A Timeless Southern Home That Feels Instantly Inviting l 4K l House Tour

Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Jane and this is Kiwi. Welcome to my home. Come on in. I really look forward to sharing our home and I'm honored to be part of your journey. Good morning. My name is Jane Holman. I run and operate an interior design firm called Studio Entourage in Atlanta, Georgia. And we're in my home in the Northern part of Atlanta, Georgia. We've been in our home for quite a few years. We moved here approximately 30 years ago when our family was tiny. And we've been here and we've added on and developed and created a beautiful lifestyle with a neighborhood and friends and community. And so we've continued just to call it home and renovate and bring it up to speed to work with our lifestyle. Originally, when we moved to Hunt Cliff, which is where we live, the attraction was the fact that it was a bit out in the country. There's a horse stables, there's a river, there's a tennis courts and lovely amenities. And each of the lots in this neighborhood is about an acre and a half to two acres. So it's quite a bit of a retreat within the busyness of Atlanta. So it was a place we targeted raising our family and I being from the Midwest, particularly over in the Grand Rapids area and a lover of horses, I have an equestrian farm love. So this home felt a little bit along the same lines of the white farmhouse from the Midwest in Atlanta, Georgia, and on a big piece of property within a great community. So we called it home and built that lifestyle of friends and friends for our children. And as we grew and our needs grew, we just continued to do some changes to the house. Some big renovation about 20 years ago, and then really pretty much a major gut last year to continue to bring new modern functional details into an older home that's about six years old, but still maintain the charm of the original home. Welcome to my kitchen. This is really the heart of the home where of course, everybody hangs out. No matter what home you have, people manage to get theirself into your kitchen. We lived in this home over 30 years. And of course, back then, kitchens were much smaller and compartmentalized. It was over on the other side, not the other side of the house, but in the shorter ceiling area. So we took over what was the garage and added this entire space from over here all the way out and created a new four car garage as well as a carriage garage with a great vignette to connect with a beautiful little kitchen courtyard that we'll go out to next. So we love entertaining. I love cooking. My career over the last several years has been built on design and functionality of kitchens, bath, interior spaces and how they function and flow as well as look. So this kitchen in particular evolved as probably Jane's best ideas and passions made their way right into this space. And truly, this is where we hang out. The kitchen flows pretty nicely because it's got a couple of rooms we'll talk about next, the scullery or the back kitchen, the courtyard garden entrance and mudroom that way, and then a really generous breakfast room flowing over to the great room and all the other entertaining rooms that way. As we stand here, you probably get a sense that maybe it feels like Blackberry Farms has come to Atlanta. The opportunity to bring in old, authentic, beautiful textures, i.e. a stone wall, a big starched stone wall with some black steel windows, textures of stains on the doors, planking around the little cupola centered perfectly over the island to bring some natural light down, and just beautiful materials of countertop, Belgian bluestone on the floor, dark wallpaper moments. It really all, brass hoods, it really kind of all brings together that love of textures and sort of a curated outcome. We spaced it such that we've got that big 10-foot island, flows really well around it. The cooking situation is ergonomically tight and really well planned out because we've got our range. We actually have behind here the refrigerator. My passion and love of horses was a really important goal in this design of the kitchen because this, for example, if you went to a horse barn, you would say, what is this piece of hardware? We had it custom made by a steel fabricator that we use a lot, and he created it like a blanket rack where you would take your blanket off your horse and put it on this rack. This is the hardware to open the refrigerator. So the refrigerator, the freezer, the entrance to the scullery, and the entrance to the mudroom are all these big symmetrically balanced moments of stained, old-looking doors with a bit of an equestrian feel. So those are the opportunities to say what's really important to an individual who lives in that house? How do you personalize it? You can have form, form, form, flow, and function underneath, which is important, but how do you make it look beautiful to the person living there? Again, it's that eclectic mixture of an old table perched at the end of the island where you can put your cheese and appetizers out or throw a couple bottles of wine, some funky old horse hide hair stools perched at the end. Getting over here, we've got modern appliances. We've got Sub-Zero and Wolf, and really Sub-Zero and Wolf areas a lot, where we've got the range and the hood. In the island, if one were to open drawers, just, again, some very well-thought-out moments, including knife blocks, spice pull-outs, pots and pans, lids. So the function, function, function is right where it should take place, so it makes it truly easy to use the best you can while you're in your kitchen. Layers to bring it warmth, those beautiful moments of earthy reds and browns that we have infused throughout. Here, on the rugs, we actually have a painting hanging on the wall, which is a Spanish painting gotten from my in-laws when they passed away in the family for about 40 years, which has just some really beautiful history to our family and actually is a pretty well-known artist, Jose Ortega. We have a lot of art throughout our home, too, that, again, evokes the moments of, hey, it was special because it was either commissioned, it was purchased on a trip, it might have value, or it's a picture of one of our horses or our children, which you'll see shortly. So it's the livability factor of you put together a lot of opportunity, of moments to make it feel not just like a kitchen, but a living space. And then behind this door, in case you'd like to have a latte, we have a coffee center where coffee and tea can be served pretty easily and kind of have a fun afternoon or morning pickup. Then as we move around the kitchen, we really can kind of have a peek at the kitchen garden out the back area. We'll go out there in a minute because there's literally, another passion of mine is to cook and to have herbs and spices and things that I grow myself. It's not the best time of year in Atlanta to have any of that green at the moment, but it's there. And then, really, we spend a lot of time entertaining out here and doing the core cooking out here, but truly where a lot of the backdrop and the prepping happens is in the back kitchen or the scullery. So why don't I lead you that way? One of the fun moments, too, when you work in the industry like we do is really trying to pick some of your favorite artisans and vendors. And when you get to work on your own personal project, bringing the talent and the passion and the excitement together of working with those special folks. So the Cabinet Company did a phenomenal job. They do millwork as well as cabinetry. So they built these great big pivot doors, kind of the old-fashioned swing door, which swing in and out, same style as the refrigerator and freezer panels, but these two drawers on both sides are more operational. So now we're gonna go into the back kitchen called the scullery. When we get in there, I love to collect old pots and also to keep vegetables and things out in a way that you can be displayed. So carefully, you have to select how much you wanna have an open display and then things put away. So I like to say to people, I have a pot closet in my back scullery. This is filled with some old pots. It's filled with the potatoes and the onions and the gourds that we use to cook with. It's actually one of those moments that over the years I've fallen in love with textures and go, hmm, one day I wanna use that in my own home. This was called shoshujiban. It is the Japanese technique of burning wood to bring and pop forth the grain, makes it dark and rich, and then you can add a little bit of an oil on it to make it look old and texturally interesting. So this is a shoshujiban moment. It's repeated in a couple of other places in the house, which is also what we typically like to do is a pull through of textures, pull through of colors. So there's continuity and the house feels like as you move from room to room, you have like really kind of a lovely sense of cohesiveness. So come on in the scullery. We typically in sculleries, we make them a little more working kitchen-like. I was pretty passionate about wanting to have a table and make this room feel as if you're welcome to cozy up and have a sandwich, cozy up and sit down. I come in here with my computer in the mornings and work and make my coffee. This also is really a baking room. We spend a lot, I spend a lot of time in here baking. I've got ovens, steam ovens, warming drawers, microwaves, the KitchenAid mixers and all, refrigerator, freezer, another dishwasher, sink, garbage disposal. So it's really an intact kitchen other than a cooktop. So the messiness when you're entertaining takes place back in here. You can prep, you can get everything out. You can bring the caterer through the back door. We have a lot of parties and we like to open the back door. At this point, you'll probably see a cat come through the back door. One of our cats. You can get out to the kitchen garden. You can get in from the back direction and be able to get in and out of here if you've had somebody in here trying to clean up or host a party. So, or just open it up on a beautiful day and look out and bring the fresh air in. So this is the back of the house, but it's really, in my mind, an important area to develop. I also love to collect old china. Over the years, the brown transfer ware, the majolica, the white French terrines and urns. So we have a lot of fun little moments just displayed. Behind every door in here is kind of a thoughtful opportunity to say, hey, when Jane likes to host this, where does she find her stuff? All the linens, the placemats, the little old fashioned clip hardware and entertaining platters, along with everything else we do. It's those bespoke moments where every detail is an opportunity to kind of bring it home and bring it together. So it's the old, our McMartin looking hardware where you have the antique brass and you've matched the brass with your fixtures, be it your light fixture or your hardware. So the hardware was carefully selected throughout to kind of evoke the feeling that we wanted room by room as it relates to how does one work? I love cookbooks. I've got some of the old cookbooks displayed. And then quite frankly, I love actually having some open shelves. I know people sometimes are horrified. They're like, it's going to get messy. You're going to see my tomato soup. But as I tell people, if you have a scullery or a back kitchen, it's meant to be an operational space. And so why not embrace it? Throw some baskets up here and organize it a bit if you'd like to. But this is reality. This is how we live. This basket would have some rice in it. This basket would have some baking items in it. And some of it's staged, but quite frankly, it's really more of a living open pantry slash scullery shelf system that works. And the moments of having some fun texture of draperies and great cording and rugs, I think brings a softness that many kitchens and bathrooms don't necessarily have. And again, trying to make it welcome and livable. It's really that layering and bringing juxtaposing, again, old moments with new moments, an old agricultural basket, or I should say tub that is filled with plants and gets changed out for Christmas plants and Easter plants and black chairs that have been in the family for about 50 years. Inherited from my mother and just spruced up a little bit and thrown in here for those moments of black. In the classic style, I love infusing a little black in every room, be it lampshades, be it countertops, be it chairs, accessories. I think it gives it a really good grounding. We encountered with this house, probably one of the biggest challenges was eight foot ceilings in a lot of the rooms. But in this room actually existed as part of the garage before. So we were able to bump it up and give ourselves a tray ceiling with a little bit of height. Always a good thing when you can work it out. It was kind of a discovery along the way that we were able to do that. Antique shops offer lots of fun finds, finding an old horse head and turning it into a lamp. Again, just those little moments of, you found something special and, or in my equestrian love, I've got those sprinkling of horse heads and horse moments kind of all over, old stools that you pull up and use. So just really kind of treat the charm, but underneath it all, it's just a really functional space. And I think you want at the end of the day to feel very welcome and to let your guests feel welcome. When we have the 50 people over for the extended family, normally the younger crowd and the kids all come hang out in here and we set the table in here. So this is an extension of how we entertain and we can seat up to about 50 people in this house, was one of those goals we made when we were planning for the space. The Belgian blue stone on the floor, really a lot of folks debate hardwoods or stone in their kitchen, but we have such a big meandering home, it felt good to kind of ground it with a different texture in the area that transitions from the kitchen to the breakfast room, to the rest of the house. We have our own personal style, my husband and I, that is really kind of true to our heart. The thought of having classic traditional details, but done in a fresh way is really important. Both of us grew up in those types of homes. I actually was born and raised in a home that was in our family since 1835, an old, beautiful farmhouse. So there's a love of like history, there's a love of home that is infused in our home around it. As we walk around later, you'll see textures, moments of old meets new. As you can probably tell eventually as well, I'm a person who loves texture, texture and earthy colors. So we've got a lot of those infused throughout, as well as really the journey of life where you have pictures of your children, you've got old vases you've picked up, you've got art that you've picked up on traveling. So we like to think as we walk into rooms, we have a lot of special moments that evoke memories as well as a lot of comfort because we entertain a lot. We have a lot of people over and we just want it to be a comfortable home. It feels like you've kind of wrapped a blanket around you when you've come into our home. So we have now gone to the other end of the kitchen where we enter in from the garage. Everybody needs a space where when you come in, you dump your stuff, you collect your life and then you head in and out. Plus it leads us out to this lovely little kitchen garden. This is again, one of those doors where you have an opportunity to close the door if needed. It's a great pivot door but typically it gets left open most of the time and it's an architectural fun door, not just a regular house door. So we had a chance to work that in. When you get into this back hall, on the other hand, you don't always want to see the door. So we do a lot of what we call a jib door or a hidden door. It's behind planks and when you walk into the room, you go, hey, it's just here but that happens to be a coat closet and then there's a housekeeping closet around the corner. So, and a nice little locker to throw your purse and to throw some things. I did want to point out one thing as we just quickly move into a small laundry room, that the beginning of our conversation, we talked about the fact that when I was born, I was born into a house that had been in our family and still is in our family since 1835 up in Michigan. So I had that estate, the farm, the barns, et cetera, framed and set in the mudroom welcoming area. So the minute you walk in, there's a glimpse to home, the original home. And then as we've moved into our own home, we've got a lot of other, you know, mementos and art on the wall as well. In the laundry around the corner, we've used, again, natural materials. We've used that pretty soapstone countertop and integrated sink just to kind of give it an older feel. It's not a terribly big laundry, but it's very functional. We've got cabinets, just clean planking white, kind of a fun fixture, which hangs at the front of the house so you see it when you walk up at night. If you're gonna have laundry room and you're gonna do your own laundry, make it as functional as you can. These laundry baskets are great. So your towels in one, clothing in the other, the washer and dryer, and then again, in the moment of texture, putting some mesh and some wire in there as well as some great looking hardware to just kind of give it a specialty feel. So that's the opportunity to see what a laundry's like. Also to work through, not only have a pocket door, but we've made it planked like the other doors so that this feels a bit innocuous in terms of old doors. A chair that's been in our family, it's probably a 300-year-old chair, so it made its way to me. And so now I'm perching in the mudroom. It's kind of welcoming. Kick your shoes on and have fun. In regards to how did I get to be an interior designer, it's a little bit of a circuitous path, but it really goes back to originally being an art major in college, being very spatially oriented my entire life, drawing and painting and studying art. When I got to college, I veered off that path a little bit and went into business for a while. I actually have my master's in organizational psychology and worked for corporations, major corporations for about 10 years in their human resources department. So all of those skillsets do not go unused in terms of needs analysis and studying people, but once we started to have a family and I said, I'm gonna recreate my career, not working for a major company, but doing my own, running my own business again, I shifted back to the creative world and worked for others in the kitchen and bath industry and then began to kind of step out on my own and further and further add what we did, kitchen, bath, interior design, space planning, architectural detailing, furniture and fabrics. And so now we have a team of 14 in the Atlanta area and we are delighted to be able to use all of those skills along the path and work with clients that are passionate about their homes as much as we are. Now we're out in the courtyard, the connection between the garage and the house. As I mentioned earlier, in order to facilitate a big kitchen, we built a carriage garage. That's a four car garage and it has a full studio apartment above. It's a great anchoring moment. The lot was pretty big and the house was small on the lot. So we just kind of stretched it out. Again, my love is to have meandering homes that feel like they've been added onto over the years. So we've got that. This is a great little courtyard. It's actually, I'm not a big proponent of artificial grass, but some of the new artificial grasses are amazing and they're obviously low maintenance, stay green year round. Here we are, 1st of March, and we've got green grass and very dog friendly. So this is a little captured area where you can have animals, pets come out. Now I'm going to take you to the fun part of it because quite frankly, as you move in from the garage to the house, you now move over to an area where we come out a lot and sit down and have a glass of wine, cup of coffee. So we built a fire pit out of the same rock that we've got on the wall. When we were in the kitchen, I wanted it to feel very grounded that that rock wall was solid rock all the way through. So it's got rock on the inside and rock on the outside. That beautiful Tennessee field stone that gives you, again, a very kind of earthy feel. We have really pretty landscaping moments. We've worked with a great landscape designer to create what I'll call that pocket garden. I'm pretty much in love with little English cottage gardens, Nantucket feel. Plants that grow in the North that don't love to grow here, but we've made them work pretty well. It's a time of year when we have less plants growing, but they're coming. We're starting to get a little bit of foliage. Again, this is where we entertain. It's a great place to be cozied up to. We've got the big oak tree that made the cut. A lot of people recommended that we take it down, but it's still here. And really kind of the last area I wanted to show you is over here. I, having grown up in a farm in Michigan, kind of have that passion for a little mini agricultural moment. So we put in a raised bed. It's beautiful in the summer because it's much greener and much more luscious, but it helps and it's watered. So it helps me create a moment to be able to do herbs and some fruits. The whole hill on the back is filled with blueberry bushes and raspberry bushes and a peach tree. So when the time comes, we've got really kind of a fun little spot back in here. Plus in the pursuit of when I go places, I like to collect things and bring them home. A trip to Maine, we found these great big old slate sinks and had them shipped back. One of which landed as an outdoor sink for gardening and washing off your plants. Pea gravel is just always to me a lovely texture mixed in with some solid stones and artificial turf to give you some textural change, but to make it super comfortable. And as you can see on this garage, even though it's a four car garage, I've got carriage doors placed around so that when you want to have a good party, you just open them up and you can set up a band, you can set up whatever you want and sort of welcome and have the whole house flow and function as well. I think a home comes alive a little differently for every single person because we all have different design tastes, but really at the core or the essence of it, in my mind, it's evoking a place where the people who live there, the clients and or the homeowners feel truly like this is my place. And if it's a passion they have, be it art, books, reading, music, travel, I feel like it's so important to take a lot of those elements and infuse those into the final decor. We're really passionate as well about overall flow and function and underneath ergonomics, but then layering it with the things that truly make a home a home for that individual. And that style can really vary a lot, but, and it's usually a collection, not one moment of I went and bought furniture and put it in here all of one style. It's the layering and layering and layering of materials and probably as well, mementos and moments to pull together a fact that somebody looks like they've lived in that house, not just it's pretty, but it doesn't, it looks like it came out of a magazine. We truly want it to feel lived in and truly comfortable for the person who lives there. We've got the breakfast room as an extension of the kitchen. As I've mentioned a few times, we have a lot of extended family and a lot of neighborhood friends and people that we have over. So we had a custom made table that is 11 feet long and can seat a lot of people. We also, I carefully thought through the fact that when there's three or four of us, where do we eat? So we'll get to the wine room in a minute. We've got other areas where if you have four people or six people, you might go there to eat instead, but we've got the breakfast table here, a bit of an English feel to, you know, work with the farmhouse vibe that we like. It's an extension of the kitchen. So it's really the same ceiling, the same planking, kind of a whelping moment. We've got a 14 foot opening that we created kind of a hefty opening as we transition now into the great room. What is a great room? It's really kind of the room where there's a family room, great room. Sometimes they're one in the same. In my mind, they're typically one in the same. It's where people hang out, where they gather, especially when there's groups. This is a favorite for many, especially in the wintertime, because we've got this great fireplace. As you saw the stone on the kitchen wall with the arch, it's the same Tennessee feel stone over here in this vaulted ceiling. So we love to put a fire in the fireplace and just cozy up here in the wintertime or in the fall. It's a great place to come and watch football. As you take a big room, you have to figure out how to compose it and put the furniture together to make it feel intimate while at the same time feeling like you can get enough seating. So we've got a little more of a traditional layout. When you get this big of a space though, it's hard to put a big coffee table. So putting a couple of leather coffee tables, which you can kick your feet up on and separating into two was a nice way to treat that. Big cozy chairs by the fireplace. And really one of the favorite moments is this, we call it the curated niche, which is back behind the sofa on the way out to the sunroom. In more transitional homes, we do the big doors that open all the way up and connect room A to room B. In this particular case, I wanted to create more of a bay with flow on both ends. So we've infused carefully some steel windows and doors into a very traditional window pattern in the rest of the house. It's that play of old and new together. And when done carefully, I think it adds great charm. So we've got the steel doors that flow out to the sunroom. We've got this little curated niche where it's a great little nook to sit on the sofa. I go back there and sit and have a cup of tea. When the guys come watch football, sometimes the wives will go sit back there and talk if we're not watching football. And sit there and maybe play cards. I do a lot of work on my computer sitting back on that niche as well. So it's part of the room, but yet a little bit of a moment separate from the room. As one would see when they look around, yes, Jane does love horses. My husband said, how many more horse pictures do we need? And I promised him we had enough. That painting over the fireplace is one of our first horses we had in Atlanta. And then these are just old prints as we've collected and had them framed in really good textural materials. Again, you're gonna see a lot of browns, earth tones, mustard colors, and terracotta reds quietly infused into a room that's painted a historical Benjamin Moore color to give it a monochromatic feel from the ceiling, to the trim, to the walls, to the actual TV cabinet. One of the things we added when we did this last renovation was the screened covered porch. This is a time of year where you probably don't use it much, but really about nine months out of the year in Atlanta, you can be out here. And we really love being out here because we have a great, almost a two acre lot that has a lot of greenery and trees around it. Again, that moment of being in Atlanta, in the fray of Atlanta, but yet feeling like you've gone to maybe the North Georgia mountains when you get into your neighborhood and your community. It's got a really comfortable seating and it kind of just brings your whole connection to the outside earth in. We've got magnolias and great trees in the back. And it's just a comfortable place to come in. We've got a television. We throw a lot of streaming TV shows on at night and or watch a football game. And we do use the outdoor furniture that also is very similar to indoor furniture in the look and the textures. Instead of buying it mass-made, we had all of the materials, which they sell great outdoor fabrics these days. So the pillows, the cushions, you'll see the terracottas and the browns and the animal prints working their way out here as well as staying in the house. Indoor outdoor rugs, and then these great, wonderful deer hide little stools, ottomans to kick your toes up on. Our house is layered with colors, earthy colors. As you walk around, you're gonna see Persian rugs and you're gonna see a bar painted terracotta red. And you're gonna see dark browns. By the way, brown is my favorite color. Have it on today. It's a great backdrop color to pair a lot of other more vibrant colors with. But you're gonna see a lot of moments of small sort of compressed spaces where it feels intimate, moving into bigger spaces. We've had client folks come over here and I think maybe one of the biggest compliments that I've been paid is people have walked around, they said, how do you choose where you wanna live, sit in your home to have a cup of coffee because every space feels like special and welcoming. And so really welcoming is the name of the game for me that it feels well curated. I wanna sit here and relax. And so probably in respect of like, what did we try to accomplish? We tried to make it feel old meets new. Very, an opportunity to be able to host a lot of people while at the same time feel intimate when you have two or three of you there and textures and layers and color. We've now, we're just off the breakfast room. We've entered into the older part of the house where we've got some eight foot ceilings. And in this area, the kitchen used to be located. It moved over and we really do love to entertain and to sit down and have a good glass of wine. So we decided at this point, just to indulge this great entertaining spot right in the middle of the home. So as you pass through from the living room and the front of the house, you come through what is the bar and the wine area, which is very open and connected to the keeping room and the breakfast room. So it really kind of all flows as one. But while we're in this wine room, having a round table is one of those things I love, a small intimate space where you can have four, sometimes six people. You sit down, you have a glass of wine, you tell stories. We actually collect here a lot with neighbors who just stop by or we invite them over. There's been many a Friday night or other nights of the week as well, where we might sit down and literally start with a glass of wine and end up being three hours later, telling stories and just laughing and enjoying life. So it's very conducive to that. We added a walk-in wine closet. Some might call it a cellar, depends on the size. It is air conditioned controlled, so it's controlled for wine. And there's a great company called Kesik that makes these brass wine pegs where you can do double or single exposures or displays, I should say. We've got the Belgian Bluestone. And if you can see in the back, it's that dark textural wood, that shishijiban wood that we've repeated in a few places that gives it kind of that earthy ambiance. Per my husband's request, I think we managed to get 400 bottles of wine in here. Not that we drink all that much of it, but it's here and it's available. And we are the house that, again, loves to say, just stop by and or come for Thanksgiving or any special events. So we've got the arched entry to it. I think, again, on arches, you have to be very careful and thoughtful on the number of arches, the repetition of the right arch. When you enter my front door, you enter under a front arched porch. You come in here and you have an arched moment. As we go in the bar, you'll see an arched window. And then as you saw in the kitchen, we have the big arched window over the sink. So it was that pull-through, thoughtful moment of how to make those arches read well together and then go back to simpler, more supportive lines. So this area is planked. We've got some great old black and white pen and ink of barns growing up in the Midwest. I'm kind of a fanatic on old barns. I go around and take pictures and do a lot of pen and inks myself. These are not mine, but I've done several. So again, one of these collected moments, we've had these for 40 or 50 years where we were able to get ahold of them a long time ago and thoughtfully display them around to evoke some fun moments. Why don't you walk into the bar, which is an extension of the wine room. You can probably tell that a terracotta or reddish color is near and dear to my heart. Works well with those wolf knobs in the kitchen. But these chairs, we needed to have some vibrancy of great chairs. There's a lot of chairs in this space from the island chairs to the breakfast room chairs to the wine room chairs. So it was a very thoughtful moment of how to make them different and make them feel very welcoming in different ways. The mass and the upholstery of performance-based chairs with some beautiful cording on it really adds that custom bespoke detail and makes them incredibly welcome and spill-proof for wine. Now, if you move into the bar, which again used to be the kitchen, we have, we've gone bold. We've gone with a really amazing terracotta color. It's a Benjamin Moore historical color, not exactly red terracotta. I have a husband who went to Georgia Tech, so much to his chagrin. It might look a little bit like a Georgia color, but again, it's got a lot more of a brown tone to it as well. This is kind of the heart of the pass-through. Come serve yourself. There's a lot of function taking place in here. It does have lower ceilings, and sometimes you go, hey, embrace those moments and make those pass-through spaces that feel more intimate. Just make them wow. So we have a black crocodile, black-brown crocodile wallpaper on the ceiling, which again sort of wraps you in that feeling of, wow, I'm in this texturally special room. Also, I worked with one of our favorite stone and fabrication vendors to do all the countertops, which all of them have a lot of special details to them, including what you saw in the kitchen, that whole niche, which is filled with marble and a brass hood. This is a special marble that's got red in it. You don't see marble that has red in it too often. So I hunted long and hard to find this Michelangelo marble and had an integrated sink made. There's a lot of function in this bar. We hope it looks beautiful, but as well, everybody's got the glassware. So we've got a whole cabinet full of glass. We've got ice makers. We've got trash pull-outs. We've got bar drawers. And honestly, one of my favorites to do is to put in that refrigerator where you can keep all of your wine and your beer and your mixers and your limes and your lemons. So if you need a drink, you come on over to this spot and you find a glass and you find a beverage. I will say when gentlemen come into this room, they do have a favorite spot. And I'm gonna turn around and show you what is known as the infamous bourbon closet. So between the bourbons, the whiskeys, and a few others, we've got, my husband's got a collection of some beautiful, entertaining moments. Glass shelves, a lot of really pretty old glassware that I've collected, and those really gorgeous bottles that are part of the whiskey and bourbon collection. Once again, there's Shochu Jiban materials in the back of this cabinet. Bring it that unified effect and that grounding of color. And last but not least in this room, this painting, there's a painting hanging on the wall. My husband, before we even got married, had gotten it when he lived in California. I like to think when we do planning that if you have great pieces of art or sentimental pieces of art, you work them in early to the design. And so intentionally, we kept that wall space and the way that the molding and the trim profiles worked, set up exactly to host and house that painting, which is filled with rich brown and terracotta colors. And then an old Oriental rug that we had that is a beautiful old piece, kind of brings this whole room together, as well as the mementos on the shelves and a lot of little curated English boxes, old crystals that we've had, and glasses. So this is the bar. It's in those details of choosing beautiful hardware. I've mentioned hardware before. I'm pretty much a trim and hardware aficionado lover. I think you can't ever underestimate the effect and the final design detail that is evoked from doing the right play on whatever that trim is. It's simpler in other rooms. This room, we added layers of it, including shadow lines on the cabinets, including creating a enhanced crown because when you have a seven-foot sub-zero and an eight-foot ceiling, you kind of have to create some interest in that one-foot gap in between. So this is the bar, kind of the center of the home. And then as we move past it, we'll move into some of the other areas that connect. This is really connecting to four or five other rooms, which gives it really good flow. And one of the things that we did have in our home prior to this renovation, as many old homes were set up, you had a lot of composed rooms and you felt a little bit limited to get from room A to room B. So it was a very intentional play here to go, how do we make a home feel much more livable in today's time while still feel charming and true to its roots? Think long and hard about flow and function and how people move around and a comfort level for them to be able to collect, talk, grab a glass of wine, get to the powder room, get to the wine table, get to the keeping room in the kitchen. So there's a lot of connection and openness, just even taking the opening and making sure it's a 48-inch opening as you try to pass through where two people can comfortably move past each other in the entertaining room. We are now moving from the wine room into kind of an interior room in the house. We call the keeping room. It was originally the family room of this house, very small and composed. But as we added around it, we realized that this room actually, it's my room. It's the room I sit down and have a moment of coffee in the morning, fire, do my work, pet my cat. We have animals. We've always loved animals. You'll see the animal connection as you move into this room. You'll see the dog enjoying the fire. So this room is really just a comfortable room. It's not big, but it has the steel doors that we just mentioned adding that take you right out to that sunroom or covered port. So whenever you want to open up, you can flow out, you can flow to the great room, you go through the wine room, or you wanna come in and just sit down with three or four or five people. This room feels very composed. It's a great room to just snuggle up and hang out in. I have a painting on the wall that's not just a beautiful painting, but it actually is a horse that is near and dear to our hearts because we'd owned him for 20 years. His name was Hooligan. That was his barn name. He had fancier show name. Anyways, we had that commissioned and put up there because really the nature of horses, they're absolutely beautiful animals. I've owned a horse ever since I've been five years old. We still own three. And unfortunately he passed away about three weeks ago. So he's a really near and dear horse to my heart. It kind of grounds the whole room. We've got little English moments around it. We've got the Winchester tuck sofa with a fresh kind of a detail on the legs. So there's a lot of furniture as well that brings the old and the new together. Cleaner forms on upholstery, the way the arms are, the way the nail heads go. It's not an old piece. It's a newer form replicating sort of a classic moment. I also love the found pieces. This coffee table, for example, is hair on hide. And underneath it, it is an old French gun rack. You would have shipped your rifles that way. And so we had it custom made where we had the hair on hide put on the top. Old English chests. We've got moments of trays. This tray was Doug's, my mother-in-law, my husband Doug's mother. One of her beautiful old trays she had inherited from her mother. So we've got those moments. We've got some little zebra tables. And actually, back in my artistic days, a painting that I did. So I still love to dibble and dabble now and then and create those moments. So this is the keeping room. This is where you come and keep yourself happy and chilled and just kind of relaxed when you feel like it. Now we're gonna move forward into the living room and the front part of the house where people spend less time, but it's still a place you enter in and you want it to be welcoming and beautiful when you get there. Never underestimate even some of the smallest rooms in your house on how to just give it a feel and layering. This is the powder room, which everyone needs. We chose a black fox color, a dark brown black to accent throughout the house, including this door. And when you walk in, we love to take powder rooms and add just gorgeous wallpaper. It's a small room. You don't have to have much, but it just gives it a grounded feel. So this has painted black fox. It has this great Italian wallpaper. And it's just a little moment of feeling like welcome when you're headed into the room, the necessary room in the house. As we walk towards the living room and the dining room, I think you'll notice, as well as when we get into the bedroom, that I talked earlier about layering on color. We have layering and textures on almost all of the walls of our main floor of the house, be it planking, be it wallpaper on the walls, be it wallpaper on the ceiling, be it great colors or trim details. Again, I think those are the moments where you take time to make it feel thoughtful and curated and pull together some of the things that you're trying to accomplish throughout the whole house. In the hallway, as we head through, again, it's planked and we've got some really fun eclectic art. We have a great artist friend who does these beautiful still moments of black and whites. Once again, I love infusing black. So we've got these flowers that our friend Kathy did. We've got Italian Sassoni with great color hanging on the wall directly across from it. Quite contrasty, but on the other hand, that's the beauty of art. You just display it and you make it pull together. When you first come in the front door, we added the arch. Once again, as I mentioned, arches to be thoughtfully carried through and arched portico as you enter and an arch door and a beautiful Spanish Tamayo hanging as you enter right in the front little foyer. Off that, we have the living room. It's honestly kind of a room that should be renamed. Most people have that living room at the front of the house and they really don't live in it. They don't spend much time in it. Probably should be called the parlor because it's a little more of the formal room. I decided to just get rid of formal altogether. We just don't live formally. So we wanted this to feel this cozy, retreatful room. It does have eight foot ceilings. It's an original room to the house. We added another opening so that no room has just one entrance. Every room feels like you've got a couple of ways to get in and out. We thickened all of the openings and embedded bookcases and put displays of beautiful old willow ware and photos of the family. So when you get in this room, interestingly enough, to some people, it's a favorite room just because it's just this reading sort of room. It's got the beautiful black piano. I play not as much as I should, but I think it's indicative of time. One day when I have more time, I'm gonna get my self-tuned back into working on the piano. But we've got the baby grand that we've owned for a long time as part of it. Again, you're gonna see a lot of the red tones, this great Persian rug that was in a different room. I wanted to make sure it fit exactly in this living room, so we worked it out when we were creating this room. This is a juxtaposition of old and new because you have this very modern acrylic table, which really is needed to have a big, big table in the center of this room so this room didn't feel lost, with these couple of great benches that tucked under it. And then you've got the old, really kind of composed sofa as well as a super comfortable sofa. I think my husband was a little concerned when we first started moving furniture in after the renovation, and the red sofa was the first one that came. And he said, hey, is this like a grandmother's sofa? Subsequent, when it's balanced well with everything else, I think it was the perfect piece to bring that red as a pop right at the end of the room to dry your eye when you first entered in. This is a great historic Benjamin Moore color on the walls that just grounds it, ceiling walls, really the drapery with the cording. Everything's based upon this earthy, taupey, slightly sage green color. This is a room in which we have some portraits of our children. We've got three children, a son, an older daughter, and then the other daughter has a portrait hanging in the hall of she and her horse. So it's just a room really filled with a lot of mementos and little collectibles from years of travel and years of playing the piano and collecting willow ware. This is the living room. We're gonna go into the dining room next, but before we head in there, there's a little fun moment that when people see this, they get really kind of excited about. There's an opportunity sometimes as you do these pass-throughs to create those moments of, hey, there's a little extra space, what should I do with it? This actually is a closet in which we have China, China from my mother, China from my grandmother, China from Doug's mother, China from my own registry. So when I entertain, I love to pull out the China. I love to have this all easily accessed and stored. And on the other side, we have the same cabinet. This has linens, tablecloths, candle holders, and a variety of entertaining platters. So it's those little hidden moments that make organization feel like you can really take advantage of it. Plus it's kind of a fun talking point when people come on and they go, where did you get that China? And they love to come over and click on my little China cabinet door. So speaking of that, we're gonna head into the dining room now, and we'll get a quick moment of the dining room. One of those other rooms at the front of the house, there's really a tendency these days in many of the new homes that we build that we do not have a separate dining room. We just have an eating gallery, one big table, an opportunity just to be all together. This was a more traditional home to start with. It had a dining room. We maintained the dining room. We made it much more casual, if you will. And I added a big walnut round table with a little bit of a fresh furniture base. So as you came into that dining room, which was here inherently, just adding again a beautiful wallpaper on the walls, trying to keep it neutral, some great drapery. We added a whole wall of windows that didn't used to exist before it really transformed this space. So it makes you feel as if you're out in that whole front entrance courtyard. And as I referenced before, when you have different numbers of people that come, you sometimes like to find the table that feels intimately the right size. So we come in here when we have six or seven or eight people and set up and just enjoy having a chandelier that says, hey, I'm a crystal chandelier, but I'm a fresh version. And it really befits the table. It's a beautiful moment. Plus, as you drive by my house at night, you see the chandelier from all the windows and it's just kind of that warm and welcoming enticement to go, hey, look at the Holman's house. It feels like I want to be in that house. We're now entering the primary suite, which is on the main level of the home. We added this level and this bedroom about 20 years ago when we did renovation number one, knowing that we intended to stay here long-term and having the primary suite on the main floor is great in the long-term. When we first moved in, it had small children. We stayed upstairs where all the bedrooms are because the kids were there. But when we added this, it's an extension on the whole side of the house. One of the things that I think is always really important is to create some privacy from the main floor of the house and from the bedroom. So we did a corridor or a hallway where we've got bookcases and artwork. It's basically a vestibule first, then a primary bathroom corridor, and then you get into the bedroom. So you're separated enough. People don't meander and end up in your bedroom. So come on down into the bedroom space. This is a little bit of a reading look. Both Doug and I love books. We read a lot. And so we've got our little bookcases and photos of the kids, some old turtles again in that brown, textural, rich feel on the wall. Then we get into the bedroom. The bedroom has windows on all three sides and it feels just lovely and spacious and connected to the yard when you look out in the windows. A lot of times people go more serene in their decor of their bedroom. I decided to go a little bolder. Again, those browns and those textures. Dogs on the bottom of the bed add some texture as well. But to really hit it with some warmth and some contrast. And this room had eight foot ceilings. We sloped them up. We created a flat spot and did some textural wallpaper on that hallway as well as on the ceiling, just to again, give it that wrap. So it's a nice opportunity to bring together some antiques. This is a beautiful old French amour that's been in Doug's family for years and years and years. In a lot of our decorating these days, we go with new pieces, but yet when you've got a few old pieces and you infuse them in and then go cleaner and textural on some of the other case goods or the fabrics, it works well. It's just all a personal preference, but this is the opportunity to have some antique moments as well as some very fresh moments on the little lovely green Don Gio fabric bench at the bottom of the bed. Then as we walk into the primary bathroom, we do a lot of space planning and kitchen bathroom bar detailing, not just on aesthetics, but on the function. So welcome into this space. This is the primary bathroom. And I think this is a nice opportunity to say, it doesn't always have to be big to be functional and to be like wonderful. It just has to function well and have some of the amenities. So again, we inherited a space that was not overly large, but we were able to create that lovely little niche where you have your soaking tub, and then there's a hers and his vanity. Even on the vanity, it's these moments of having some trim that gives this room some texture. And as well, the functionality, even have a Roburn mirror that you can use. And you've got, of course, ladies like this, the little magnifying mirror that is actually very functional. So it's using just really pretty hardware, great sconces that give good light. In our case, we kept it neutral. And then we went with this beautiful Viola marble on the countertops, the vanity top and around the shower, and then really grounded it out with that Belgian bluestone on the floor. Because this room is smaller, taking and using a herringbone pattern, plank pattern versus the bigger format random stones that we used in the kitchen was really a kind of a lovely play on working with the size and creating a little bit of a pattern in this room. So this space has really just a lot of function in the reality of like getting ready in the morning. This little spot is perfect. On both sides, you have moments where you can keep your makeup, you can keep your hair products, you can have your pull-outs, your pull-out hair dryer, and so it's really just a very self-intact little spot to sit as well as to bring in some of the natural light and have some reflection to the backyard. There's a soaking tub. In the reality of textures and layering, throwing some of those browns and earthy herring hides in here kind of felt like a good way to make it less sterile and less white. And then last but not least is just a beautiful shower that's got the texture of taking a moment to saying how do I bring that marble in and give it a repetition in key parts of the room, surrounding it, doing a floating bench, doing the niches out of the viola marble, and then just making all of the plumbing fixtures within there have a good purpose and a meaning. So they're exactly matching vanities. There's a his and hers, and then there's a distinct his closet and a her closet as you walk off the bedroom, so or the bathroom into the bedroom. It's a very small but functional space that just feels intriguing in the morning. We've got the Sonos speakers in the ceiling throughout key areas, so you can just put your Spotify on, get ready in the morning, bring your coffee in, and try to enjoy before you start that busy day. Home means a place where your life takes place, where your memories are built, where you've raised your family if you have a family, and or worked through a good portion of your life. We happen to be people who don't move much. We've been in this home over 30 years, so this home in particular is probably extra special because it's the place where, again, our three children, our newest grandbaby, our pets, our animals, our friends, our neighbors, extended family comes and hangs out, and so home means that place where it's just filled with joy and the ability to create memories and live daily in a comfortable way, but in a way that when you come home, you're happy to be home and to be able to retreat from the busyness of life. Homeworthy, thank you so much for being a part of our home and the journey that we had in creating this home as a special place for us. We enjoyed sharing it with you. It's been great. I hope it's been inspirational in some form or fashion. Anyways, I'm gonna say adios now. I'm gonna take my dog for a walk and also head back to work to get back to doing what we do for a living and love. So have a great day. Stay safe, everybody, and goodbye. Thanks for watching. Go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content and shopping guides.