CHRISTMAS HOME TOUR | A Texas Home Transformed with Vintage Charm and Holiday Decor

Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Audrey. Welcome to my home in Austin, Texas. Come on in. This holiday season, get ready to unwrap the most magnificent holiday homes with Homeworthy's 25 Days of Christmas. For the month of December, we'll take you inside the most heartwarming houses decked out for the holidays in true festive fashion. From twinkling lights and elegantly trimmed trees to sparkling ornaments and cozy holiday charm, these homes capture the warmth, wonder, and beauty that make this season so special. So join us as Homeworthy celebrates 25 Days of Christmas. The magic starts now. Raise your glass. Cheers. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Hi, I am Audrey Scheck. I am an interior designer in Austin, Texas. Welcome to my home. It is a spec home that was built by a builder before we came into the process, so we actually had no opportunity to customize it in any way. So we purchased it from the builder and then spent quite a bit of time remodeling. So we came in, we ripped and replaced most of the hard finishes and donated them. And then we have spent the last four years, since we've been living in the home, adding personality and character and layers with different colors and textures and artwork to really make it feel reminiscent and reflective of who we are in our personal aesthetic. And just when I feel like I'm done, I'm not. I come up with another idea. And it's a great testing ground, if you will, for for the firm, for the design firm. So I test a lot of concepts and ideas and vendors here in my personal home, so I call it my creative playground. Welcome to our entryway. Right when you walk in the front door, this space really sets the tone for the entire home. So it was important to me that we incorporated touches of vintage. The bench is vintage from Round Top, and then we sprinkled in some different things that look and feel like the rest of the home. So we have textiles in a red and green pattern here that feel like holiday. We've added some gold wreaths on top of our artwork, and this is a piece by an artist named Cater Bowley, who does really beautiful work. This is called The Herd. It is a print that I just love. I think his work is so interesting, and I feel like this really sets the tone for how you're going to feel moving through the rest of the home. We have a pocket door here that separates our entryway from a guest area. There's a guest bedroom and a guest bathroom. Before you get in there, we have a vintage bentwood coat rack hanging on the wall, where I leave a hat. I actually wear that hat all the time. I pull it and take it and run out the door, so it is functional. But again, bringing in those touches of vintage is really important when you're in this space. And then on this wall, I have artwork by my friend Eileen Fitzgerald. She's a local artist based here in Austin. She does a lot of landscape artwork. This is obviously an ocean scene with a purple wave. My favorite color is purple, so I actually got this print from her because it was something that she did where she started using purple, and I just love the colorway of it. So she framed it in a beautiful vintage frame that we hand painted with some gold to make it feel really authentic and to tie in with the colorways and waves. So this piece is really special to me because I'm good friends with Eileen, and I really like to have her artwork throughout my home, as you will see. The vibe of our home is definitely transitional, and it's constantly evolving. So I don't try to back myself into any box. Sometimes certain spaces feel a little bit different from other spaces, and I just imagine that that's an evolution of my style and aesthetic changing. So I'm always fine with a little bit of imperfection and imbalance. Now I'll take you into my office. Follow me! Now we are in our home office. So this space is super important to me because it is the first room that people see when they walk in the door. So you come off the entryway, take a left, and you're in the office. And if I were designing my own home with an architect, I would never put an office at the front of my home. But this was a spec home that we purchased from a builder, so we didn't get to make those decisions. So here we are. So we did our best to really bring some personality and character into this space. We added vertical millwork going about halfway up the wall, and then on the top of the walls we added a wallpaper. This is actually an Australian wallpaper from a company called These Walls, and the pattern is called Tilly, which is my daughter's name. And I did not know that when I picked it out, so it felt like it was meant to be in here in our home office. So we have a corner desk here and a black wood that kind of nestles over here to really ground the space. And then we brought in some greenery to give it a little bit of life, again with some artwork. I love to display artwork on an easel rather than mounting it on a wall, especially when there's a wallpaper involved. I tend to be a little careful about that. So artwork, greenery, ambient lighting with a lamp. This is a vintage lamp that we found at Round Top and I just love. So anytime we can utilize ambient lighting instead of overhead lighting, I always opt for that. Over next to the desk, we have a really cozy vintage chair that was reupholstered by one of my favorite vendors from Round Top. They're called The M. They're actually out of North Texas, and they come to Round Top twice a year and bring beautiful furnishings that they've reupholstered. And so this chair was actually a pair, and during the holidays, we moved the other chair to our stairwell and brought a rubber tree in here. And my husband and I just decided that we liked it so much like this that we're going to leave it like this and leave a chair in the stairwell and one in here with a tree, which is perfect because now the tree is next to a window and it gets lots of bright natural light facing the front of our house. So speaking of home office and what we do for work, we are a full service design firm and we partner with Tald to offer virtual consultations to anyone and everyone around the country. So if you're looking to consult with a designer on anything related to your home, whether it's hard finishes, construction, remodels, furnishing, styling, anything, Tald is a great platform to connect with designers and I would love to chat. So for the holidays, I layer in lots of different details sprinkled around. So we have holiday decor in bathrooms and areas where you wouldn't traditionally decorate, but we keep our decor up for a full two months. So I really like to spread it out and give myself some longevity. And it is a mix of decor that is representative of our personal aesthetic and fits the heritage and the vibe of the home. And I also sprinkle in lots of little special moments. I have figurines here in our living room that I collected when I was a little girl. So there are definitely sentimental special moments sprinkled around. Now we'll leave the office and head into the guest room area. Now we're in our guest bedroom. So this space is utilized quite often. We have guests who come to visit all the time. So we really wanted this space to feel warm and cozy and like it could be someone's own oasis. So to start, we added vertical millwork again to the walls in here. This time we went floor to ceiling and we drenched the whole room in one of my favorite colors, accessible beige. So the millwork, trim, doors, and ceiling is all painted the same color. So it gives it that warm, cozy feeling in here. And then the bed is actually the piece of furniture that we have had the longest. My husband and I bought this when we moved in together in 2014 and we still have it, which is shocking because as a designer, I love to change things out and I'm known for not holding onto anything for too long. So this bed means a lot to me because it's been through a lot of moves with us and it has held up beautifully. We grounded the space with a vintage rug. So throughout our home, we have vintage rugs everywhere. They are so durable and especially in a guest space with high traffic, they're a great option for something that you really don't have to worry about. They've already weathered so much. They've been through a lot and it's nearly impossible to ruin them. So I love that we were able to find one that fit appropriately in here to ground the bed and the nightstands. And speaking of the nightstands, there is a pair of black wooden nightstands in here. I really love the contrast of a darker wood tone against a lighter wall and a lighter bed frame. So it was important to me that we were able to find some that would fit in the room and that were a dark tone. And then on each nightstand, we have a beautiful handmade lamp that's made of a marble base with a woven shade. I love how tiny and dainty they are. So it was very intentional to have small lamps in here to make sure that we could maximize the space where guests could actually function and utilize the nightstands. Above the bed, we have a vintage piece of artwork that I found at Round Top at one of my favorite stores called Box Road. And this piece, just the chunky gold frame felt so appropriate and the scale of it fit nicely above the bed. One rule of thumb, whenever you're looking for artwork, whether it's for a wall or on top of a piece of furniture, make sure that you're filling at least two-thirds the space of the eye. So in this case, the bed frame itself, I took the measurement of the bed frame and I knew that I wanted artwork that filled at least two-thirds of the width of the top of the bed frame. Similarly, if you were looking for artwork for a wall, I would use the same rule of thumb. How wide is the wall? I want to fill at least two-thirds the space of the wall. And we also decorated the headboard in here for holiday. We added some faux garland with beautiful burgundy velvet ribbons hanging from either side. And then we sprinkled little touches of holiday decor on each nightstand. So we have some trees, some vintage brass deer, just little touches of holiday that coordinate nicely with the green quilt and the burgundy colors in the vintage throw pillows. Directly across from the guest bedroom is the guest bathroom. So we're in a corridor right now where that pocket door divides this area for guests. So there's lots of great privacy for them to make this their own little home away from home. In this bathroom, we intentionally made it feel really dark and moody by painting the walls in a beautiful rich brown color, which is called London Clay by Farrow and Ball. We also removed the texture from these walls. So in Texas, texture is a big thing on walls, which really drives me nuts. So I try to cover up drywall as much as I can with millwork or wallpaper. In here, we just remove the texture, which feels so nice. And I wish I could just do it everywhere in our home. So the dark bathroom feels really moody and it feels different from the guest room. So the room is a lighter taupe color. This one is definitely more dark and cozy. And one tip is that whenever you have a small space, a lot of people tend to think, I could never use a dark paint in there because it's going to feel even smaller. The opposite is actually true. We tend to go dark in smaller spaces because it helps to make it feel intentional and more interesting rather than just walking in and feeling like it's small and you're paralyzed by that. Making it dark and intentional suddenly makes it interesting and cool instead of just feeling like you're in a tight space. So the dark walls are one of my favorite things in here. We added some touches of holiday with the burgundy velvet ribbon, which I put throughout the home. Again, with some little trees, very simple to just like quickly make your bathroom feel like the holidays, like the rest of your home. One fun thing that we did in this bathroom was we updated the cabinet fronts. So we work with a local cabinet company called Alchemy and I was really interested in making a taller, more dramatic cabinet front face for this vanity that there was a dummy drawer here and then shorter cabinet doors, but I really wanted an exaggerated cabinet face and I wanted one that had some curvature to it. So because this was a builder grade spec home, all the cabinetry was a standard shaker profile, which I appreciate and left in most of the spaces. But in here, I really wanted something a little more whimsical and dainty. So we worked with Alchemy to customize the curvature of this eyebrow curve on the top and the bottom profile of the cabinet faces. And then for the paint, we actually saturated the wall color to 150%. So it's actually just 50% darker than the walls, which most people wouldn't know, but I think it's a fun way to make your cabinetry feel a little bit different, but still feel like it's matching. Possibly the most important piece in our entire home is this vintage mirror. I have had it with me since 2015 when we purchased our first home in Los Angeles. I found it at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and it is something that people ask us about all the time because it is so unique. It's a vintage Venetian mirror with some beautiful floral etching in it. I love the curves on it. It has this nice patina that doesn't make it too worn. It's still really functional, but it has this appeal and character that just feels really glam and beautiful in here. So I mentioned that I rotate things out of my house a lot. We sell a lot of things and I'm constantly changing things out. This is one thing that will never leave. The artwork in here is a stack of two original paintings by my friend Eileen Fitzgerald. These are reminiscent of the Texas Hill Country and I love that juxtaposition of light and dark and that they play off of one another. They're not matchy and they're framed in a really beautiful wooden inset frame that just gives them that nice depth and character. So some of my favorite artwork by Eileen and like I mentioned she sprinkled throughout the house which I just love. In the shower we used a rosemary ceramic tile from Fireclay and we stacked it vertically and took it all the way up to the ceiling. So you'll notice in all of the showers that we do we typically run the the tile on the walls from floor to ceiling to really elongate the eye and draw the eye up to make the room feel even bigger. And then in here we stuck with frameless glass to make it feel really light and open. The plumbing that we use is actually a living finish. It's a brass from a small shop out of the east coast called Atmosphere. They make really really beautiful patina plumbing. So the shower trim matches the faucet in here and I'm about to extend it up to my daughter's bathroom because we love it so much. And now we'll head into the dining room. Welcome to our dining room. This space is next to the office one of the most visible rooms in the house. One thing that we did in here that feels really special is we customized the entry into here. So when the builder built the home it was a traditional squared off drywall framing to come into the space and I worked with one of our local contractors to customize the curvature of this framing. I actually drew it with my finger on my phone screen and then worked with him to map it out with cardboard and then we came back and filled it in with drywall so that it has this just pretty curvature to kind of set the tone for the space being special. Our dining table is a long walnut oval table. I love that it has curved ends because there is a high traffic area right behind this captain's chair and the curve kind of makes it feel a little softer. And then the table is grounded with one of my favorite things our vintage dining room chairs. I found these at Round Top from one of my favorite vendors Prize KC. Stephen the owner curates vintage furniture from all over the world. He found these in Amsterdam, stripped the stain off of them, reupholstered the chairs, and I saw them last year and knew that I had to have them in our dining room. I feel like it's really special to mix new and old. So the table is new, the chairs are old, and you'll see that a lot throughout our home. We mix vintage with new often. And then in the dining room our chandelier is these beautiful reeded globes with a brass finish on them. We mix finishes a lot at our design firm and I do the same here in my home. So you'll see a lot of mix of different brass finishes incorporating blacks. I love a polished chrome. So it was important to me that there was something in here that brought in that touch of a pretty metal and that wasn't too matchy with anything else that was happening in this space. So in our dining room there is artwork by another another local Austin-based artist named Taneya. She actually creates her own pigments and creates landscape work that I really admire. So this piece we worked with her to customize the size of it and frame it so that it filled two-thirds the width of the bankette below it. And I love that it just it's it's subtle enough and it's not too dramatic and yet it still feels really intentional. We flanked it with ceramic sconces by Huey Lighting. These are actually not functioning. We just mounted them on the wall. We didn't need the lighting in here so rather than going through you know working with an electrician to actually run the wires we just mounted the fixture on the wall and they don't actually work and nobody knows except for everyone knows now. So for holiday purposes our dining room is quite an important part of the home. We leave the table set so that it feels formal and reminiscent of the holidays and then we sprinkled decorative accents throughout all of the spaces in our home. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go and change everything. For example these books are always here. This vase is always here. I just added different greenery and moved some decorative objects around to make to make way for these velvet deer and the little brass reindeer that you see. So just sprinkled little touches around things that were always there. On the table we used a magnolia garland from Gracious Garlands. They make the most stunning wreaths and garlands so we have their stuff around our house and this is actually dried and one of my favorite things to do during the holiday is to decorate really early. But given that our holiday decor is up for a full two months, real foliage would obviously dry in that time but so much of it dries really beautifully and can hold its shape nicely. So this magnolia garland will stay here through the holiday and can make it a full two months. And then I sprinkled in some ornaments on either end to make it feel a little more gilded and festive. And then vintage glassware is really important to me. This the glassware here with my the beautiful bows on it was actually my grandma's. I have a full set of it and used these little coupe glasses to set the table this year. Our flatware is also vintage and so we mixed new plates from Target with vintage stemware and silverware to really make it feel like again that mix of new and old working together. The wreaths on the window are also from Gracious Garlands and they are also real. So this is a mix of you know evergreen greenery that's some fir, cypress, and magnolia. She makes these in all different sizes and these have been up for a while as well and they've just dried like this. But again I think it's nice to have the character and the texture and they flank the windows and make them feel really intentional and special by having that burgundy velvet ribbon on them that you can see throughout the rest of the house. So I definitely did not actively pursue a design. I feel like it was something that was always inherently within me. My parents built a custom home when I was growing up and they let me be part of the process from working with the architect and seeing what they were doing with them into traveling to make furnishing selections. I got to design my own room. So I think the seed was planted from a very young age and then growing up once I got married we bought our first house and I got to experience the freedom that came along with being a homeowner. So I really tapped into my creativity then and I started sharing about what I was doing at our own personal home at the time it was in Los Angeles. And so we owned two homes there and I was sharing about what I was doing at those properties and friends started asking for help and so I started just charging an hourly rate. People were asking for help and I was helping with a friend's nursery or any small project that they might have. When we decided to move to this home in Texas it was an even bigger project and I was still sharing about what I was doing and again people started asking for help and once I had five clients I thought I should probably buy a logo and come up with a name for the business. So it really just happened super naturally and now it's been three years and we are a full service design firm based here in Austin with projects and employees around the country. We are currently a team of 15 servicing anywhere from 50 to 60 clients nationwide at a time. Just off the dining room is our stairwell area where again this is a high traffic zone in the home connecting a lot of different spaces. So we leave a pretty intentional large walkway here so that people can move around the home. We remodeled the staircase. The original builder had a wooden stair railing here that we demoed and brought in this cylinder shaped metal finished in the matte black finish that makes the home feel a little more modern and up-to-date and reflective of our personal style. So that was quite a big project for us before we moved in. In addition to doing the floors and paint and changing out lighting and that was something that we knew we wanted to tackle before we moved into the home. And for holiday we use a faux garland on the stairwell. We had a real garland up but on the stairwell once the real garland starts to die it just gets a little messy. So we've replaced it with a faux garland that still feels nice and like the holidays and it has the velvet burgundy ribbon on it again which we've used throughout the home. And then we have the the twin chair from the office out here. So this is where that tree used to live and now the the twin chair is here which we've just loved because it's an easy place to sit down put your shoes on as you're coming and going. We just hung some artwork on the wall yesterday. Now that we have this space available without the tree being here we were able to incorporate artwork and these are two vintage pieces that I found at Round Top. I found them hanging just like this on a vendor's wall and I love that they're similar enough but different enough. The frames are also similar but different so this felt like the perfect pair. And one trick that I like to do is rather than just having a singular piece of artwork on every wall I like to do stacks of things like in the guest bathroom we have a stack of landscapes. It felt nice to break up the monotony of one big piece of artwork with some smaller pieces that can work together in a stack. So you'll see some more stacks around my house because I like that trick. Whenever you're deciding to invest in your home in any capacity whether it's hard finishes or soft finishes like furnishing my number one piece of advice is to always stick true to who you are. If you love it you're going to feel great being in your home and the way that you feel in your home is what people will feel and remember so that is most important. When it comes to splurge versus save if you're doing a remodel plumbing is definitely a place to splurge. That is something that's typically difficult to change later on so I recommend splurging on plumbing saving on softer finishes like ground coverings things that you'll want to change eventually over time. A lot of our clients have kids and pets and you know need things to be really durable and functional so thinking about that and the longevity of different pieces and how much they're going to be used. Welcome to our living room. So this space is one of the most utilized spaces in our home because it is open to so many other areas. Obviously the stairwell the kitchen is just behind it and there are huge glass doors that go out to our patio so we tend to live in here quite a bit. Again we grounded this space with a vintage rug that is so durable and we can live real life in here which is nice because we're in here all the time. Right now we have our Christmas tree here in the corner up against the stairwell. We typically have a chair here on the rug but we move it to the garage during the holidays so that we have room for a tree and it's nice that it nestles here next to the mantel in the fireplace. We still have a little bit of a walkway between the sofa and the tree so still functional because like I mentioned we leave our decor up for a full two months so it felt nice to find a spot for that that worked with the flow of the rest of the room. Our fireplace was one of my biggest projects when we purchased the house so we didn't get to make any decisions with the builder prior to purchasing the property but once we closed we were able to come in and modify nearly everything in the home so there was tile from floor all the way up to the top of the ceiling in here. We ripped that out and purchased an extra slab of our marble that we used on the countertops throughout the entire home and worked with a local fabricator to custom cut it. There are lots of angles happening around this fireplace so we custom cut it to fit perfectly around this fireplace insert and then he created a ledge for us that sits nicely on top of it so that we could have a place for decorative objects and stockings during the holidays. And one fun thing that we did with this marble was we have an OG edge detail on the marble in our kitchen and the guest bathroom which is a pretty curved edge off of off of your countertop rather than being a straight square or a simple one curve. An OG edge comes down in a soft wave with like two layers of depth if you will. So because this piece was a little bit smaller than a traditional countertop it's a two millimeter thickness instead of three our fabricator actually hand carved this OG edge detailing in our front yard to perfectly mirror the OG edge detail throughout the rest of the home. So I feel very proud of this entire project because it was working with a lot of angles. I got to partner with a local vendor a fabricator who I like and he does such great work so it felt really nice to be able to partner together to really transform this portion of the home. So the tree obviously lives in this corner of our living room and is in a focal point of the holiday decor in addition to the mantel. So we have four stockings hanging here over the fireplace one for each of us. These are made from vintage rug pieces so rather than wasting vintage rugs that might have a you know a portion of them damaged this company Francis Loom out of Los Angeles made these stockings from remnant fabric from vintage rugs. So I like that they coordinate and that they're not all matching. We hung a velvet burgundy ribbon from each of them and accented it with a little brass bell ornament which I also put on the tree so there's again a little bit of symmetry without it feeling overtly matchy. So this garland is um was fresh greenery from Gracious Garlands and I mentioned on the stairwell that once it dried we got rid of it. This one isn't in a high traffic area so no one's really touching it often so it has actually stayed looking so nice even though it's fully dried now. I love the way this corner of it dried with its curved shape intact so I just could not bring myself to take it down. I do every now and then add some fresh sprigs of greenery up to the top to give it that life and character but it has made it a full two months and I feel very proud of that curve over there. Above our fireplace we mounted a tapestry art piece by my friend Lauren Williams. She's a textile artist based up in Dallas and I just adore her work. We've become really good friends and it's always important to me to have some of her work in my home. This is a collaboration that she did with another partner. They weld the mounted base up at the top and then hang the tapestry. I believe this is actually a wool and she dyes it and I just love how grand it is but yet it's still simple and elegant. So that stays there year round while the greenery and the decor on top of the mantel changes. That's something that's always there. Next to the mirror in the guest bathroom this coffee table is one thing that people constantly ask us about and I can't imagine ever parting ways with it. It is a raw wood table. It's actually cut from a sugar cane tree so it is the center of a sugar tree cut flat with a really cool unique base on it. It has a living edge and again it has that age and character in a way where it doesn't feel too precious and like you can't really ruin it. You know the kids are in here all the time. We have lots of friends and guests and it's just something that I never have to worry about but it always has that special intricate detail that makes it feel like something that I would never want to part ways with. When it came to furnishing the living room of course creating a functional layout was forefront in our mind. So we started with grounding the space with a sofa which naturally faces the television and then on either side of the sofa we have accent chairs that face one another to really engage everyone around the coffee table and then to maximize seating we brought in two ottomans covered in a vintage fabric that face the sofa and so those tend to move around the space a lot whenever someone needs you know a chair or a side table those are they look beautiful on their own but they're actually very functional. This sofa has a bench seat on it which just means it's not divided by any seams and separated cushions so it allows us to maximize the amount of seating on here based on you know how many people there are and we can tend to like fill quite a few people in this space between the sofa and the chairs and the ottoman so function first and then mixing the textiles and the fabrics and the finishes of things is really important to us. So this is a neutral oatmeal colored linen sofa from shop amber interiors that we paired with leather chairs. These chairs are so cozy and comfortable and the leather makes them really durable so I like the idea of mixing a leather with a linen and a vintage rug so that nothing is too matchy and you'll see that throughout our home everything plays nicely off of one another but there's not a lot of matching in any of the spaces. Moving over to the other side of the living room opposite the sofa is our console table and our frame tv so the frame tvs sit flush against the wall all of the components are inside the drywall behind the television so they sit really nice and flat you can customize the the bezel on the edge ours is a light wood tone to contrast with the dark wood in this console which was a very intentional decision. I knew moving into the home that the flooring would be a medium toned brown it's actually a varied plank size and I love our flooring but I didn't want everything to feel like it was the same color brown so we intentionally chose a darker stained console here to ground the living room space. When it came to decorating the media console for holiday again we kept our foundational pieces intact so keeping risers and books vases and artwork in place and just swapping out little pieces I added some magnolia branches in the back again to give it that life and character and then the florals I opted for a burgundy that feels like the holidays these are little trinkets that I collected when I was a little girl they're called snow babies and I think they're just so sweet I have about a hundred of them but to to make it feel a little more tasteful I just chose four of them this year and displayed them on this riser that's always here and then over on this stack of books I swapped out the decorative objects that are normally there throughout the year and added some glass Christmas trees and a figurine that I just got from John Darien's store in New York. When it came time to decorate the living room for holiday we kept most of our textiles in place and just added in a few extra touches of burgundy to coordinate with the velvet ribbon that you see throughout the home so we added this really cozy blanket this is one of my favorite blankets we have them all over the house my family loves them their friends love them my son actually gives one of these blankets to each of his friends for their birthday so while most of them are getting Pokemon cards and you know sports toys my son is giving kids blankets that's just the reality of having a designer as a mom so these are Lola blankets and they make this really really pretty burgundy color color that I love and it accented nicely with all of the holiday decor and then similarly some of the block prints fabrics that you'll see here we we brought these in for holiday because they coordinated nicely I like to bring in a red or green tone that isn't a primary red or green but you'll see this burgundy and olive green color tie in nicely with the colorway of everything else so this year we stuck we stuck to the reds and the greens but in a toned down more muted earth tone way that felt more you know true to who we are my favorite thing about the holidays is the togetherness so we are in a community here in Austin where we are very close with all of our neighbors so we tend to be hosting and getting together a lot outside of that of course family and friends I really enjoy having people over so hosting is definitely my favorite part of the holidays opposite our living room is our kitchen which is where we spend the most time our family actually eats here at our island we don't actually sit at any of our tables unless we have guests here so this space is highly functional and it was also important to me that it was aesthetically pleasing so we used marble throughout the home including in the kitchen and we actually worked with a professional company to seal it and they light cured a sealant on top of our marble that has a lifetime warranty so a lot of people don't love to use marble in a home where there are a lot of kids because it is a natural stone it's more porous but in our case I feel really confident with our kids eating here because it has that layer of sealant on top of it and they were able to hone down the sealant so it feels soft and leathery without having that polish and shine to it like a lot of stone finishes do so the stone was definitely like when I was designing the home it was something that was top of mind and in addition to the flooring the stone was like I have to get that right um so I really love our marble and after four years of being in the home through lemon juice coffee red wine all the things nothing has ever stained it so highly recommend professional sealant on your marble and then the edge detail in here again this is that og edge that I was mentioning that's on our mantle so it's that sharp finish leading down into the depth of a pretty curve and so we have that throughout our kitchen and most of the downstairs of our home which I just appreciate that little detail I think it's really special um to pay attention to details like that when you're designing and then the bar stools I mentioned this is where we actually sit and eat so we added a leather cushion to the top of them so that they are wipeable and easy to clean because our kids are eating up here so they are they are stained and ruined but that's part of the story like the leather chairs in the living room they're able to be cleaned really easily and they're functional and I think it's a nice soft finish to have on top of the durable wooden stools our kitchen also has a vintage rug grounding the space so again this is a rug that is very old handmade has a lot of charming character and it's something that thankfully I never have to worry about because no matter how much traffic and spills and they have all happened um it still just it just lives its life in a really beautiful way it wears naturally I do rotate it every now and then because this end of it tends to get a little more traffic than the other end so every few months I'll flip it around to make sure that it's wearing evenly but especially in a kitchen I highly recommend a vintage rug so for our backsplash material we chose a Zaliz bricks so Zaliz tiles are handmade so they're all a little bit unique there's not a uniform color way or character and shape to each one we stack them in a traditional offset horizontal pattern here and we included them with a mitered edge on our vent hood so on our vent hood we mitered the edges of the Zaliz brick and took it all the way up to the ceiling so I love that it flows seamlessly from the backsplash into the vent hood and all the way up there's a recessed liner in here that's hidden and we made sure to elevate this as high as we could off of the cooktop so that you don't risk dunking your head and we do that for a lot of our clients if they're especially tall we make sure to note that in everything whether it's dining chairs or vent hoods because it tends to be a hazard in a lot of homes another really important factor to me when designing the kitchen was making sure that our appliances were panel ready so our dishwasher and our refrigerator are both manufactured to have panels applied to the front of them so we created a panel a panel with a shaker on it that looks just like the cabinet faces and then utilize thicker hardware pulls that can sustain the durability of pulling on those so it's a nice way to blend your appliances into your cabinetry and without them standing out so in the kitchen when it came to hardware and plumbing finishes we went with brass so our pull-down faucet is obviously a shiny brass and it's actually coated so it will never have that living finish and patina on it and I contrasted that with cabinet hardware that is a living finish and it will patina so this is an unlacquered brass these knobs do patina over time and I like the juxtaposition of a polished brass with one that ages just slightly so that they're not matching but they still work and play nicely together so in the kitchen when it came time to decorate for holiday I did the same thing that I did in many other spaces which is just pulling some decorative objects and replacing them with seasonal ones so I added a glass Christmas tree this is actually a vintage tree that I just found at an antique mall in Los Angeles and then this is a velvet nutcracker from Target so again we're mixing new and old this pear artwork is always here but I layered a holiday swan on top of it to make it feel a little more holiday and down on this side I typically will keep figs or cherries in this bowl but I added dried pine cones for the holiday and then I have some Santas and some burgundy florals as well just to carry the holiday theme all the way down the countertop on our island I tend to keep it pretty simple because like I mentioned this is where we eat and our kids spend quite a bit of time here so I usually will just have one floral piece on the corner of the island this glass vase is one that I had my eye on for so long and I just pulled the trigger on Black Friday and treated myself so it's my holiday present to myself and I got some fresh berries at the grocery store this week and put them in there and I love that it feels holiday and these might dry perfectly too so one thing that I do all the time is I just let things dry once you know once they've lived their life I tend to just let the water go and see how they'll dry and we use dried florals in our projects all the time one of the girls on our team's jokes that I should go into the dried floral business because I don't just trash something once it's drying I like give it a chance to hold its structure and like live much longer life so a lot of our greenery around our home is seasonal for holiday but when it's not there I typically use dried florals from all of our photo shoots because you just have to give them a chance what makes your home really come alive is the way that people feel when they're in your home so you can work as hard as you want to make it look really nice but what's going to be really important and meaningful and a lasting impression is how you make people feel when they're in that property and now we'll head into the breakfast nook so just off of our kitchen is Eden Dining in a really beautifully well-lit breakfast nook area that we grounded with a round table so we were able to get a 60 inch diameter table in here which will traditionally seat six people and again during the holidays I love to leave this table set so that it feels a little more formal um so right now I actually set the table with um with tabletop decor that could fit any season so this tablecloth and the floral napkins could definitely lean more spring but to make it feel more holiday I added a napkin ring that has holiday greenery on it and then persimmons and pomegranates adding in some foliage and real fruit and produce that feels more wintery and holiday just makes it feel a little more reminiscent of Christmas if you will so one tip we love to have candles around our home especially tapers on the mantle and the dining table and this breakfast nook table even if I'm not letting the flame actually burn I always light the wick and blow it out so that anytime there's a candle around our home it has that burnt wick on the top it just feels a little more lived in and cozy and not so stiff and formal and new if you will so on this holiday tablescape um again I incorporated a mix of new and old these are my grandma's vintage glasses that have that pretty bow etched detailing on them I have a similar but different shape on our primary dining table and then I paired that with a new a new glass option this is just a a drinking glass that has some etching on it as well but again mixing new and old is important to me and then mixing textures as well so the woven placemats contrast nicely with you know the ceramic dishes and other hard finishes that are happening around the table this tray is also vintage from Round Top I love browns and so it's a nice piece that'll act as functional serving wear throughout any holiday um right now I put persimmons and pomegranates on it like I said to make it feel holiday but you know typically we'll have bread and olive oil and it's a nice filler piece that can sit in the middle of this table and fill that space nicely and then the stemware the silverware is all vintage this is vintage flatware that doesn't match so they're all a little bit different and I love how unique that is and again everything vintage is just able to live life and you don't have to worry too much about it so I really appreciate having some vintage silverware on the table as well so in this room whenever we were designing it we thought a lot about the function of the table because there's a door here that leads out to our patio so as you can imagine there are kids running in they're going through the big slider in the living room and they're coming in here so this door is opening and closing so we wanted to make sure that we had ample walkway here around the table and we wanted to fill the space appropriately so the size of the table is nice because it seat sticks and then in this corner we have artwork again with the trick of stacking artwork rather than just putting one piece here I layered a smaller piece on top of a larger one on the bottom and the colors in the artwork works nicely together but they're not too matchy so I love having that nice corner moment over here and then in the opposite corner where there's not as much of that foot traffic I have a ficus tree in a position where I can get lots of natural light I actually bought this tree at a nursery a few months ago and found out that it's called an Audrey ficus so I was like well this is meant to be my tree and it seems quite happy here we I love watching it grow I water it like once a month it's very low maintenance but it nicely fills this corner and again we don't use this table too too often so I like the visual impact of real greenery in this corner and and yeah we'll see how big it gets up above our breakfast nook table we have a vintage light fixture that I just found at Round Top this is from another one of my favorite vendors her name is Amelia Tarbet she curates really beautiful lighting and furnishing from all over the world and this piece was hanging in her showroom at the last show in Round Top and I saw it and just immediately fell in love I love the little round bold details and I wish in an ideal world that it were a little bit longer like it dropped about six inches longer so I'm currently having this internal debate of do I trust a local welder enough to perfectly finish the patina on this metal to make it look right or do I just enjoy it as is and know that it's meant to be here regardless so a little internal debate that I'm having at the moment but zero regrets I love the shape of it I love the the light that comes off of the bulbs in any scenario throughout the home I always try to lean into an ambient light instead of overhead lighting so even though the builder has recessed can lights in here we rarely turn them on we typically lean more into lighting from fixtures sconces candle light is important to us so this one just has the most beautiful ambient lighting my favorite thing about our home is that we have worked really hard to make sure it feels reflective of our aesthetic and even though it started looking very differently than it does now over the last four years we've really spent a lot of time making it feel intentionally different than it did when we purchased it and so it's a place where I really feel like we are reflected in this property and it feels like our aesthetic and honestly I feel really proud of everything that we've done here it's helped me to establish myself as a designer and launch my career so I am forever grateful to this home now I'll show you our primary bedroom off the breakfast nook you pass through our living room and head straight into our primary bedroom which is my personal sanctuary this room is dark and cozy we color drench the whole space in one of my favorite colors kendall charcoal by benjamin moore so you'll see that the walls the trim the outlets the doors the ceiling even the air vent covers everything is painted in the same color so you're just immediately greeted by this coziness that this space provides although it is contrasted during the daytime by this nice bright light that comes from the bay window that looks out into our green belt which is what we call a zoo because during the daytime there are deer and fox and then at night time there are coyotes we see so many animals back there we feed lots of them and it's a really fun place for us but I love that the bay windows in here provide a lot of natural light during the daytime and then at night we can close the curtains and it becomes this cozy nighttime oasis with the color drenched dark charcoal color on the walls when it came time to furnish this space it is quite a large room so we grounded the room with a big rug and tip if you're purchasing a rug make sure that it feels big enough for your room so you want to make sure that if you're in a bedroom ideally most of your furnishings except for night stands can sit appropriately on it and still allow for you to have a walkway around all of the furniture in a living room or areas like that ideally at least the front leg of all of your furnishings can sit on that rug a large rug will make your room feel even larger so we grounded the space with a large rug and then we have a king-size bed with a boucle fabric headboard in a wavy pattern so that's another theme I guess throughout my home the waves are happening in lots of different places and I like breaking up square edges with curves so in this room where lots of the furnishing ended up having those harsh edges I like that that wave on the headboard makes it feel a little softer in here these pillows are one of my favorite round top finds I got them from prize kc the vendor who actually found those dining chairs in amsterdam he found this vintage dead stock fabric and filled them with the most luxurious down inserts and so I always use these to ground our bed even though I'll change out other textiles we have a blush velvet lumbar here right now seasonally for holiday I like that these are subtle enough but they're still really big and luxe and grand and take up the width of the headboard so I'll play around with different fabrics on our bed but right now the velvet lumbar feels like holiday and ties in nicely with the brown velvet ribbon and bows that I draped from the piece above our bed that is another Eileen Fitzgerald original and like I mentioned she's a good friend of mine and I really like having her artwork throughout our home this is actually a piece that she did a few years ago and she reproduces a lot of her artwork it's sold as prints and having the originals in my home just feels so special to me so I really adore that piece and I love the blush contrast against the the dark walls so I like that it pops when you walk into the room so for holiday we added some velvet ribbon and the bows and to make it feel a little seasonal and special and then over on this side of the room next to the nightstand we typically have a faux tree that lives in this corner for holiday we swap that out with a narrow tree with some elegant ornaments on it these are vintage ornaments that I found in an antique mall I have no idea what they used to be but someone added a little velvet ribbon to the top of them and I love the simplicity but yet there's they still feel really interesting like they have a lot of character and we put a little woven basket on the bottom of that which ties in nicely with the woven texture texture of these nightstands and speaking of some of my favorite vintage finds of all time these nightstands I found at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in 2014 before I actually became an interior designer one of my first side hustles when I worked in corporate America was curating vintage furniture and selling it online I worked with a company called Cherish who's still around when they started out of San Francisco I was one of their first sellers on the platform so I would spend my weekends before kids at the Rose Bowl Flea Market curating decor and furnishings and selling it to people around the country I found these and thankfully never sold them because I still love them and they are vintage and again super durable they have holes in them and they're not perfect but I love that character and that juxtaposition of new and old so these nightstands have been with us for a long time and aren't going anywhere and then the artwork in here I really obviously have a passion for artwork and connecting with artists this piece of artwork is from a nocturne series by my friend Lina she is based on the east coast and I have left several of her pieces throughout our home one of them is on the entertainment center in our living room and I just love the pretty serene nighttime feeling of this piece especially in our bedroom with the really dark walls so that sits right there and I love that it's oval and that it's framed so it can stand on its own it's not like you have to commit to hanging artwork on the wall all the time like I said you can use an easel or a frame and beautifully display artwork on any surface up against the bay windows we created a reading nook moment with a chaise lounge chair that I actually custom designed with a furniture maker in Los Angeles I chose a fabric that reads purple because that's my favorite color um but it still feels earthy and like the saturation of the purple isn't too bold and I like the contrast of it against the dark walls in our room I finished it off with a vintage plaid pillow a soft throw and a vintage reading lamp that I found at an antique mall here in Austin now let me show you our primary bathroom so just off of our bedroom you open these French double doors and land in our primary bathroom which looks and feels very different than it did the day we bought the house there was a giant garden tub coming horizontally off of the windows into the middle of the room which felt completely unnecessary and cumbersome so we got rid of that and instead positioned a freestanding tub vertically under the windows so the flow of the space feels much more appropriate for the layout of this bathroom we have vanities on either side of the room so my husband's is over here mine is back here and they are actually different sizes so one thing that was tricky when we were designing this room is that we had to work with disproportionate sizes for the width of the vanity so mine is a little bit wider than his but we still wanted them to feel really similar to one another so we worked with a local furniture maker to custom design vanities that look exactly alike the only difference is that my cabinets and drawers are a little bit wider than his and then we use the same marble in here that you see throughout the rest of the home and we stuck with that curved og edge detail in here and because it just it feels really intentional and special once you move upstairs to the kids zone it's a straight edge the mirrors were also tricky in here because like i mentioned the size of the vanity is different the mirrors are different sizes so we could not purchase anything that was prefabricated because it wouldn't fit appropriately over the width of each of the vanities so we worked with a local glass company and i hand drew the shape of the mirror that i wanted over my vanity they measured out the angle of the curvature on mine and then matched it proportionately to fit the width of his so again i don't know that anyone ever notices that they're different but as a designer of course i had to design around that so i knew all of the intricacies that went into making this happen and then above each mirror we grounded each vanity area with a matte black light fixture so in this space we mixed a brass finish in our plumbing with with a dark black sconce light above each mirror so i really like that contrast of a gilded this is actually by brizo it's called champagne's bronze so it has a little bit of pink in it which doesn't perfectly match the brass hardware and again i like that things don't match they're not perfect but they still work nicely together but i do love the contrast of a black with a brass and this room is a perfect example of that we do that for our clients all the time i feel like it's it's a no-fail so if you're ever wondering just try to make things work nicely together but they don't have to match perfectly and if if you are down with it a maximum contrast like a light and a dark is always the way to go so these windows were traditionally a a different type of glass that the builder installed that we didn't love we swapped it out with a reeded or fluted glass panel which actually ended up letting so much more natural light in and to minimize the impact of so much light it is quite bright we added cafe curtains in an oatmeal linen fabric suspended by a little tiny brass rod which brings in that touch of whimsy and elegance that i really appreciate and then above the freestanding bathtub we have a leather light pendant so it has a bit of that curve in it and that floral look um it's a green leather that's hand stitched and just suspended by a brass rod that goes all the way up to the ceiling so again tying in the brass with a little bit of a colorway that works in this bathroom because as you can see we have a lot of green in this bathroom um i worked with my friend anastasia casey designed this wallpaper with chasing paper it is a vinyl grass cloth paper that is very thick and durable it can withstand a lot of moisture and heat so it's perfect for a so anastasia designed this pattern and i chose this colorway to tie in with some of the greens that you see throughout our home and then in this bathroom in particular the light fixture has green in it and i use little touches of green throughout the space the rug in here is also vintage and it has some of those olive undertones in it so playing into the blushes and the greens again even though it's not holiday it kind of always feels like holiday in here but speaking of holiday to make this space feel like the holiday season i added some little touches on each vanity on my husband's vanity i have a wooden angel that i found it in the antique mall and then on the other side i added a velvet tree from target so new and old yet again um just these are always here the tray and the plant are always here i just pop in little accents of holiday throughout the home opposite the windows is a wall that encloses my husband's closet and our water closet and on this wall we updated the light the light switches to be um brass dimmers and knobs we have these in several places throughout our home but especially on a wall where there's wallpaper or millwork we like to update our light picture so that they feel a little more elegant and like they fit in really nicely with the aesthetic of the way that that room was designed so you'll probably see these in the background of a lot of spaces around our home this is another original piece of artwork by my friend eileen fitzgerald and this one has one of my favorite vintage frames i love the character and the chunkiness of this one but then when you get close it just has the most beautiful little details and she actually used a charcoal pencil to draw that on a piece of linen and i just adore this piece so much so i get to walk past it all day long and i really like that so behind me this is our shower when we purchased the home this was a full glass shower so you could see straight in one of the big decisions that we made was to drywall this and frame it out so that it would be fully enclosed we have a custom shower door um over here so you can actually access the shower but i love the privacy of a fully enclosed shower and it gave us the opportunity to extend the visual impact of this wallpaper in the bathroom and then once you're in there it feels nice and cozy and like you have a lot of privacy and then this door we custom made with a local glass company it has a grid line in the middle of it so it feels nice and special with a brass handle on it and it just feels like its own cozy little space without being so exposed to the rest of the room home to me it means family it's where you are the most comfortable being with those who you love to book a virtual consultation with audrey sheck on taled scan the qr code on your screen or click on the link in the description box below thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more