At Home in Millbrook with Darren Henault

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] michael and i were looking for a place out of the city that wasn't the hamptons so we came up to millbrook there are a lot of horses here we do a lot of riding we found this great little 1800 farm house we added the kitchen which is a very large kitchen we added later um the garden room and the two girls bedrooms and it was a christmas tree farm so the outside was a wreck we had to move 3000 christmas trees so there was a ton of landscaping work thankfully michael really loves i think he's a frustrated landscape architect at heart so he really loved doing all that [Music] right away i can tell everything about your lives by the enormity of your footwear tennis yeah riding yeah mucking about gardening yeah just about everything else i love it you covered most of it pretty much covers it there might be flip-flops in there for the beach at some point this is 1800s house yeah talk to me about floor decision here because this is such a wonderful surprise so the room like michael this is michael's kitchen and he wanted it super clean he wanted it really easy you didn't want a lot to look at but it started to get a little boring for me it started to get a little staid so i just threw some crazy pattern on the floor and had it hand painted okay i love it i just hadn't had painted in an hour i mean this is a big decision and commitment and you know what i bet you a lot of people will see this and want to do it themselves it's something that you could never envision until you see it in person okay i mean the truth is i've hired this amazing faux painter and it's complicated and it was layered and i did it in a very specific way and the paint's diluted so that the wood grains coming through and it looks worn the first day it was put down so yes you're right there's a lot more thought put into it than just like throwing down some pain but the end result is even though it's a completely different vibe than an old house in the country from the 1800s right they just work so well together and it would be kind of a not steady but a rather quiet kitchen kitchen it's a white kitchen that's all it is a correction i see three whites beiges creams just here this is not a white kitchen i've never done something i've never done such a thing as all white it is three different shades of white to give it a little more depth um but we kept the cabinets themselves all white because i didn't want it so chock-a-block but then on the larger surfaces we did do three different colors and there's actually a fourth white on the ceiling it just gives it more depth but still reads like a white kitchen it does sensational and rare coastal estate in england oh my god now i understand why you subscribed to this that's our real estate porn yeah it looks amazing can you talk to me about what what made you think i mean i know why you thought to do this room it's incredible but it's so different feeling than the rest of the house and i'm sure you spend all your time here when you can so you know the house is 1800 the ceilings are eight six nine feet it's small cozy and after living here as the girls got bigger we needed a room we needed a room we needed more volume and so we actually dug down so that we got a higher ceiling um and michael had a photograph of a house that david hicks did and it was a georgian house with these amazing floor-to-ceiling mullioned windows and he just had been hanging on to it forever so when we started we handed out to the architect and we said we basically want to be sitting outside right so i it so this originally was like this fabulous hangout room and then you'll see there's there's yoga i'm seeing some exercise equipment because this turned into our peloton room for the past five months so we moved the coffee table the ottoman and we have a huge floor and you pop up the videos wait isn't that with bikes yeah it doesn't have to be bikes you can get an account they have yoga classes stretching classes meditation classes and so you move these on over and it's like you're exercising this is our exercise room it became our exercise room otherwise we would have all been 300 pounds so this is the dining room and it's where we eat mostly in the winter because it's a smaller cozier room but we love them here talk to me about those on the wall are those sconces that you would put real candles on there you put real candles in you put barrel candles in and honestly i found them online they were like 150 you're kidding me that makes me mad i kind of want them but they actually are almost like sculpture right i mean how often do you really put the candles on every meal really every meal i love that because we eat in here in the winter at night yeah um i love this and is this a wallpaper or is this stencil so this is hand stenciled and it was kind of funny the woman arrived it was a pattern that i'd seen in some magazine in england and i just had it in my book a pattern that i loved but it was tiny and so i blew it up the woman made stencils and she came and she said what color do you want the stencils i said no color just use gloss paint clear clear gloss oh and she said you're not going to see it i said that's the point i only want to see it kind of candlelight shimmer yeah i only want a shimmer i don't want really heavy pattern i want it to be super subtle you know i think about why we love it here so much and so many people now are talking about editing editing editing and i think editing is for a gallery or it's for a store this is about layering our house is about layering and texture and you see that we've lived here over the years it's it's more complex to point out that lamp i love that oh that's made out of oh uh alabaster we got it at the flea market in paris looks like it should have always been there so this was originally the girls nursery when we first moved into the house and the girls were first born and i wanted a bathroom i needed a bathroom for the girls and we started to put a wall up and then i was like no just tear the wall down i'd rather have the tub in the middle of the room so that hey i'm bathing the girls in this big beautiful room and b i've got two of them i was grabbing one and putting one in the tub and grabbing another one and putting the other one in the tub and i just i didn't want to be stuck in a in a bathroom and then when we built the other two rooms for the girls this became a guest room and we seem to have a lot of friends with babies so we kept the crib in here we just had um troy schumacher and ashley larissie two ballet dancers from new york city ballet who have twins and they came and stayed with us for two and a half months so it was really handy that we still had it as a baby's room i love bathrooms i love designing them i love being in them i think they're great rooms to hang out in i'm a big fan of a bathtub um you know i like when they're bright and kicky i like when they're super sophisticated and textural they're just they're a lot of fun to work in and to spend time in and people make them too utilitarian and not sumptuous enough i love this little space i don't want to leave here okay so this little space that you're sitting in there were two windows this was the end of the house and that looked out of the fields and then when we put the addition on the house which goes that way we just thought architecturally it was really cool if we left this window it was kind of a sewn moment and it became this great little look and then there's something to look at out there we always have vas flowers or a piece of art or something and that changes i move that around all the time fun whatever's out there do you remember before we were talking about perfect and i'm not like a person so i could have just done wallpaper which is printed perfectly rectilinear and the lines are absolutely straight but instead i did a fabric and because of the nature of fabric as you're putting it up in wallpaper you don't get these it's imperfect lines and also it's an old house so the ceilings aren't straight so if i had these perfectly straight lines at the ceiling it would look all wonky so i like that there's a hand you can see the hand there's like a hand quality in the way that it was installed and the movement of the pattern i just i think it adds more to the texture may we stop the tour for a second in honor of this is crazy look at my shoes with the pattern besides a rug it's a thing i do i match okay i mean i didn't get the memo and it still worked out i i don't need to send that a memo i know we know we're we're telepathically communicating fashion and design darren is that a birdhouse um actually it's made to look like a martin house but it's the exhaust for the stove inside the house all the exhaust comes out the bottom well that was a little clever trick that you devised that was actually michael goldman that was the architect he was great so smart so what millbrook's become for us is a world within itself i i don't love leaving the property so we you know had a 1800 cemetery on the property that we refurbished we created a fire pit we created another little place to look and get a great view we installed chickens we brought in chickens so there's an area to hang out with the chickens and there's a hammock so you can lie in the hammock and be with the chickens we've got bee hives we've got an orchard there are all these locations all over the property where you can really feel like you're getting away from the house but still at home so these are the bees these are the beehives that we keep you talk to them with some of their friends i know these are the bees they live over here do not notice that they're the bees not like these are my bees like right so there's a distance between there's an electric fence you know the electric fence is interesting it's to keep out bears because bears eat the larva not the honey not the honey it is not a winnie the pooh thing okay it's a larva it's protein so how does this all work you actually you don't have do you have any honey for me to take with me we're actually out because we've been living here full time it's the first year we've ever run out of honey but it's so wonderful to have this on the property you know what there's a story the reason we have it on the property is because bunny had severe allergies my daughter bunny had severe outdoor allergies and her allergist said get bees and give her the honey every single day from your property her allergies are gone work like a char like a charm absolutely works and i thought okay you're insane totally worked it was great [Music] [Applause] [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: 120,899

Keywords: At home with, Darren Henault, designer home tour, Susanna Salk, Quintessence video series, interior design, how to decorate, Quintessence, old house renovation, Millbrook, country house, architecture, decorating, decor, design inspiration, house tour video, country estate tour, design books

Id: Tn_wPCMJLWk

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022