Sam achieved her mission of adding warmth to the space through custom white oak cabinets and engineered hardwood floors. The unexpected mixed metals help give the space an eclectic, welcoming vibe. “People get really anxious about mixing different metals, but it’s a gut instinct when it’s going to work and when it’s not,” she adds. The copper hood fan above the stove was custom-made by a millworker and helps bounce light across the room, playing off the nearby brass sconce and faucet, a copper-handled microwave, and stainless-steel appliances.
To bring more depth to the rest of the house, Sam used navy grass cloth wallpaper sourced from Amazon for a textured effect to the living and dining room walls. “It shimmers when the light hits it, adding layers of visual interest we weren’t getting otherwise.” The built-in IKEA bookshelves in the dining room, which existed pre-reno, were also given the grass cloth treatment, lending them a more custom appearance. The marble dining table and striking modern pendant lamp were both CB2 finds, but the midcentury plywood chairs belonged to the client. “Because we were giving him so much new and he’d been through something really big, I didn’t want to take his personal touches completely out,” she says. Sam also appreciated the warmth and patina the chairs added to the room, noting that “they felt like they had echoes of history.”
