Step Inside Ceara Donnelley’s Charleston, SC Home

I mean I fell in love with this house before I fell in love with this town and saw it from day one [Music] I'm Kira Donnelly I'm an interior designer here in Charleston South Carolina and you're at my house and we're getting ready for the holiday season [Music] this is a classic Charleston single house and it was built originally in 1740 there was a big fire in Charleston so it is understood that it mostly burned down but this wall was with the arched Windows survived and then it was probably rebuilt from the inside out it was beautiful you can see there's a lot of original detail all of this paneling has been preserved for centuries but it was a huge huge project when I came in here I was like this is the perfect blend of an amazingly historic house with Incredible detail and I love that I grew up in a brownstone in New York with a lot of you know Woodwork and original detail but also it needed a lot of work it needed a modern kitchen and needed new bathrooms it needed to be reimagined for modern day life with kids and animals and there was so much to work with I love this house I have a deep deep personal attachment to it but I don't really feel ownership over it people in Charleston talk a lot about with these old houses you're kind of stewards of them it doesn't feel like mine and the public can't enjoy it [Music] this is the entry hall two things I knew I wanted to do and have in this house was do a painted floor and then I also thought it was really important in this Central stair Hall to create as much light as possible so we added spots for these sconces which I brought these down with me from New York and we added the sconces next to the windows going up the stairs and then the most important thing is we did this really subtle but reflective Venetian plaster on the walls going up the entire stair Hall this is the what most people would call the formal living room my kids call it the fancy room it does not mean it's off limits we are in here a lot this artwork was really the first piece of Contemporary Art I bought for myself I sort of inherited a lot of art from my parents that was more traditional but I really like tension between old and new and when I saw this piece by Kazumi Yoshida and the sort of very modern geometric aspect of it I thought it would be amazing against these old paneled very traditional walls and I love that it's this bright bright white against the creamier White this room it's a workspace it's an entertaining space and it is really like its main purpose I think it's most important purpose is to be the Christmas space decorating for Christmas always starts with the Christmas tree always a live tree the first thing I do when I walk into a house or an apartment is things like where does the Christmas tree go you know it's only one month of the year but it's a really important month and then decorating the Christmas tree is always a little bit of a party and we blast Christmas music which really is kind of blasting all month long [Music] I think I am acutely aware of the fact that I am in charge of creating memories and traditions and things that my kids will hold on to into their adulthood it's because I want to create an experience for them and for me the dining room really took shape around the chandelier it's a reproduction of a Tony ducat Chandelier and then it was a trip actually to Drayton Hall that gave me the idea for this wall color I'm not a huge blue person actually but this blue just became a sort of signature Hue for the house this room didn't have a rug for a really long time and I wasn't going to put one in it but then I saw this snake rug I had to have it [Music] there are a few Traditions that I've sort of stumbled into one is my front door several years ago a very close friend of mine who's just a design florals event Guru Blake Sams said you know like there's this great new Garland Magnolia Garland coming out of North Carolina do you want me to do your front door I fell in love with it and then it became this sensation and it was this really lovely festive backdrop for Christmas cards and photo shoots wedding shoots after that first year I was like oh I have to do this every year people expect this of me so I sort of think of it as my like Christmas present holiday present to the City of Charleston foreign [Music] we built these bookshelves in to match the original paneling and the thing I love the most about this room and what I was very intentional about when I was choosing its colors was that I wanted any color to work in this room you'll look around their Reds there are Blues purples obviously that's the color of the room there are beautiful monochromatic houses and neutral palettes I am not a person who feels comfortable in that environment I need a lot of color I think it's really great to have a room in the house where you can almost put anything in there and it'll look great so as you can see in this room I have a lot of books but I have a lot of decorating books and a lot of art books and I have accumulated those over the years and that has really been the source of my education in decorating and design that is how I've honed sort of my craft and learned what I love is by looking what at what the Masters have done and seeing what inspires me when I think about what I do for a living you know I trained as a lawyer and a lot of family things happened that sort of pulled me into the domestic sphere in a way that I didn't ever intend to be in and I'd always loved design I kind of wrestled with it for a long time figuring out where is the meaning in this work and it really comes down to home and I think home is extraordinarily important in the development of people and kids home isn't obviously about only about furniture or you know paint colors it's about creating a sense of safety and belonging and acceptance and that's what I want to do for my kids for a few reasons the bedroom's my favorite room so it's very much in this center of the house and things kind of radiate off of it and that's how it lives for me it houses my bed which is maybe the thing I've designed that I'm most proud of had this fabric that I was like desperate to use it was just the right sort of almost highlighter yellow but texture silk brocade amazing but that is not a fabric someone who has kids and cats can really live with in a responsible way so I had this stroke of you know Insight I was like oh I can put it on the top of the tester bed where no one can reach it but I can wake up every morning and look at it I refer to this as the family room but in reality it's kind of the dog room this is where they hang out this is a room that evolved over time originally it was painted this very pale pale blue and then I saw this pixel wallpaper and just thought okay we're gonna go in completely different direction from this sort of icy blue to this really warm Rich Art Deco wall covering I designed this mantle out of soapstone it's obviously much more modern than the other mantels in the house but I didn't want to again try to compete with the historic fabric originally this was a solid wall we were able to put in these doors out to the pool and it really allows us to live indoors and Outdoors and often there are little like wet footprints that trail through this room as the kids are coming in from the pool as much as I tell them to dry off they do not these banana trees were on the property when we bought it I love that both on the first floor and on the second floor through the steel Windows really all you see is banana leaves much of the time this is one of the things that you just don't get very many places is banana trees that actually produce a ton of bananas so it's a pretty special thing to be able to have my own little banana Farm outside my kitchen door [Music] if I had to describe the holiday season in this house I would say chaos or chaotic but good chaos I mean there's always something going on people coming in and out animals I would say it's cozy something that's really nice about old houses is there are a lot of fireplaces and festive I would say I want it to feel joyful and celebratory not just on like Christmas Eve and Christmas but all month long thank you

Channel: Schumacher1889

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Id: sW6IJ4WVAvg

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022