between interior and exterior, including a 40-foot wall of sliding glass doors. During warmer months, when the doors are open, the living room and terrace connect to become “one massive living area that’s both inside and outside,” Kofitsas said.

Some interior walls were designed to hold specific pieces from Brown’s art collection, including works by Vik Muniz, Carlos Alfonzo and Julie Blackmon. For furniture, Kofitsas designed and built a floor-to-ceiling media unit with bookshelves, a credenza with leather-wrapped doors for the dining area, a canopy bed for the master bedroom and a Murphy bed for another bedroom.

After about a year of construction, at a cost of roughly $2 million, Brown moved into her new home in November 2017, before the outdoor spaces were completed the following spring.

“In the summer, when the glass doors are opened up, it’s a pretty special place to be,” she said. “Modern architecture can be so cold, lifeless and sterile. But there’s nothing sterile about this place.”

Her friends seem to agree. Brown has had so many visitors that she asked Kofitsas to convert a detached two-car garage on the property into a guesthouse.

“I have nonstop company in the summer,” she said. “It’s like I run an Airbnb.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/realestate/reinventing-a-life-and-a-house-in-massachusetts.html" id="a3b9dedf-3562-3c59-ad05-65e1fe624d6b">The New York Times</a>.

A New Home and Life Rise on an Oceanfront

<h1>(On Location): As the sun broke through clouds, spotlighting the formal gardens and splashing fountains at her 10,000-square-foot Georgian Revival house in Oyster Bay Cove, New York, Constance Cincotta recalled how she had never planned to leave her city life.</h1>

“I was living in Brooklyn, and had no interest in Long Island,” said Cincotta, 58, the owner of Glenwood Mason Supply Co. in Brooklyn.

But in 2002, a friend sent her a real estate magazine featuring homes for sale in Nassau County, and when she saw the 1931 residence on the cover, she was awe-struck. “It was the house of my dreams, literally,” she said. “A Georgian house had been my ideal home forever. I’m a huge Anglophile. It was just everything I wanted.”

It also happened to be constructed from handsome red brick, which seemed fitting for a woman who spends her days selling masonry products and manufacturing concrete block. Growing up, she said, “We had a wooden Victorian in Brooklyn, and my father would always say, ‘Oh, God, I’m in the brick business and I have a wood house. This is terrible.’ ”

The Oyster Bay Cove estate, known as Highwood, was designed by architect Henry Corse and the landscape architecture firm Innocenti &amp; Webel for Edwin Gould, a son of the railroad financier Jay Gould. It had changed hands over the years, and its extensive property had been subdivided, but the stately old house remained largely as it ever was, with its big divided-light windows, paneled library and terrazzo floors intact, and its gardens overgrown.

When she went to see the 4-acre property, Cincotta walked through the house twice and then made an offer on the spot, for about $3.5 million.

She sold her house in Brooklyn and her second home in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, packed her belongings and made the move to this small village about 25 miles northeast of the city. Her father joined her and lived there until he died in 2007; they used a pair of walkie-talkies to communicate from distant parts of the expansive residence.

At first, the house and landscape didn’t seem to need much work. Cincotta renovated the bathrooms, which had last been updated in the 1970s, but otherwise relished the idea of using the partially empty house as a venue for entertaining.

On occasion, she had blockbuster family reunions with more than 50 overnight guests. “We had the living room set up dormitory style, with all these air mattresses,” she said.

But by 2006, she realized she needed help to create a cohesive, finished look. “When I brought my furniture in, it seemed like dollhouse furniture because of the scale of the rooms,” she said. “I was really intimidated about decorating.”

While shopping at the store and studio run by Andrew Maier, an interior designer in nearby Locust Valley, she decided she had found someone who could help. “I clicked with Andy immediately,” she said.

First she asked him to furnish the pool house, which he outfitted with an Oushak rug, an oversized antique wall clock, and a sofa and chairs from Crate &amp; Barrel with washable slipcovers that could withstand abuse from Cincotta’s dogs, Dixie and Mason.

“It’s all very dressy,” Maier said. “Connie wasn’t doing sisal and typical pool-house stuff.”

Cincotta loved it. “So I asked him to do my living room,” she said.

There, Maier cleaned up and painted the original dentil molding, the marble-and-wood fireplace mantel and a faux door designed to give the room a sense of symmetry. He also added corner settees, an oversized velvet sofa and occasional tables — antique wood bases with column-like details for which he designed black-and-gold marble tops.

Gradually, during the years that followed, Cincotta tasked Maier with redesigning and decorating various parts of the house, including the library, the dining room, the master suite, a casual dining area off the kitchen and the terrace, as well as several outbuildings.

She also had Maier convert what was once a ladies’ sitting room into a standing bar, while maintaining the original verre églomisé wall mirrors. The new design, she said, reflects the active lives of women today: “We don’t sit.”

To restore and maintain the gardens, she hired Mary MacDonald, a landscape designer in Locust Valley.

“Without having the original drawings, we tried to put it back to what it was,” said MacDonald, who replaced, replanted and pruned what was there, all the while “keeping in mind today’s maintenance requirements,” she said, for an estate without full-time gardeners.

Along the way, Cincotta also had brick walls restored and the home’s clay-tile roof repaired when it began to fail.

Now she frequently uses the property to hold fundraisers for local causes and groups, including Preservation Long Island, the North Shore Historical Museum and the Interfaith Nutrition Network.

Cincotta estimated that updating and maintaining the house has cost about as much as she paid to buy it. But bringing Highwood back to its former glory has been a profound experience that goes beyond a simple investment, she said: “It completely changed my life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/realestate/for-a-georgian-revival-estate-on-long-island-a-second-act.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

For a Georgian revival estate on Long Island, a second act

“I was living in Brooklyn, and had no interest in Long Island,” said Cincotta, 58, the owner of Glenwood Mason Supply Co. in Brooklyn.

<h1>When you’re designing a home, it’s easy to get carried away dreaming about pricey sofas, rugs and art. But big-ticket items aren’t as important as they seem, and plunking down the money to buy them is no guarantee you’ll end up with a home you love.</h1>

Often it’s the small touches that make a space feel truly inviting and memorable.

“Style is in the mix of things,” said Cliff Fong, founder of Los Angeles interior design firm Matt Blacke. “It doesn’t take any imagination, or any level of taste, to go to a big-box store or an Italian design store and buy everything. That just takes deep pockets.”

If you’re willing to take your time — hunting for special yet affordable pieces and doing the work yourself — he said, “There’s a way to approach design at any budget.”

To help, we asked Fong and other interior designers for ideas about how to make a big impact on a small budget.

— Use Paint Creatively

“We all know that the biggest bargain in the world is a gallon of paint,” said Jeffrey Bilhuber, an interior designer whose upscale clients include Anna Wintour and Iman, but whose new book from Rizzoli, “Everyday Decorating,” offers punchy decorating tips for everyone.

A fresh coat of paint on walls that have become smudged over the years will immediately renew a room, and a change of color can transform it. “Color connotes confidence,” Bilhuber said, and painting the walls a bold one “means that you’re confident in the place that you live.”

Paint can be used to cover more than drywall. Will Cooper, a partner and the chief creative officer at New York firm ASH NYC, said that a quick fix for lackluster wood floors is to paint them.

In his own East Village apartment, he said, “The floors were cheap strip oak that I sanded and painted the same color as the walls and ceiling,” using an oil-based floor paint.

“It made a huge difference and changed the whole atmosphere,” he said, by making the space seem bigger and brighter.

In smaller rooms, he recommended painting brick walls after giving them a light skim-coat of plaster to reduce surface irregularities. Although many people prize exposed brick, he said, “it can suck energy and light from a room.” Painting it lightens things up, while leaving an appealing texture.

Fong suggested using a contrasting paint color to play up attractive molding, or even to create a wainscot effect. “Painting a line of color that’s about three feet high and goes to the ground is a really nice, interesting way to add a visual vector,” he said. “If you want to get fancy with it, put a chair rail at the top.”

— Add Textiles Strategically

Changing a room by swapping out throw pillows is such a well-worn concept, Bilhuber said, that “if somebody says ‘change your pillows’ one more time, I’m going to change my job.” But, he admitted, that doesn’t make the strategy any less effective.

Adding pillows and a throw in a bright color to a sofa can make a statement in a living room, Bilhuber said, and you can do the same in a bedroom with minimal expense.

“You can change your bedding in a flash by just changing the pillowcases. They could be daffodil yellow, garnet or sapphire blue — boom,” he said. “Keep everything else straightforward.”

— Change the Lampshades

Another easy, affordable way to bring color into a space, Bilhuber suggested, is with new lampshades. “Buy yellow instead of white,” he said — or choose aubergine, as he did for his home in Locust Valley, New York.

Cooper offered similar advice. “You can get off-the-shelf shades in all different shapes, sizes and colors, which will change the look of a lamp super easily,” he said. For a client in Tribeca, Cooper installed black shades on vintage 1970s Pierre Cardin lamps, which gave them “a whole new point of view and a little glamour.”

Or try painting white lampshades with stripes, as Cooper sometimes does, to make them a striking visual feature.

— Adjust the Light

“Change your light bulbs — it can be that fast and economical,” Bilhuber said. “I walk home at night and see some of the most egregious mistakes when I look up into apartment houses.”

Specifically, Bilhuber said, he sees too much bright bluish-white light. “You should always use warm light, whether it’s incandescent or LED,” he advised, which typically means installing bulbs with a color temperature of 3,000 Kelvin or lower.

Next, he said, “Bring down the wattage. You do not need to be cutting diamonds in your apartment. Low levels of lighting improve the mood.”

This can be accomplished with lower-wattage bulbs, three-way bulbs or dimmers.

“If you want to take it a little bit further, add picture lights,” Bilhuber continued, either over paintings or behind pottery on tables. “You’re controlling how you visually navigate your way through the apartment by turning spots of light on certain objects and highlighting their beauty.”

— Add a Vintage Find

Not every piece of furniture and accessory needs to be a showstopper. A single distinctive object can create a focal point and enhance the appearance of a larger space.

“One special thing can elevate a whole room,” said Vanessa Alexander, founder of Alexander Design, in Santa Monica, California. “We always try to include something vintage or one of a kind in every room. It’s something that can’t be easily replicated and has a story.”

In one Malibu, California, home, Alexander added a 1950s chair by Osvaldo Borsani to a corner of the living room. It is as much a sculptural element, she noted, as a place to sit.

For her own home in Malibu, she found a perforated, brass-globe pendant lamp at a flea market and had it rewired as a statement piece for a sunroom. “It adds a textural moment,” she said. “And at night, it gives off a pattern” when illuminated.

These pieces needn’t be expensive, said Fong, who is known for creating interiors filled with vintage treasures, including a home he designed with Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi that featured a room with a beaten-up wooden ring on one wall and a collection of vintage mirrors on another.

“A lot of those mirrors came from flea markets and thrift stores,” Fong said. “You go to the flea market and find an amazing tray, interesting tabletop items or interesting art, and it can really do a lot for an environment.”

— Install Inexpensive Art

In his new book, Bilhuber writes that “art can animate a room even if it isn’t trophy art.” Expanding on that idea, he explained that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to put art to work in an interior.

“Some of the chicest projects I’ve ever worked on had masterworks next to framed posters,” he said. “Go to MoMA and get a $100 masterwork in poster format, and make no excuses. It’s human, it’s real, it’s humble.”

Or buy pieces by lesser-known or unknown artists simply because they appeal to you.

Better yet, Bilhuber said, work with what you already have. “You’re always going to have those five pictures you’ve had since your first apartment,” he said. “Take them down and start fresh. Lay them all out on the floor and look at them together. Just rehanging them in a way that is more uniform, or like a collage, can make the difference.”

— Remember the Sense of Smell

While the things you see and touch get the most attention when designing a home, scent can also play a role.

“Find a room scent you love,” said Bilhuber, who prefers home-fragrance sprays over scented candles. “There can be a difference between your apartment and everyone else’s. There can be a difference between what’s happening in the hallway and your living room.”

His favorite, he said, is Amber &amp; Smoke from Paddywax’s Apothecary collection.

“I use it every night before I go to bed,” he said. “Two or three spritzes and you’re transported to a completely different place than where you were two seconds before.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="4fe03741-04f7-491a-ba7d-a7199bf0a29e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/realestate/making-a-big-impact-on-a-small-budget.html">The New York Times</a>.

Making a big impact on a small budget/marketingland

If you’re willing to take your time — hunting for special yet affordable pieces and doing the work yourself — he said, “There’s a way to approach design at any budget.”

Making a big impact on a small budget

<h1>John Dewberry, who collaborated with architecture and design firm Workstead on the Dewberry’s interiors, likes modernism well enough. But he is more interested in creating spaces that appear true to their context.</h1>

“I try to be authentic,” said Dewberry, 55, founder of Dewberry Group, an Atlanta-based developer of commercial and residential real estate. If you’re re-imagining an older building, he said, “you should embrace that particular era.”

The Dewberry inhabits a former federal office building from 1964, so an interior design scheme with midcentury modern-inspired elements was appropriate, said Dewberry, an architecture buff who peppers his speech with references to Richard Meier, Thomas Jefferson and Andrea Palladio. His house in Charleston, however, dates to 1770, so it has an older vibe, with many antiques.

Still, he is no period purist. Once the design direction for a project is set, he said, he follows his gut and often ends up with an eclectic mix of furniture and art. “Because I didn’t go to school for it,” said Dewberry, a cigar-smoking former Georgia Tech quarterback and quail hunter who has survived cancer and a plane crash, “no one’s told me what I ain’t supposed to do.”

In 2013, he began looking for an apartment to buy in the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta, where his company has been amassing land for two decades with the intention of eventually building a community with “an Upper East Side look,” he said, and “an Upper West Side mentality.”

It didn’t take him long to settle on buying in Reid House, a 1924 neo-classical condominium designed by Philip T. Shutze of architecture firm Hentz, Reid &amp; Adler, where Neel Reid was a partner. “Reid and Shutze are probably the two most famous architects in Atlanta,” Dewberry said. “So we had something to work with.”

When he learned that a friend was selling a 2,000-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit in need of updating, he bought it for $500,000, sight unseen. Then he set about remaking it with help from Studio Dewberry, Dewberry Group’s in-house design wing, and his soon-to-be wife, Jaimie — now Jaimie Brown Dewberry, 30, a principal at Studio Dewberry and director of Dewberry Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm. (They married in 2017.)

The couple was impressed with the intimately scaled architecture of the apartment, which included a series of smaller rooms for specific functions, including a formal dining room, a study and a sunroom, rather than the wide-open spaces seen in more contemporary homes. So they left the walls as they found them.

“The bones were there,” Jaimie Dewberry said. “The crown molding is original. The hardwood floors were beautiful, so we just re-stained them.”

The dated kitchen and bathrooms weren’t quite so charming, so they gutted those spaces. The new kitchen has stainless-steel base cabinets, shelves made with wood reclaimed from an old Georgia icehouse, and walls and counters of Vermont Danby marble. The master bathroom has more Danby marble and the claw-foot soaking tub that came with it.

Visitors to the Dewberry, a buzzy hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, equipped with a massive, curved brass bar, 1960s-style globe lamps and timeworn Poul Kjaerholm sofas, might assume that the developer was a devotee of midcentury modernism. That wouldn’t be exactly right.