Features: The Ultimate Philadelphia Dream House: I Love It, It’s Perfect, Now Change It
For the rest of the rooms, we felt pretty lost. Especially because the look we’d decided was “our look” — basically old-new/spare-but-cozy — kept changing in definition. We’d go to a hotel, and the angular beige sofas and sleek upholstered headboard would become a dream bedroom. I went to visit a friend who lives in an Ardrossan farmhouse, and the antiques and cozy armchairs in her huge kitchen felt exactly right. We went to a party at a chic home in Haverford with a pale green and gray living room, a crisp green-black and white porch, and a dark gray powder room, and those colors began to seem like the essence of good style. As always, John leaned toward more modern, loving color and sleek forms, and I responded to pale hues and old silver and glossy buffets.
Help in focusing and executing our myriad ideas arrived in the form of a very pretty, petite blond woman who had a sweet smile and a soothing demeanor. Her name is Lisa Simmons, she worked for my husband’s real estate company as an in-house designer, and she offered to help us pull the house together in her spare time. In her role as part shrink, part design expert, she immediately realized that John and I needed to use what each of us was bringing to the house in creative, cool ways that made us both feel validated. The antiques that I moved over from Merion one hot, rainy day (on which we also emptied and delivered the entire contents of the townhouse) looked good to John when spread out sparingly in the new house, and his angular glass console table looked great to me in our bedroom — with an old silver vase on top.
Lisa showed us how to mix our styles, and how to keep the results from looking bizarre: She helped us find an antique console for a few hundred dollars in a funky store in Narberth that looked exactly right with my grandmother’s mirror perched above it in our front hallway. With her well-honed taste, she gently talked us out of painting the dining room brown (thank you, Lisa), allowed us to paint its ceiling silver, and came up with the creamy color for the walls and the curtains that now hang there. We found twin glass chandeliers at an excellent discount furniture place called Brandon Home Furnishings, in King of Prussia, and installed them over Grandma’s table. We found a super-upholsterer named Casey, who came and took away my grandmother’s dining room chairs, returned them covered in a bright-colored silk that John thought was great, and charged us almost nothing. My bench that John had secretly hated he now says he actually likes, after Lisa helped us reupholster it and place it on a spare sisal rug. His bench with modern metallic legs and a groovy oval shape, she suggested that we slipcover in crisp white. I can freely say that I like it now — it’s very boutique hotel.
One day, my father-in-law arrived with some antiques from John’s grandmother’s home that had been in storage for years that were incredibly right for the house, and stunningly pretty. Lisa even gave in to my idea of having one dark room (no doubt I stole the concept from a friend’s house, I can’t remember which), and we ended up with a dark-brown study and hung modern art and glittery mirrors on the walls. Was it mod enough for my contemporary husband? I hoped so; Tyler seemed to like it, because he took to playing Yu-Gi-Oh there in his free time.
Oddly enough, it became my favorite room in the house.
