6/18/2023 0 Comments Music collector buddy hollyFrom our first apartment together, and along the way through two New York City renovations and four in the Hamptons, our tastes merged surprisingly easily. I was the professed modernist- a midwestern kid who had dreamed of living in a SoHo loft. She grew up in Los Angeles, but contrary to stereotype, in a beloved Old English Tudor house filled with an eclectic mix of antiques. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, PILAR AND I BROUGHT VERY different design sensibilities to our relationship. If you like what we’ve done with our spaces, we think we can give you a playbook and the confidence to create a home that feels both modern and warm, both personal and photoworthy. But as you will see in the following pages, these limitations often proved to be our greatest gifts. Not unlike marriage, designing a home requires the ongoing reconciliation of mutual hopes and dreams with baggage and limitations. The way we see it is that when we move into a home, we are entering into a relationship, a dance in which we balance our own needs with what the house wants to be. Some present it readily, while others require coaxing. We also believe that all houses have a soul. See, we believe that the job of a home is twofold: to signal the aspirations of how we want to live on our best day, as well as to provide shelter to us, both practically and emotionally, along the messy road of life. We recognize how much pressure most of us put on ourselves to get it just right -to have our homes both protect and reflect us, to be the ever-evolving backdrop of the movie of our lives. The goal of this book is to inspire you to identify the things you love, and to give you a few tools and guiding principles to help you put those pieces together into beautiful spaces. Our projects have been influenced by two things: a passion for twentieth-century design, and the groundbreaking work of our favorite designers. We aren’t professionals we are self-taught, highly discerning design enthusiasts and collectors who have amassed, over the course of twenty years and six renovation and design projects, some hard-won wisdom. So much of the design jargon that gets thrown around in books and magazines and all over Instagram forces us to self-identify using terms like “traditional,” “modern,” “eclectic,” or, our least favorite, “transitional.”Īnd while we are all for a house with a clear design point of view that might hew to one tradition or another, and have utmost respect for rigorous modernists with nary a knickknack as well as die-hard maximalists who deftly mix ikat with toile, we find that both camps often forget the humans with all their moods, hopes, and dreams–who do the actual living in these spaces. Most of us get tripped up by the wrong labels and the wrong questions. ![]() Photograph by Francois Dischinger.) Book excerpt: ‘Patina Modern’ (Excerpted from Patina Modern by Chris Mitchell and Pilar Guzman (Artisan Books).
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