Brief: renovation and restoration of a 1917 Craftsman House in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2018 my husband and I and our 6-month-old son left Manhattan to move to new haven, where my husband grew up and I had lived during my undergraduate and graduate studies. After nearly two years of looking at houses, we found a simple craftsman house in the St. Ronan neighborhood of new haven with a beautiful slate roof, a circular flow, and a back yard. We spent 6 months renovating what is now our home.

We focused our architecture and interior renovation efforts on the spaces we would use the most. The kitchen was gut renovated with respect given to the original layout. We stripped it to the studs, keeping only a single cabinet dating back to the 1950s as a remnant of what was there. Dark cabinetry and heated black marble floors are offset by a 3" thick antique heart pine island top fabricated by a local craftsman. The original wood herringbone floors were restored, and places where the wood had been removed years before were replaced with black marble tile in varying sizes. The first-floor powder room was updated with brass fixtures and vine covered wallpaper, and the entire house was painted in shades of white and grey. The light fixtures are by George Nelson, Louis Poulsen, Michael Anastadias and cedar and moss.

The interior design was completed organically. We brought things with us from our previous homes and interspersed them with pieces from First Dibs, Chairish, Herman Miller and CbB2.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the process was thinking about where we would hang our art- nearly all work by emerging artists that we had accumulated over the years from our time living in Vietnam and from trips abroad. The finished renovation feels balanced. There is something calming about respecting the bones of a place while also imbuing it with new life.