At Home in Millbrook with Ashley Whittaker

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is the house that my husband and i built together about four years ago in millbrook new york and we had my son at the time i have two wonderful stepdaughters who are both in their 20s now but our family was expanding and we needed a little bit bigger house so we looked for houses in millbrook and they were all either these wonderful 19th century houses that were all sort of sprawling and just didn't work for our family or they were new construction and it just wasn't architecturally what i was looking for in a house so we combined the best of both worlds it feels like an old house and it lives like a wonderful new house and i think the most important thing that we incorporated is a wonderful floor plan this house works for four of us two of us it works for a hundred people at christmas times and it just feels very cohesive and connected and we love it for our family [Music] [Music] [Music] so talk to me about how you divided this room up to work for you guys you and your husband and your seven-year-old son andrew so this room i knew we'd have one main like great room for lack of a better which by the way i read in your book it's based on your childhood romance my mother my mother had what she called our florida room as i was growing up and it was a double height wonderful room where we did everything we entertained we ate we watched television it was such an important component of sort of my life and my childhood and i felt like i've always wanted a room like that so i have these wonderful reclaimed beams which i think again draw your eye up in a room that has this kind of scale my husband found these beams there's so many things that kind of draw your eye up and then as important to that is having things at eye level smaller things sort of little moments that stop your eye and i think really bring a lot of color well there's low space mid and high here to delight everyone and all these vignettes and yet this is an incredibly practical room it's very practical because of the two seating areas so this is our our area where andrew and i live at night we watch television my son plays with all his toys here these cabinets are full of magna tiles and legos he gets them all out plays on the cops he can be here and you guys could conceivably have cocktails or entertain on this side by the fire everyone loves we do buffet suppers we just had my friend chris pitts miller's a little 50th birthday celebration here for him on friday night everyone was sitting here having dinner sitting there having dinner and i actually love the idea of i always wondered how do you do the the the sofas that help you know break up around back to back and i liked how you did this long table in between therefore putting these amazing lamps and kind of demarcating it yet it doesn't it's not like a wall that's still open that's very true and i think that another important thing about rooms like this that have this sense of scale is the lighting and having lighting exactly as i was saying about the beams in the smaller moments we have overhead light we have table lamps there are picture lights there's sconces at the fireplace there's a smaller lamp over there so your eye is able to sort of travel with the light too and it's very flattering at night you can read by it entertain by it everything's on a dimmer it can go up and down and without having overhead lights the room feels very illuminated at night and especially when there's a fire roaring it's a very very comfortable room and we just you're such a living room stacy was saying while you were getting ready she was like she's such a pro and i don't use that word lightly it's just there's a sense of that you have a command of how to make a room happen and sing and what i really think is important is that i think people wonder about how much pattern do i use and how much solids do i use at a big room and here your eye is obviously drawn to this amazing print but there are the solid sofas you know you kind of switch on and off and so you need this i think you need the solids to ground the prints but then i also love the combination of the prints so you have this smaller scale paisley that has a uh yellow ground and then the one on your pillow and that's the white pillows that are peter dunham and they have a little bit more white ground so it's kind of balancing it's balancing scale it's balancing amount of white space it's bringing in a stripe on top of another stripe using this stripe is actually the skirt on the bottom of this chair so thinking about how to use things kind of going outside the box a little bit even these lamp shades we took a border and ran that around the bottom and this is some indium fabric i think we bought on etsy or lord knows where that came from but i just thought the border was so pretty that i didn't want to cut it off and i wanted to use it in oh so you can use it almost like as a trim exactly a lampshade exactly uh speaking of stale don't even get me started about how amazing this branch looks where did you get this well of course we're surrounded by 80 acres of woods so you literally just like went out there this morning and cut me down a huge bridge exactly you can sell a small tree on any given day get out there with my my husband gave me some ratchet clippers so i can go out and cut down almost anything by myself it's amazing so but it you know it reinforces to all of us that just the most simple things from nature you don't have to spend a million dollars at the flower store just getting a beautiful branch and putting it in a vase and you know giving that drama to any room is like the best i always tell everybody go to home depot buy a great fern put it on your kitchen table it's about things that are living they bring life to the room there are so your plant game is very very strong we have some good mentors let me tell you i have katie ritter and chris fitzmiller and bunny williams is close by so you go there and everything's alive and i think one of the important things is the containers when you're at a junk sale when you're at a christie's auction when you're at jamali down in the flower market like what makes the arrangement interesting and a lot of times it's containers i want to go outside and look at your amazing let's go see and then another important thing here is that connection to the outdoors and as you mentioned the floor to ceiling windows you just feel very connected and in millbrook that's certainly a huge component of our life so speaking of jewelry all your hardware everywhere everywhere is so thoughtfully beautiful well i just think the brass hardware is um it's appropriate to a house that would have been built in possibly the 1830s this we built four years ago so it wasn't but really paying attention to those details that make the house feel appropriate and and correct for the period of time in which it would actually talk about plant game what is going on well i'm a container gardener you're just you know everybody's getting these fabulous gardens and i can handle pots of geranium but i think you're doing it as an excuse to just get more containers well that's true too okay so i think people forget how great just a huge furniture here i think this is a home depot fern exactly really hey right here exactly you walk through the water and i i guess and you know i like the container i bet was quite costly but it's worth it because it bumps up the furniture yeah and this is actually this is bunny williams column from ballard designs so i have a couple of those and that's a great idea too just to kind of give the different levels yes of the plants to elevate yes mario always said a room is like a garden and you need height you need scale you need things low you need things high and so i think that's a very good example of mario's sense of scale that i'd like to think i can you know emulate you do the littlest degree there's a wonderful formality here even though we're in the country this could be in manhattan this could be a manhattan apartment and yet i look outside and there's boxwood and green i just i love the dichotomy of that it's a surprise i think it's about the empire chandelier it's about the 18th century chairs which are actually hand-me-downs for my dear friend crispitz miller so that was nice of him well it was nice you know i think we there was a trade in there somewhere i'm not totally i'm not totally sure exactly we'll ask you at lunch and um and also so many things that came from i bought this on a shopping trip to charleston with my mother i bought this mirror with my cousin holly phillips shopping in hudson talk to me about what you did from the walls this is quite extraordinary well this is this is actually a wallpaper this is not a proper scenic paper um so it's off the bolt and i love that about it because it was economical but i think it looks super chic and i love these kind of citrine curtains against it i love that with the brush there's such a little trim like everything where everything is trimmed but everything stands out against us even the dahlias look beautiful against the brown at christmas time it's it's greens it's clementine stacked so interesting about what you chose for the floor yeah not something formal at all exactly i always say decorating is about the contrast like that's what makes the yarn the yen and the yang and was it fun to design for you was it harder was it easier was it no it was fun i just kind of did everything that i've wanted a lot of the the michael smith fabric in the living room i've been holding on to for years forever like this is my living room you'll see my son's wallpaper the faux pas from runs always wanted to use i knew it was going somewhere so it was so fun to find my own house i want to see let's go to india let's go look okay so we're in andrew's room you know i'm obsessed about children's rooms this one really you know where was this room when i was doing my book i love everything about this room because it's part grown-up part it's very childlike here's the wallpaper that you always wanted to use it looks incredible here this will look good when he's 15. i agree right i agree i can't even tell everyone what you guys did because this is such a i wish my boys were still little and i could steal this idea well the thing is with my son is you have to steal the artwork he creates it and then he wants to play with it so he cut all these out and they were like little toys and i said no i've got to hide these from him somehow i got them away from him got them to the framer in millerton and then they created this almost three dimensional shirts with that they're kind of our favorite thing popped out a little bit i can't even this is such a great idea for everyone because it doesn't cost anything no children's creativity is free i mean you pay for the frame and the math but it's worth it you have it forever well until my son says um that's going to cost you twenty dollars mommy for his artwork right okay or twenty thousand where did you think i love this guest room and what's fun about it is i actually found this napkin that had been printed in india and somehow we tracked down the printer and asked him to print it as yardage and i had these delusions of vines running up and down floor to ceiling and i got the paper back and i said this just looks like a bunch of napkins next to each other and the paper went up and i looked at it and i said this is fabulous and it's just a reminder that sometimes plan b looks great so this guest room reminds me of all those wonderful houses of my childhood in the summers like in maine or martha's vineyard where the floors were painted and there was a casual retained rug and then just it has a summertime feel i just i agree enchanting that's the exact word and i think that's what i really tried to create on our third floor it's a very special floor this is actually my stepdaughter like lachlan's room and i love well should we mind if i go on her bed oh she'd love it no it's the most comfortable bed in the house but when i saw this in your book yes didn't i say stacy i was like are you kidding me i mean i was so inspired i literally went throughout my house and i was like where can i put floor to ceiling wallpaper now it's about that feeling you're enveloped by it it's like being in a garden everyone should do it it does not overwhelm the room it makes it better and for a room that's kind of unusually proportioned a lot of people inherit rooms it helps it right really yeah we created this but some people will get slanted ceiling rooms or rooms that they're not quite sure what to do i'm telling you put some fun wallpaper and you are good to go that's all the difference i have three rooms in this house my son's room the wallpaper goes on the ceiling and both of my stepdaughter's rooms on this floor and i think it creates a cohesive room it hides a multitude of sins if it's not perfectly symmetrical and i just think it's a really it just makes it fun feeling and then the painted floor is such a good idea that's what makes it feel sorry i think that's i think you're exactly right but you know there's a lot of browns in my house it's a very sort of old house feeling so i think this gave it sort of a youthful approach and my stepdaughters are young and they're fun and they're full of life so i just wanted these rooms to really embody there well i feel a little younger in here i hope you look a little bit younger of course you do here here hi how are you guys neighbor ever bearingly yes oh my gosh always gift this is bearing what is going on with that flowers from kathy graham in one of my catchpots trailing vines all of those flowers were grown at clove brook farm and she gathered them and conditioned them and arranged them and the vegetables that she includes apples and how about apples i mean that's a great where's the apple juice yeah to put an apple in with flowers is just like genius and then i brought you some chocolate chip cookies because i know you love my recipe from my books now we haven't eaten lunch it but i might have to pre-game i think we have to okay all right we're really excited life is short and i brought ashley's book to autograph because i never see her and then there's a few there's a few invoices in here yeah let the ledgers reflect thank you chris wow we love you so much oh my god i brought tears to my eyes i cried it's beautiful let's have lunch right now i'm already like have started it unofficially [Music] don't miss another video visit click on the orange queue to subscribe and have quintessence virtually delivered from our doorstep to yours [Music] you

Channel: Quintessence

Views: 395,260

Keywords: At home with, Ashley Whittaker, Susanna Salk, Quintessence video series, interior design, how to decorate, Quintessence, new old house, Millbrook, country house, architecture, decorating, decor, design inspiration, house tour video, home tour, The Well-Loved House, design books

Id: 4soWEHG3TsE

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021