HOUSE TOUR | Inside Nina Long's Classic & Beautiful Atlanta Home

foreign [Music] you're watching homeworthy where we believe every home has a story like And subscribe for more hey homeworthy I'm Nina come on in welcome to my home in Atlanta Georgia [Music] foreign [Music] hey there I'm Nina long and I'm an interior designer in Atlanta Georgia I live in this house with my husband Taylor long and our sweet little son Collier long and Collier is actually a old Atlanta name so it's kind of special that we named him after that so he'll forever be kind of tied to this house because we do live in Collier Hills so um that's really so we could basically never leave I've always been an artistic person I was always drawing and painting at a young age when I was a little girl we lived in Connecticut and we had a lot of woods and I remember I would make little um floor plans in the woods with string and and kind of set up rooms and say this was the kitchen and this was the family room and I would like make floor plans with string and tie it from tree to tree which is a little bit um unusual but it started at a young age for me I truly enjoy it it doesn't feel like a job to be honest with you I love it we have lived in this house for about three years now and what I really love about the house is that it's old I love an old house this house was built in 1938 and what really appealed to us was um basically just the Aesthetics of this house it's everything that I love it has the charm of an old house um you know which new houses nowadays they just don't have anymore so for my husband and I it was like super important that we were only looking for old houses um we love the windows the architecture the um a lot of the the creeks in the floor a lot of those little quirky things about an old house that some people may not like we actually love it just has so much character that you you just simply can't find in a new house nowadays um so we've lived here for like I said about three years and when we bought the house it it had great bones but it needed a lot of work so it was definitely something we knew we were coming into a project which we actually really enjoy um maybe not so much during the the renovation process but we really like um being able to make a house ours and so you know me being an interior designer of course I did really enjoy it and I'm exposed to so much so I do have a hard time when it comes to decorating my own house it takes me um probably a lot longer to make decisions but I do eventually end up um making I think the right choices it might take me a long time but my husband he's really great because we kind of have the same taste and so he's he's awesome because I can just show him something and I say what do you think about this and nine out of ten times he actually loves it so I'm lucky there welcome to the foyer this is a small space in our house but it's also important because it's the first thing you see when you walk in the front door um this is one of my favorite pieces in the whole house actually and it took me forever to find this I mean literally years and then I stumbled upon it at Scott's Antique Market here in Atlanta which is it's like a huge Antique Market that people from all over the southeast come to and it's once a month and I found this piece and I really fell in love with it of course it's an antique but I love I love like pieces that have little details and I thought this was really cute because it had just little like inlay and the scalloping here at the bottom is just so precious and I just I love this piece because it was unique and one of the other things that I am starting to collect besides oil paintings is these little are these little boxes these are um chinoisery boxes or tea caddies and um I just really love shinwassery so I thought this was a great place to display the collection when you walk in the front door you know you see something again that just that I love of and then this is a antique French Mirror Has a scalloped detail on it just it kind of you know looks good with the scalloping on this chest and I had this sweet little antique Alabaster lamp so it's it's a pretty simple foyer but you know again all the pieces have meaning and I found these pieces like most of the pieces in my house you know over time it's not something that I feel like a house just shouldn't always be like instant um I don't believe in instant house instant decorating I think it's something that you collect over time so um that's the first thing when you see that you see when you walk in the door and I love it so when you walk in the front door it's um it's kind of an open concept you know to the right you see the living room and then to the left you have the dining room and so we'll get to these rooms in a little bit but it was important that in a home like this where you have these doorways that open to each other that it really flows you know that's very important to me in my home and with my clients homes you know you want cohesiveness you want each room to have its own personality but you know when you're looking from one room to the other it has to make sense thank you Welcome to our living room this room is where we actually spend the most time and it's one of my favorites in the whole house I think when we originally were looking at this house this is really what sold me on on the house and I think the reason I love this room so much is you could see all the decorative molding um along the ceiling and that is original and we'll show you the fireplace here in a second but that's also one of my favorite features so this room was a challenge because of the layout this is where we're spending so much time so it was important to me that I can you know have space for everyone to move around for a little Collier to play but also when we entertain that there's enough seating for our friends and family when I started decorating this room honestly the thing that I started off with was this um fabric right here the curtain fabric is it's an English print it's by Jasper and that was my color palette for the whole room I wanted something warm in here so I really started off with that I found these Botanicals at an antique shop the rug it was a miracle to find a rug that worked in here because just the colors that I used or I wouldn't say you see it as as much as you know you see maybe some Light blues that a lot of people use or Grays or creams you know this is a very warm room and I definitely struggled when I was designing this room you know I could do everyone else's houses but I can't do my own so this took me forever but I love this room so much and then I want to share with you um quickly I want to you have to see this mantle it's my favorite thing probably in the whole house us this is the original mantle from 1938 and I just love the detail on it when we bought this house the um the marble was actually cracked it was in really bad shape so we replaced this I love the way um an old you know a honed soapstone looks I think it's so classic so I did this added you know an old fireplace screen and you know it's the focal point of the room so I just love it so much and if I was moving I would try and take this thing off the wall but I don't think I could so originally we did not have bookcases in this room and I love you know design books architecture books art books so I needed a place where I could store my books I had my friend who's a carpenter who does a lot of work for our clients come over and make these great bookshelves for me also great place to hide you know some kids toys so I just love a bookshelf in a living room so we had a lot of fun designing those something really cool that I have to show you guys is this photograph right here I actually use this in a show House recently and I fell in love with it and I just had to purchase it for myself this is a slim errands photograph and you could see Mick Jagger and that's Mary and faithful she's a British singer and that is Desmond Guinness from the Guinness family and this photograph is from 1960 and it's taken at one of his castles in Ireland so I thought it was really cool I like having something in a room that you know maybe you wouldn't expect my husband plays music also he is an amazing guitarist so I thought this little nod to music was fun so I kind of threw that in for him and he loved it of course so surrounding this piece are some antique French oyster plates and I'm obsessed with the colors and these um you don't really see that color a lot you know a lot of the times with oyster plates you might see white ones or pink ones or maybe dark brown but I saw these and they were definitely a little out of my budget but I made the splurge and I think I found just the perfect place for them you know it's one of those things where you know um again it's just something that you wouldn't normally maybe um think to put in your living room on the wall but I just think they add such a neat you know decorative element and they frame out that um the photo really nice so um of course the colors are amazing and it just worked with the blues and the Browns and um everything in this room so I think they're perfect so as I mentioned before you know I like to collect things I'm at a point in my life where you know I can collect things that I like and I'm always on the hunt for antique oil paintings and I have a certain aesthetic that I look for when I'm on the hunt for antique oils you know um I'm not a huge fan of the Pastoral scenes or still lives with people um you know I think I usually look for beautiful landscapes traditionally I'm looking for English oil paintings maybe Italian oil paintings or French oil paintings and I like I like them to be smaller and I like to put them in groupings and the frames don't have to be perfect I think that you know that's what makes them beautiful is the patina so I love this little I think this is actually a watercolor and it fell off the wall once and the glass broke and I'm like whatever I still love it so I'm going to hang it anyways but this is a little watercolor um I think this is a looks like a boating scene and then you know I have this little landscape over here I have another you know water scene and then just a beautiful little landscape right there and I just love gold frames and I think they're just special and each little one tells a story so I'm always on the hunt for those and of course um you know it's kind of you have to be careful you don't overpay for these but I'm always you know on the hunt for them and you know sometimes in an antique shop you might find a little tiny one like hidden in the back of something or on the ground and usually those are the real Treasures um off of this room I want to take you into the sun room this is kind of a spot that I this is for me this is almost like my room and it's a special little place come check it out so this is our sun room and when we first bought this house this room looked totally different it had black and white kind of linoleum floors in here and the windows were they were all fogged and damaged so we had to do a lot of work when we um when we bought this house especially in this room I had to replace all the windows but of course as you can see they are covered because I love the way a sheer kind of diffuses the light and it makes you feel like you're almost in a plane and you're going through clouds I don't know there's something about this room that is just very calming to me and this is a place where I come and kind of have some me time I'll sit on the sofa and you know read sometimes or if I'm doing some work you know I might bring my computer out here and it's just a place where I like to sit and maybe also have coffee in the morning I open the door and I let the air in and I don't know this is just a special little room it took me of course a while to figure out what I was doing in here I found this ink English Botanical Fabric and that was kind of the starting point for the palette in here and then you know of course my husband thought I was crazy when I told him that I wanted to paint the entire thing one color but we're really happy with how it turned out and I just I love the blue it kind of reminds me of like a pair of old jeans that's by pharaoh and ball and I just I love their colors so I think it turned out really well a funny story this light fixture was actually here in the house when we bought it and I really loved it so much but it was white so I went and got about four different color Golds at Ace Hardware and sat in the backyard and spray painted it and I actually had a lot of fun doing it and I think it turned out really well and one of my favorite pieces again back to shinwassery is going to be this antique cabinet it's actually a secretary but I I definitely use it for storage but it's a beautiful piece in our old house it was in the living room and It just fits so perfectly on this wall and you know it stores just some little tchotchkes I guess that are you know meaningful for me that I want in clothes somewhere where they're safe and we have some old books a funny thing is I'm going to show you guys this book these were given to us by Taylor's mom and the funny thing is every single book on the bottom says Collier and I have no idea why or what that means but that's my son's name so um I think that's really kind of a funny story and of course the blue was so pretty so I had to have them Welcome to our dining room I love this room too I'm kind of partial I love all the rooms in our house to be honest with you but this one is extra special because of the wallpaper of course I knew I wanted to do a scenic uh mural in here and one of my favorite wallpapers is a designer it's IXL and Schumacher makes this paper and I use it a lot in my jobs they have beautiful beautiful designs that are um our Old Scenic murals and this one in particular is Italy and I fell in love with it I'm Italian so again that's a nod to something that has meaning to me and a special I thought it was so beautiful I had a lot of fun picking out the panels that we're going to go in here and what was going to go on each wall and when my son was really little he was super tiny we would I would hold him up and we would walk around this room and we would point to different things in the paper and that was really sweet because he would point out trees and cows and it's just kind of a funny story so every time I come in here I just kind of think about that little memory with him so that's really special so this is a great chandelier it's actually a replica of kind of a French Parisian style this one is has the little glass you know beads and it also is iron it's killed a gilded iron and if you look up you could see that beautiful original Medallion that's also on the ceiling so it's just a beautiful architectural detail along with the molding that you can also see along the ceiling here the crown molding it just makes the room special and I painted this room one of my favorite greens by pharaoh and ball this is one of those colors that you could honestly use everywhere and anywhere it goes with anything and it kind of changes based on what else you have in the room and I've used this many times for clients and I just was dying to use it for myself and I just love the way that it looks with this wallpaper because there's so many beautiful Greens in here so I think it works really nicely and so for the rug um this is an antique one-of-a-kind rug I wanted this to be a little more subtle since the wallpaper and paint is so strong and it was tricky to find just the right you know rug for in here um but I think we nailed it I love the the gold tones in here and it just pulls out all this beautiful kind of ocher that you see in the paper those are actually a gift from a friend I was hoping they were going to hang hang on till today and they you know this might be the last day but my friend sent those to me so they're beautiful it's actually from a French florist here in town Who funny enough did our wedding flowers and she didn't even know that so I thought that was really sweet I love doing um flowers in here this is a room that even though even though this is our dining room you know we use this super informally we don't have a breakfast room in this house so you know I sit in here all the time I'll bring my computer I do work here at this table little Collier you know we put a booster seat here and he you know eats at the table with us um you know I don't want our house to feel like it's so precious you know I want you to feel like you could sit at the table use your dining room um so even though it maybe feels um you know it has an element of dressiness to it it's a place where you know we use this when we have friends over um we will sit here and have pizza um so you know it's we don't have to do a four course dinner in the dining room it's a place that you could sit with friends and have pizza or you know with your child in the morning and have a bowl of cereal so um it's somewhere that makes me really happy I look at this wallpaper every day and I just love it so much it just really makes me happy so I think that's what's important in a home for sure the style of this house I would say is um a traditional Georgian style house you know it kind of has an English sensibility a lot of the architecture comes from you know a traditional English style it has the brick exterior which you know I just I love and in the front um one of the things that just really made me fall in love was that trilliage design in the front over the porch it's really charming and it has this beautiful like old metal roof and it's just really sweet and very unique and you know so many people have told me that they've driven by this house so many times and they just love you know how it looks from the street and it kind of I don't know it's a popular house it's kind of well known the area of town that we live in is a historic part of Atlanta and there's a lot of history on this street and kind of in the neighborhoods surrounding it so um It just fits perfectly in with all the the sweet little houses on this road which are traditional I would say the area is very traditional you know in Atlanta there's a lot of old beautiful neighborhoods so we really love it here okay this is our kitchen when we bought this house several years ago this kitchen looked way different you wouldn't even recognize it it had brick floors and the Cabinetry was like a mint green and the refrigerator was over there the stove was over there there was this was a wall so it was very tight um and it was just not going to work for us so when we bought this house we knew immediately that this kitchen we would have to tackle I had a lot of fun doing this kitchen and I think it really kind of changes the whole house again I wanted kind of an English you know sensibility as far as the aesthetic in this kitchen um just really clean I like the kitchen to be you know a clean area not too much clutter and you know this is just perfect an interesting thing about this kitchen is that's the original window from 1938 had to keep it I love opening the windows um because I burn things a lot so that was important that the windows open in here they are old windows and sometimes you don't have um you know a lot of times windows are painted shut so it was really important to us that we had these um you know functional I love this faucet this is by Waterworks I knew 100 I was doing brass I love brass it's kind of my my go-to with uh with plumbing all the time so I knew for sure that we were doing a beautiful brass faucet in here and again it's one of those things like the wallpaper in my dining room that I have that I look at every single day and I just love um I also knew I wanted marble in here and you know marble is one of those things where you either love it or hate it and for me I love it this is an old house I think it makes sense to have marble it's more traditional and yes you know it can stain and a lot of people are like I can't believe you did marble in your kitchen and I was like well you know I love it and it's beautiful it's a natural material and if I get a little ring on it or some wine well you know I'm just living in my house and so I'm okay with that um and we um we had to do this little tiny Island here because I definitely needed an island in this kitchen and I thought this was really sweet I did some research with um uh like English kitchens and I I would see a very simple Island on legs and I thought that was perfect for this kitchen and for this space when we have friends over and we have dinner parties or we're entertaining A lot of the times I set up food on this island and a lot of people Gather in here so yes because it is open to our dining room you have you know a flow going back and forth which is actually pretty convenient um if I'm in here at the sink you know prepping things the dining room's right there so it's actually kind of convenient if I'm making breakfast for Collier he can be sitting at the table and I can keep an eye on him so um it actually works out really well and you know that's just one of the things with an old historic home especially you know here in Atlanta they are a little more com compact I guess you could say so as much as I would love a gigantic kitchen this one is perfect um less cleaning and it just you know it just does it does the job and renovating it definitely makes it feel bigger and brighter because it is a small space so it's important that I you know keep it you know pretty clutter free in here and I'm one of those people that I don't really I mean I like to collect things but I don't like um clutter so you know it's kind of like organized chaos with my collections but then when it comes to the kitchen you know I can't stand having like you know baby bottles on the counter and um you know just utensils everywhere and my husband's kind of the same way I guess maybe we have OCD a little bit so it works well this is our main powder room and this room is it's really cute you know the wallpaper adds a little element of design that I love love pattern love wallpaper and I put an antique mirror in here we have a pedestal sink again with some Waterworks brass the floor in here is marble we added that everything in this room is new but I like it to look like it's always been here if that makes sense um originally this whole bathroom was green when we bought the house and it had black and white linoleum floors I believe um and it just was not I was not having it so we gutted this bathroom and you know everybody that comes over sees this room so I wanted it to be special and I think it feels like a little Jewel box I'm not a huge monogrammer it's really big in the south it's not really me but I think if you're going to do a little bit of monogramming a great place to do it is like in your powder room so I did bite the bullet and do a little monogram in here and I think it's really cute so now I'm going to take you upstairs and let's go check out the three bedrooms [Music] the first bedroom we have here is my son's room this is Collier's room so this is my son's room Collier I had so much fun designing this room for him um the starting point for this room was of course this drapery this is called India story and it's so adorable it has um just kind of like little Indian palaces and tigers and animals and flowers and you know we just kind of at night go through and look at this and point to all the little animals and say goodnight to everybody and I just knew that this would be really fun for him and something that he could grow into I guess you know that was important I didn't start with you know a super baby room for him that was just blue and white and this is something that he could grow into so that was important for me Collier has the probably the nicest rug in the entire house I love this rug this is an antique rug by moatar it's from moatar here in Atlanta one of my favorite rug sources and the color was absolutely perfect and I knew that he could sit on this and play and obviously if it gets stained you're not going to see it and this is something that he would probably have his whole life we did a cute little stripe in here the wallpaper and I found this neat little wicker light for him this painting right here is actually kind of special this is by Casey Hughes she's a artist out of Nashville and I've worked with her before she does really awesome art and before Collier was born I worked with her and she commissioned this piece for me I love working with artists because you know they make you exactly what you want and it's something that nobody else is going to have so again this is a special piece for Collier and I'm gonna you know give it to him one day and so he'll have that forever and just remember you know the love I put into this room and the time I took to just make him you know feel special and um so I love this piece Welcome to our guest bedroom what's special about this room is this was actually the furniture that my husband and I had um when we first got together this was our first bedroom and I love it so much obviously it's special to us I had to keep it and I still love it um it's really fun these um bunny Williams lamps you know obviously these are really cool the blues were perfect in here these draperies we had in our old home and I definitely had to reuse them so I had them reworked to fit this house because I loved them so much and I just had to use them and there's just a lot of things in this room that maybe we've had a little bit longer than others love this bed spread I found this on an antiquing trip I think I was up in New York and I found this this is from India and again a little oil painting you know I love this little one I didn't want the guest bedroom to feel too crowded and cluttered it's not the biggest guest bedroom so it was important that I use the space really wisely in here um but everybody seemed to love this room when they stay here it has just good light it has three windows and it's really comfy so that was important to me that guests feel that they could relax in here and that they feel comfortable and welcome something that I wanted to point out you know I love to collect things and one of the things that I'm going to start collecting is clocks this is an old little marble clock this was given to me by actually my partner my design partner he has the most massive collection of clocks I've ever seen in my life and this one is really beautiful it's white marble and it's an antique so this was kind of like the start of something again this is a oil painting it's old and one important thing about oil paintings is you always want to make sure that they are old this one says it's from 1918. and I always look at the back of oil paintings because you don't want to buy a replica so you want to make sure that the back is original and that it's original framing if it's signed you know that's a bonus if there's information on it I always try and keep the whoops I always try and keep the tags on everything so that I remember where I got it where it's from and even like how much I paid for I try and keep all of that intact or at least keep it in a little file when I buy all my art I think my house is really warm and cozy um it's not a grand house but I think that it has a lot of charm to it and I'm comfortable in this house you know when I when I come home from work I love to just plop down on the sofa or sit down on the floor and and play with my little boy and like to have friends over we entertain and it's just it's a comfortable home you know and it's a good reflection of really who we are we're not following Trends we're not trying to impress anybody it's just really what what we like and what speaks to us and last but not least is our bedroom so this room was again a challenge because we had little to no closet space um we love this room um but one thing is again it was tight so I had to think fast what are we going to do to add some closet space to this room we also decided to upgrade the master bathroom so we we kind of had to do that at the same time took some space out of the closet and made it part of the bathroom and in turn I decided to add these um I guess you could call them wardrobes um these closets and they're used a lot in Europe because they have the same issue with space kind of that we have in the smaller old homes here where there's just not a lot of closet space so we had these custom made and I wanted them to go all the way up to the ceiling and there's a ton of storage in them this is my side and Taylor's side is over there but this really solves the problem for us and as you can imagine they're so large that when they were made the contractor actually could not get them up the stairs because they were so long and he had to take them back to the shop and take them apart of course I was almost in tears over that but we had to go to plan B and kind of remake these a little bit because they were so tall we couldn't even get them up the stairs but that being said it was worth it and I love them so much they're very functional one of my favorite things about our bedroom is the canopy and when I presented this idea to my husband of course he was like I'm not going to sleep in that at night and I said well you're gonna love it it's gonna feel like we're you know at a hotel it's gonna feel like we're at the Saint Regis and you know I think that you know a hotel for me is just a place where I can always relax and I wanted the bedroom to have that same kind of sink actuary feeling so it's more kind of light and Airy in here you know the blue I feel is very soothing you know it's always a great choice for a bedroom and um you know every time I lay in this bed I just get a great night's sleep it's quiet and it kind of like you know cocoons around you and yes it is a little feminine for my husband but he's learned to love it so I could say that he definitely gets a good night's sleep in this bed so another one of my favorite oil paintings is this one I had to put this in the bedroom I thought the blues and greens were so pretty it's a gorgeous landscape I found that at an antique Market of course and it's just very soothing I love the the blue skies it's just I don't know relaxing and perfect for a bedroom and you know my love for all things chinoisery when I saw this desk I bought it I had nowhere to put it at the time but I just knew that I would love it and make a space for it so this is a neat little kind of vanity desk I keep a lot of you know Christmas cards and letters in here sweet little notes from my husband and um I have some you know special little things in here and then a wedding photo so this is just a sweet little area of our bedroom I love the framing in front of the window here and the Beautiful drapery of course with the blues and the ivories and the greens it's just a special little space where I could sit down and you know if I need to take notes on something you know I have this desk it's always great to have a little you know desk or a vanity in a bedroom so I love this one and so I had to make a space for it and it was perfect right in here this is our bathroom when we first moved here this uh bathroom was so tiny it only had one sink the toilet was over here and that behind me where the shower is was actually our closet made some changes we um you know gutted this whole room we added a beautiful marble floor custom Cabinetry marble in the shower and of course my favorite brass faucets these are from Waterworks and I love how they are really simple but they kind of have that vintage feel to them which I think is really appropriate to the house and you know what I'm doing bathrooms especially for me this being an old house it's important that the bathroom is classic you know I'm not looking for anything super trendy in the bathroom because we come and go let's say the bathroom's gonna stay here it needs to be timeless so it's really important that in a master bathroom that it's it's just classic and so that's what we wanted to do in here we have these little kind of vintage Ralph Lauren lights just very simple medicine cabinets are a must in a bathroom of this size because I have a lot of products and I like to have extra storage so I have everything in here and then plenty of space down here drawers cabinets you know they hold a lot of things so um it works out really perfect recently I put up this grass cloth just to add a little texture I don't have any artwork in here and I I kind of toy with that do I want to put something up but then again I just kind of like the bathroom to feel clean and just be like a functional place where you know we come in get ready and you know you don't spend a whole lot of time in here because it is you know a smaller bathroom but it works perfectly for the two of us so it's all we need I think a home is a place where you can be yourself where you can be comfortable where you can could live and and just feel safe and know that you could come there and um just feel good when you're in that space and when you're you have those walls around you and you you want to be there we love our home you know we um we like to stay home we like to be here um you know our ideal Friday night is you know sitting on the sofa with sushi and some wine and watching you know a movie or something and um you know it's a great location we have Parks you know we like to spend a lot of time outside so home is just somewhere that you you want to be thanks for watching for more homeworthy content be sure to like And subscribe

Channel: Homeworthy

Views: 259,040

Keywords: home, house, home tour, house tour, traditional decor, traditional home, classic home, grand millenial, atlanta, georgia, interior design, interior designer, home decor, antiques, antique, luxury, real estate, family life, dining room, renovation, sun room inspiration

Id: cvwE8k5Ubpo

Length: 42min 7sec (2527 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023