Home Is Your Happy Place

The best design projects start with a spark. That first meeting is a jam session. Questions fly, answers bounce back, and when everyone’s finishing each other’s sentences and interrupting with excitement, you can feel the electricity and things start to cook. When it gets loud—we know it’s a go.

Good luck finding a good house in a place you actually want to live. Often you settle for “meh” and dream of what it could be. This renovation turned a builder’s bland brick box into a stylish suburban escape for a Manhattan couple with Princeton roots. It sits at the end of a quiet tree-lined street, still modest from the front, until you open the front door and… surprise! A giant orange “Pony” greets you, a 1960’s children’s toy that brings a wink of Tribeca loft to leafy Princeton.

The design inspiration came from a stack of books I brought to our first meeting. She fell for the raspberry red jacket of Josef Albers in Mexico. He was enamored with the white oak kitchen cabinets in another. A few beats later we had the scheme: a lacquered raspberry library, a white oak kitchen, tied together with walls the color of clotted cream. A fun footnote: the raspberry shade we selected would later be named Benjamin Moore’s Color of the Year. Ahead of the curve, baby.

She’s a woman of letters and a fashion maven at heart. Upstairs, new windows frame a luminous dressing room centered on a translucent onyx-topped packing table, with jewelry drawers lined in pink mohair — a jazzy flourish that brings the fun full circle.

Photography by Pam Connolly