You can take it with you—the furniture you have, that is, when moving to a new home. But professionals recommend you cautiously select only timeless and quality pieces to go on the moving truck.
The owners of this 11,000-square-foot home in the Springfield neighborhood of Seans Woods made sure to incorporate a few favorite keepsakes from their previous home, with new furnishings to create a charming living room and dining room.
Just to the left of the front entry, the living room, which flows to the dining room, features pieces from the owners’ former home as well as splendid new finds.
“I wanted to bring my two sofas plus a glass-topped coffee table and a side table,” says the homeowner, referring to Ethan Allen pieces that were part of their old house. “The couches are an ivory/beige fabric with a fern leaf pattern. The color scheme in the living room in our old house was ivory and navy. We were ready for something new.”
The couple hired Swafford Construction of Troy to build their new home, which features dark wood flooring, 11-foot ceilings and a fireplace in the living room. The homeowner cleverly asked for a slight “doorway” feature between the two rooms, dropping down the ceiling a bit and bringing in the walls just a tad. “The exterior of our house looks like the early 1900s. For these main rooms, I wanted it to look like a wall had been removed, that a new living space had been created from two separate rooms,” she shares. “That made the interior more in keeping with an older home.”
For design assistance, the homeowners turned to Randy Luken of Luken Interiors in Kettering, who brought his 40 years of design expertise to the project.
Some of the best rooms, the most interesting rooms, springboard from a single item that conducts the rest of the space like a symphony orchestra. For these rooms, the genesis was a piece of cloth.
“We knew some form of art was going to be placed on the wall area between the two dining room windows but we didn’t know what it was,” Luken says. “But then I saw a piece of fabric at market and, oh, the possibilities!”
The Schumacher fabric, sturdy enough for draperies, features an elegant green background with white flowers, branches and birds. Luken showed the fabric to the homeowner who said a hearty “yes!” and ideas for the room flowed.
Luken next selected a gray-beige and white buffalo check material to use with the more sophisticated tapestry. “Checks can tone down a more formal room and make it not stuffy, and I used them to make these rooms look like an English or French-country manor.”
The Schumacher fabric was stretched on a frame by Patterson Chase in Dayton, then positioned on the dining wall space and lighted from overhead, making it easily visible from the living room.
The checkered material was also used for window treatments and upholstered chair seats in the dining room. The spacious round table is dark wood, chairs are weathered white and the hutch is a lighter maple color. An area carpet defines the eating space, topped by a mid-sized chandelier that is careful not to steal the show.
Pillows of the green tapestry print and of the checkered wall coverings found in the dining room easily tie the rooms together while avoiding any “matchy-matchy” look. A quartet of green and white plates that Luken found is displayed in each of the recessed areas next to the fireplace. Again, an area carpet anchors the living room.
A gray green paint color is used on the walls of both rooms. White trim, including the fireplace surround, brings contrast and crispness to the design. “I wanted these rooms beautiful but livable and that’s what we got,” the homeowner says. “We are so at home here, and I love that pieces from our old house are now part of the new place.”