Prior to announcing to the homeowners that they had finished their work, interior designers Liz Slutzky and Joanna Jones of Torus Interiors, and the general contractor for the project, Michael DiMeo of DiMeo Construction, took off their shoes and socks one more time. They walked through every room in the Westport house making sure all was well.
“For many days while we were putting together the rooms,” says Jones, “Liz, Michael and I walked around barefoot to make sure that none of us got splinters from the reclaimed heart-pine boards that were laid throughout.” Homeowner Amanda Snyder, adds, “It’s a phenomenon we all came to call ‘barefoot-friendly floors,’ and that’s what we have. Neither I, nor my husband or our two-and-a-half year old have ever gotten a single splinter or a stubbed toe, despite the boards being so weathered and uneven.”
Getting the floors right—using boards from the Hudson Company that were deliberately knotted and chinked but then sanded to smoothness—was one of the first directives to which the design duo attended. “A funny phrase we used during the process is that we wanted to build ‘a new old house’,” says Slutzky. “We said to the client that using old heart pine for the floors will be that one stunning detail everyone notices,” Jones remarks.
A two-story foyer was created during the renovation. A console from Lawson-Fenning is paired with a 1950s ottoman through Chairish upholstered in a Rosemary Hallgarten alpaca. The painting along the stairs is Head for the Hills by Diana al-Hadid through Winston Wächter Fine Art.
A century-old house came back to life in every room, but especially in the living room, which is furnished with a Lawson-Fenning sofa in a Schumacher fabric, an elegant chaise upholstered with a Mark Alexander linen, a vintage coffee table, and a striking Moshekwa Langa artwork, Mosesetjana II, through Winston Wächter Fine Art.
In the dining room, Kelly Ventura’s Meadow Fern wallpaper and Benjamin Moore’s Caldwell Green paint complement a Jacob May dining table set with chairs covered in Mokum’s alpaca velvet. The chandelier is through 1stDibs.
Pendants from Currey & Company illuminate the custom island composed of walnut and Taj Mahal quartzite.
The breakfast nook is furnished with a custom white oak table set with vintage slat-back chairs upholstered in a Brook Perdigon Textiles fabric, while a Thibaut fabric adorns the banquette.
The kitchen opens onto a completely reinvented exterior.
Hoffman Landscapes was responsible for removing hundreds of pounds of bedrock, regrading the yard, installing stone pathways, lining the perimeter of the property with trees, and creating a spacious outdoor kitchen/dining/lounge area, complete with a fireplace.
An upstairs hallway is lit with a series of flush-mount lights from Soho Home.
Her office is equipped with a Soho Home desk, a vintage loveseat upholstered with a Pollack Textiles fabric, and a Visual Comfort ceiling light.
In the primary suite, a Maiden Home bed is clad in a Pollack Textiles fabric, and the sconces are Urban Electric.
Nasco wall tiles through Bella Pietra are used in the primary bath; the Stone Workshop countertop is composed of quartzite.
In his office on the upper level of the cottage, a wall of custom shelves become a practical solution and an aesthetic one. A vintage lounge chair uses a Rogers & Goffigon fabric.
This was an old, frankly rundown, circa-1910 house in Westport’s picturesque Stony Point neighborhood. The couple, then living in Brooklyn, purchased the property as an investment, but, eventually, were so taken with the house’s scale and locale, given its sightlines to the Saugatuck River, that they decided to move in. “They felt strongly about not wanting to wipe out the original character of the house,” says Jones. “Our intention from the start was to keep the charm of an older home,” says Snyder, a prominent art consultant, who is a partner at Winston Wächter Fine Art.
But once the demolition of interior walls began, it became apparent that the original charm was a thing of the past. The reclaimed heart-pine floors were among the elements brought in to foster a feeling of age. “Once the contractor broke through the walls, we knew we couldn’t keep anything original,” says Snyder, “not even one wall.”
The footprint of the house was extended to incorporate a new bedroom and dining room, the former kitchen became a skylight-lit mudroom, and an adjacent two-story concrete garage was transformed into an office for the husband with guest quarters below. The ceiling at the entry to the home was opened up to create a vaulting, sweeping two-story-high foyer, marked by a checkerboard floor and an elegant staircase made, yes, also of heart pine.
Slutzky and Jones even re-created some original elements. A redbrick fireplace in the kitchen, for instance, had to be wholly dismantled and discarded. “Liz and I went to a local brickyard and handpicked enough old bricks to make a new fireplace and mantel that replicates the old,” says Jones.
Meanwhile, the arrestingly large, yet still intimately scaled, 600-square-foot kitchen, is defined also by an island whose surface is composed of a handsome walnut and off-white quartzite. “Amanda is an expert cook, she has an incredible collection of copper pots that she wanted to display, and she definitely didn’t want a typical all-white kitchen,” explains Slutzky. As a result, she and Jones designed a novel island that the homeowner says with pride, “looks like a real piece of furniture—it even has turned wooden legs.”
Because the designers had worked on the couple’s prior Brooklyn townhouse, they already knew their clients’ aesthetics. “Nothing shiny, lots of matte finishes, nothing predictable or cookie-cutter like,” as Slutzky relates. “It’s wonderful working with a client a second time,” adds Jones, “because there’s already that level of trust. They understand what our vision is and we know what theirs is.” Snyder concurs by adding, “We trusted Liz and Joanna implicitly. The more we work with them, the more control we’re happy to give them.”
Now that the house is complete, Snyder and her husband and child increasingly go barefoot. “The rounded edges of the boards feel almost therapeutic, very organic and soft on the feet,” she says. “That’s a detail of life at home we feel every day.”