Katie Rosenfeld Gives a Historic Massachusetts Home a Vibrant Second Life for a Growing Family
This Royal Barry Willis–designed house holds tight to its historic roots while its interiors honor old and new.
Read McKendree
While Boston-based designer Katie Rosenfeld stopped accepting minor consulting projects once her interior decorating business took off, she knew one client was worth taking a chance on. Rosenfeld and the ultra-stylish client, a young mom with a growing family, clicked immediately, and the designer knew this client would eventually provide her with the ultimate design project. Within three years, the client offered her a dream opportunity: to refresh a Royal Barry Wills–designed home in the nearby suburb of Wellesley.
The client had already hired Frank Shirley, a local architect specializing in historic preservation, who could treat the bones of one of these highly sought-after 1930s Colonial homes by Wills with tender care and respect. Once Rosenfeld came in and helped her choose the Chelsea Company as the builder, she and the client became joined at the hip, picking every tile, toilet, and fixture together until installation week.
"This is what I typically do with most clients, but she became like my little apprentice, choosing everything down to the floor stain," says Rosenfeld. "This house was so meticulously designed, and we had such a specific direction." While Rosenfeld typically leans into finding delicious juxtapositions between the old and new and the classic and edgy in her projects, the client became her ultimate muse, as her sense of style led the way for the design of this vibrant yet timeless home.
"We kept going back to fashion for inspiration, and I'm very interested in that world and getting dressed up and putting things together," says the designer. "A lot of her house is such a cool mix of high and low, and that's kind of the way she dresses. The design of this house is really no different than putting on an iconic piece of jewelry with a great pair of Zara jeans and a really funky coat. It's just that kind of decorating. It was curated but not overthought."
Each room echoes this notion of mixing the high and low to create an entirely unique ensemble in a way that no one else can. The dining room features a custom Urban Electric overhead light fixture and chairs from a consignment store, while the kitchen features floor-to-ceiling subway tile with an antique chestnut island and a special hutch they fastened to the wall to hold her prized cabbageware collection. It was all about creating classic, timeless spaces with just the right amount of edge.
"When you walked into her kitchen and bathrooms, we wanted it to look like it was the original space, just polished up nicely, historic and permanent but not at all fussy or overdone." This sentiment shows in both spaces, as the kitchen's antique island houses a stunning piece of Jurassic marble, the powder room features an early-20th-century style console, and the stylish primary bathroom houses a vintage dressing table, along with plenty of modern luxuries.
Visitors to this home would be shocked to discover the client originally wanted the home to be completely free of pattern or color, dreaming rather of a neutral sanctuary where whites, browns, and blacks reigned supreme. But once Rosenfeld convinced the client to broaden her horizons and create a more livable home for her soon-t0-be family of five, there was no stopping the pair from bringing an array of colors, patterns, and textures into this stunning setting.
"The big sell for me was the dining room," the designer says. "It wasn't that hard once she got on board, and she was very excited. I'd felt like one room should be outrageous, and this was the room." And so the space was swathed in Grace by Jasper Furniture & Fabrics (Michael S. Smith's brainchild), becoming the focal point of the home and the perfect place for entertaining. Rosenfeld says neutrals still served as the foundation of the rest of the rooms, with the wall colors and furniture skewing toward these hues in nearly every other space, but this one really needed to wow.
As with many recent projects, the biggest challenge of completing the work on this home was the pandemic. Rosenfeld was doing the home's install the week COVID-19 broke, and the client, nearly eight months pregnant then, and her family had to move in with little but paint on the walls and rugs on the floors, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together without any help. A group text between Rosenfeld and the client then became a lifeline for piecing together the details while the new homeowner could begin spreading her wings and putting her burgeoning design prowess to the test.
"All of the really personal details were done remotely, but finally, once we were allowed out of our houses, I could see it filled up with furniture," Rosenfeld recalls. "All of the art had been collected online and she had developed a plate collection. By the time it was photographed, it was a very true representation of the home. We didn't need to style it much at all besides with plants."
While the client could have never expected that she would have to wait to open her doors to loved ones—or even meet her new neighbors–until nearly a year after moving in, the house really took on a life of its own as the family sheltered in place. It became a safe haven for the family, a first home for their third child, and an incubator for building the client's design confidence, which has led to her joining Rosenfeld in her latest design venture, Vanity & Company, come 2022, hopefully, a year that will be far unlike the last.
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