What we are reading this week about decorating and renovating old houses:

 


Door Sixteen has embarked on a major renovation project, her kitchen, starting with tiling the walls. Anyone familiar with blogger Anna Dorfman’s past renovation projects knows this is going to be wow. Actually, she’s keeping the look of her current kitchen, which we like, with its black Ikea cabinets and stainless appliances, and redoing the layout and the walls with tile and paint. There’s a lot of great information here about subway tile, which happens to answer many questions that have come up in the Forum, such as where to get it cheap and how to space the grout lines.
Kitchen Tiling Progress [Door Sixteen]
Photo by Anna Dorfman

 

In this post, English architect and shop owner Ben Pentreath declares that 2013 “is officially going to be the year of wallpaper.” That’s something we can get behind. “Now it is time to go really mad,” he continues. “Driving down on down to Dorset, I rapidly realised that more wallpapers is what I am missing in life.” He does what we do: He tapes a sample to the wall where it can be seen juxtaposed against other elements. In his case, these are art, curtains, and mantel accessories; in ours, the actual mantels and the woodwork (which is dark, and presents decoration challenges). Since his homes are all early 19th century, he’s going with expensive, to-the-trade-only historic papers from Adelphi (which makes perfect sense, since he’s an architect). We love the crazy yet refined patterns. Click through to the story to see psychedelic pineapples.
Lying Low [Inspiration]
Photo by Ben Pentreath

 

Big Old Houses takes a look at the New York Coaching Club and the area around Madison Square Park where it was located. The New York Coaching Club was a kind of hipster society of its time, in which a group of well-off young people preserved the romantic tradition of the by-then-vanquished-by-the-railroads English mail coach.
A Center of Fashion, a Century Later [Big Old Houses]
Photo Via Big Old Houses


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