Above, one of eight new
nichos
added to Casita
Alegria. |
Linda's Newest Project:
Casita Alegria
A
year ago, on one of their regular R&R trips to Santa Fe,
New Mexico, Linda and her husband finally fulfilled their dream of
buying
a home in the Southwest. The old adobe, on the historic east
side of the "City Different," as Santa Fe is called by the locals,
needed
complete restoration but had great bones, and they knew it was the
right place for them.
The restoration took a year to complete - just in time for Linda's Design in the Desert
seminar last weekend. They call it
"Casita Alegria," meaning "little house that is filled with
happiness." The completed home is featured in
the September
21 issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper and online.
In an
interview with writer Patricia West-Barker, Linda talked about the
project, her design seminar in Santa Fe, and her new book, "Linda Applewhite's Architectural
Interiors." Here is an excerpt and photos from the article:
Interior Design: Bones and beauty
By PATRICIA WEST-BARKER | The New Mexican
September 19, 2007
Linda Applewhite talks about houses the way a modeling agent or casting director might talk about aspiring
new stars: It’s all about bones and beauty, the veteran interior designer says.
By “bones” Applewhite means built-in features such as beams, arches, niches, windows, doors,
moldings, columns, stairways, fireplaces and cabinetry — the architectural details that help define and distinguish a room or a
building. “I found that adobes are a lot like Victorians in San
Francisco,” Applewhite said. “They have little rooms and they tend to be dark.”
The house she bought “had
good bones,” the designer said, “but we embellished it even
further ... opening up the stairway — which looked like it was from New
England, with little tiny pickets — while still keeping the
lintels and the posts. We could have sheetrocked that (feature) and we
didn’t do it. We respected
it.” |
This
was the house’s narrow
galley kitchen before Applewhite
took
out a wall and redesigned
thespace. The result can be seen
in
the photo below. |
Applewhite also took on the narrow galley kitchen and the three tiny dark rooms on the first floor, removing
walls and bringing light and color into the space.
To maintain the flavor of
New Mexico — honoring the existing architecture is another key tenet of
her
work — Applewhite did extensive research before she picked up a trowel
or a color chart. The two books she found most helpful, she said, were
two Museum of New Mexico publications: New Mexico Style: A Sourcebook
of Traditional Architectural Details and New Mexico Furniture
1600-1940: The
Origins, Survival and Revival of Furniture in the Hispanic Southwest.
From these books she
selected the scallop and chip-carving details that became the themes of
the house,
embellishing custom-designed tiles, cabinetry and furniture. The design
for the new ballusters on the staircase came from those sources as
well.
|
Linda Applewhite knocked down walls to bring
light and color to what had been three dark
rooms
on the first floor of her Santa Fe home.
Photo by Jane Phillips/The New Mexican |
|
Linda Applewhite, an interior designer,
sits in her home on Friday afternoon.
Photo by Jane Phillips/The New Mexican |
Applewhite
left the living room fireplace and the windows as they
were, but added new French doors to brighten the dining area and help
connect the garden outside with the interior of the home. She also
added eight
new nichos to the one she found in the house.
“Hopefully we’ve kept the flavor of New Mexico,” Applewhite said.
“This is an old adobe so I tried to honor it — but this is really where we live and I felt that opening (the house) up to
today’s living style was an appropriate thing to do.”
Readers need not be on the verge of a major remodel — or own a million-dollar or
historic home — Applewhite said, to benefit from her workshop or her book.
“This
is a great book for people with tract homes,” she said,
“because a lot of the chapters are about decorative rather than
structural changes. There’s a lot you can do without remodeling your
whole house to give it more character.”
You can do a lot with inexpensive cabinetry and lighting and with paint, she said,
noting that all the colors on her walls were off the Sherwin Williams shelf.
The
goal of both her workshop and the book, Applewhite said, is to help
people bring
more beauty into their lives. A painter as well as a designer and
decorator, Applewhite works with color and light as well as structure
to create
what she calls “a house that glows.”
“A lot of people are a little bit afraid of color,” Applewhite said,
“but I’m not. I think color is life-enhancing and it has a vibrational quality. I think it really can nurture you.”
Whatever a client’s color choices, Applewhite “always creates homes that
feel good.” So much of creating a beautiful space, she said, “is about the way a room feels, not just the way it
looks.”
Linda and Su Casa Magazine Make a Great Team!
Casita Alegria will also be featured in the Spring 2008 issue of
Su Casa, the Southwest's leading design magazine. Su Casa has asked Linda to be an ongoing contributor to the
magazine and we think this is a truly great pairing! Stay tuned for more information in the coming months.
|
ROOMS THAT
GLOW
Linda used warm, neutral colors, soft lighting,
buttery fabrics and reflected sunlight to create this guest room in the
Hotel Sausalito. |
Linda in the Valley of the
Moon
Wednesday, October 24
3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Please join Linda at
Sonoma Country
Antiques in the heart
of Northern California's wine country for wine, cheese, and a
presentation on "Rooms that
Glow." This exquisite showroom, located in the Valley of the Moon, is
one of Linda's favorite shopping spots for fine European country
furniture and
antiques, lighting, collectibles, gifts and housewares. It's
open to the public,
so come to Sonoma for the day and drop in to hear Linda talk about
how you can warm and enliven your rooms with lighting,
fabrics
and the colors she calls her "glow palette."
For more information, call 707 938 8315.
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