A House Tour at Colonial Williamsburg With Heather Chadduck Hillegas

In my opinion, Colonial Williamsburg is where American decorating started and there are beautiful and modern references just outside the door. I'm Heather Chaddock-Hillegas. I'm an interior designer based in Birmingham, Alabama. I'm the Williamsburg designer-in-residence and we're at the Nelson-Gault House. When I walked into the house the first time, I knew I was meant to decorate this house and it's an incredible opportunity that my husband and I get to live here with our dog Eloise for the next two years and call it home. I grew up in a Williamsburg-style house, so it almost feels like the style of home is in my DNA. We're in the Nelson-Gault House, built in 1695, and it's the oldest residential dwelling in Colonial Williamsburg. General Thomas Nelson was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Governor of Virginia, and he was one of the early owners of this house. In 1816, the house was purchased by the Gault family, who owned it for longer than any other family. When we started decorating the house, there were a lot of rules we had to follow because of the historic nature of the home. So we couldn't put any nails in the woodworking and anything applied to the plaster walls had to be installed by a curator. We had to get incredibly creative in this house. This is the parlor and I loved the paint color on the wainscoting, so we decided to leave it as is and I fell in love early on with this wall covering from Paul Montgomery that's derived from an embroidery panel in the museum here, and he was so kind to work with us to work through the colors and bring in the greens and the creams and a khaki color that related beautifully to the existing wainscoting. One of my favorite tricks in decorating is using these brass rails to hang art from because you don't have to drill nails into the wall. I borrowed these beautiful prints from the Garden of Versailles from a local dealer and at the time I didn't know exactly where they were going to go, but I love how the 12 perfectly lined up on this wall and there were two oddballs of a different shape that were the perfect pieces to go under these sconce and that's just what we call a happy accident in decorating. It's hard for me to pick a favorite in this house because I feel like every room tells a story and every room is so rooted in tradition. This wallpaper is a mural that was hand-painted. I think it's perfect for a dining room. It makes it moody and dramatic. We depended so heavily on local vendors to loan us such beautiful furnishings paired with things that I brought from home, lamps and kooky lampshades and cherish finds. I found this set of chairs that were in desperate need of recovering and we used Schumacher's Lightfoot Stripe to not only upholster the seats but also make a slip cover. I wanted something skirted for the softness and I think we achieved that. This was my great-grandmother's corner cupboard and my father was so kind to loan it to me for the two years and it's Shenandoah Valley Pine. It's a piece and with the imperial blue china we just chalked it full and I think it makes a really beautiful focal point. I think the most important lesson is that there's no need to reinvent the wheel here. The color palettes are here, the architectural details are here and if you do your homework and look around you'll realize how many decorating lessons are rooted right here in Colonial Williamsburg. One of my favorite buildings here is the Galt Apothecary. I love the shelving, I love the blue and white jars, I love the way it's all displayed. I just think it's beautiful. This is probably my favorite room in the house because I love blue and white and we used Lafayette Botanical which is a new fabric and wallpaper available through Schumacher and it was extracted from the archives here at Colonial Williamsburg. I love this room because it's tiny and it was fun to design these beds that perfectly tucked under the eaves and we decided to wrap the entire room in both fabric and the wall covering. It's a very English way to approach things. Eloise loves this room too. It's one of her favorite little sunny spots. I love the Wythe house here. It is one of the chicest homes I can imagine. I love the bedrooms draped in the canopies. That was a huge part of our inspiration here. The study in the Governor's Palace is one of my favorite rooms here in Colonial Williamsburg and it was entirely the inspiration for our study in this home. This is the study. I love this room. It's completely swaddled in blue. We love to entertain in here. This is a daybed that we had made for lounging and also as an extra twin bedroom in the house when we have so many guests and it's just cozy nesting right underneath this swag canopy and then we tucked these beautiful little lamps in with custom shades and it glows at night. It's just one of my favorite rooms to spend time in. The Benjamin Moore Paint Company challenged me with using as many of the colors from the Colonial Williamsburg paint deck as possible. So there's 144 colors. We chose a palette of blues, greens, naturals, and whites and wove those colors all the way through the house. I love this little kitchen. It's tiny but it's perfect. The color is Palace Pearl and it's become a favorite blue. This kitchen is a little bit masculine which I like. It feels a little bit more like a scullery than a true kitchen. I think the colors do that and the richness of the soapstone but also the richness of the walnut butcher block which my brother handmade from a tree that fell in his yard. Many of these old houses had the main house and then the kitchen was separate in case there was ever a fire. It wasn't in a total loss. So in the case of this house they were connected by something they call a hyphen which is basically a sunroom and that serves as my desk area and where I office. It gets beautiful light during the day and it has sort of a casualness about it and we sit there and have cocktails in the afternoons. It's everyone's favorite room. Everyone wants to know about the lampshades and in order to find the perfect color green I mixed Rit dye in a bath in my house and dipped silk shades repeatedly until I got the perfect color of blue-green. One of my favorite fabrics from the Schumacher collection is dandridge damask and it comes in three colorways and we've used it in two colorways in the house and it was a fragment of Martha Washington's dress that was preserved and the scale of the pattern is as it was when she wore it. In the queen bedroom we used a beautiful Schumacher fabric and made a scalloped cornice around the bed that was something that I dreamt about doing for so so long but I couldn't quite figure out what pattern I wanted to use for the scallop. I walked out the back door one day and looked ahead and my neighbor's back porch had this perfectly scalloped trim around the top of it and I said that's it that's the pattern we need to put on the on the bed. Spring is a beautiful time to be here. The tulips are coming up, the peonies are about to bloom and there's so many lovely outbuildings. I have a gorgeous gazebo out here that I love to entertain in and you're just nestled in the middle of beautiful gardens. One of my favorite things is hosting weekends here at the house whether it's my family at holidays or having a girls weekend. We sit outside in the gazebo, we have wine, we ride bikes, we go to the farmer's market. It truly feels like my home. One of the takeaways here was how important it is to do your research. I feel like I learned so much. I feel like I'm a better designer now because I know the provenance of so many of the things I've always loved but now I know exactly where they came from.