HOME TOUR | The Boldly Colorful Boston Home of Interior Designer Liz Caan

People typically hire me for, I think, my use of color. And I think it's the ability to sort of create a fresh story every time we do a project. I love classicism. And I love tradition. But I sort of love it when it's reinterpreted. And so I guess I would describe it as fearless traditional. My name is Liz Kahn. And this is my home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. We've done a wide range of projects from very neutral and much cleaner and minimalist to layered and colorful and a little crazy. But I think that we can do both pretty well. And I enjoy the process so much. This house is very classic. It's very traditional. It's from the 20s. There's lots of small rooms. They all have a purpose. I wanted you to walk in and notice that we sort of reversed everything. We put black walls above the wainscoting. I think it helps people let their guard down. And I think that's the goal. You want everyone to feel comfortable. And I think when they see something funny, they're kind of like, oh, just a little giggle. The kitchen was very tiny originally. And I was trying to create a kitchen that didn't look like a kitchen. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish was to make it feel like a warm kitchen that also felt appropriate to this home. So we opened up the back of the house and added on a 3 foot by 15 foot addition. And it's all glass. And that helped give the illusion of more space. It also gave a lot more light to the space. One of the choices I made was to have an island that was not an island you sit at. We decided to put all of our glassware, my china, all of my serving dishes, all on this side of the island. On the other side of the island, we have all our everyday ware. So everyday dishes, bowls, we have containers that we store things in. And then everything that relates to sort of cooking is on the cooking wall, including all of our utensils. So it's actually very streamlined. I did need to get rid of a lot of things. So I decided instead of having three different everyday types of dishes, we went down to one. And I brought all my china up. And we actually use it on a regular basis. The dining room, I love this room. We probably shrunk it by 30% during the renovation. And weirdly, kind of a big win. We just didn't use the dining room when it was a formal dining room. So I wanted this room to actually be really comfortable for any time. You can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner. You can have a formal dinner party there. You can have a casual dinner party there. You can have a cup of coffee. You can use it as a workstation. It's actually this fun room that can become pretty much anything you want. The sofa that we're using as a banquette in there was my mother-in-law's. It was a Chippendale sofa that we had recovered in this really kind of pre-antiqued velvet, which is durable. And it shows nothing. And it's only going to get better with time. We reused our old dining room chairs. We just recovered them. And we bought a beautiful table. The priorities in that room were to make it comfortable and inviting and able to do a lot of things. The living room is a really great collection of things I've acquired. We did some minor changes. We changed the window treatments. We changed the furniture layout. We used all the furniture we had. This room, I feel like, is a great representation of how I think about design in terms of this kind of sweet but modern and handmade wallpaper paired with, like, army green curtains. So there was just this sort of, like, a masculine-feminine moment. All the color that's in this entire house is represented in this room in one way or another. And in different proportions, it's a lot like a recipe. But this room is comfortable. It seats a lot of people. And it's curious. Sometimes clients inherit furniture that they don't know what to do with. We've used the secretary that we inherited was to turn it into a bar. It's very useful. It stores a lot of things. And it's a fun way to repurpose something that hasn't been named. It's actually a big workhorse for the space. And it's kind of like a mini butler's pantry. And there's all these little drawers for your stationery. We filled them with, you know, maraschino cherries. There's cocktail napkins. There's multiple ice tongs. All those types of things are all stored away in these drawers. And we'll organize this so that this is very functional. And the marble protects the surface of the chest. The sunroom is our family room. It kind of serves a lot of purposes. You can read. You can watch television. It's really for kind of anything and anybody. It's the room where we sit and hang out together. We watch TV. We have friends over. We have drinks. This room is broken up with a lot of windows, as you can see. There's not a lot of wall space. So one of the first decisions I made was to really paint everything one color. So it's this high gloss paint from the crown to the floor. And that helped unify all of the edges and keep it clean. This is a rug from Morocco. These are some, you know, honestly inexpensive tables I acquired years ago. And I still love them. I layered a lot of patterns together and hung one of my favorite pieces of art over the window because I don't actually have a wall. So the window was it. This desk was my husband and grandfather's desk. And it's where I house a lot of my design books where we use for inspiration and research. After we lacquered, funny enough, the ceiling just sort of fell flat. It was white. And it just kind of wasn't really standing up to all the other elements happening in this room. So that's a good case to wallpaper your ceiling. And so I chose this great cloud wallpaper. I know it's popular. It's just, I think, such a winner. And this room has a lot happening. And the ceiling needed to join the party. I think stairwells are sometimes overlooked. And they're actually really important, kind of almost like a ribbon that ties everything together. A stairwell, from the rug runner to how you treat, I don't know, your banisters to the walls, I think is really important. And there's a nice way to, I guess, connect the dots. I strategically wanted to make this a gallery space. So we have white wainscoting. And then we did the black walls and hung all the art on the walls. I had this runner made by Merida. It's an undyed natural wool, which is so durable and beautiful. And it's gray. So it's just this gray undyed natural wool. And then we did this orchid border that's woven into the rug. It goes from the first floor all the way to the third floor. The continuity of all of that, I think, helps tie everything together. My oldest son, Henry, his room is on the top floor. And so it has a lot of ceiling lines. And the ceilings are really low. The room's been painted before. And it never really looked great. We chose to wallpaper the entire room. And this is a nice trick. I think when you have a lot of, again, visual disruption with the architecture, or lack of architecture, you can actually cover the whole room and envelop it in one pattern. So we did this big buffalo check. We actually took a fabric, had it paperbacked, and then applied to the wall. And it's not upholstered. It's papered. But it's sort of this nice way to add some texture. This may be one of the world's smallest bathrooms ever. But we have a limited amount of space. And so when I was designing this, we decided that we needed to use every square inch. I did choose a floating smaller vanity. It was more beautiful. So that was kind of the other tip, is to choose really beautiful materials. I chose to do two medicine cabinets. It's more mirror. It's more space. My husband and I each have our own. This is my family home. So my goal was to experiment a bit. I wanted to include all of the things that I sort of loved and have collected over the years on my travels. I wanted this house to feel appropriate to what it is architecturally. But I also thought it should be interesting and inspiring and have a little humor. The goal was to really create a home that was warm and inviting. I wanted people to come in and just feel comfortable and welcome and curious. I want people to explore things and ask questions. And I think it's a conversation starter.