Pennsylvanian
Bold Shapes and Quiet Tones for Art Collectors
"I've collected Calder prints for almost twenty years,"
says a Pennsylvania client whose house was recently redecorated
by Craig Leavitt and Stephen Weaver. "The colors and shapes-so
much of his work is designed around pyramids and inverted pyramids-
are what appeal to me."
The Calder prints are hung in the dining room of the residence,
which sits on a wooded suburban lane. "My wife and I didn't
want the house to stand out in the neighborhood," says the
client, "so it's conventional brick with clapboard trim. Inside
it's our own, with our collections and the furniture that Craig
and Stephen have designed."
By the time Craig Leavitt and Stephen Weaver came to work on the
house, they had already designed two other residences for the client
and his wife. The results had been so successful that they were
given carte blanche on the third interior with one simple stipulation-that
Leavitt/Weaver furniture be used throughout. "They have a hundred
and eighty pieces of our furniture," says Weaver. "There
are special designs created specifically for this house, plus many
prototypes for the furniture that we sell out of our shop in Modesto,
California." Leavitt and Weaver, who started their firm almost
twenty years ago, both have backgrounds in art, and Craig Leavitt
gained experience working with Val Arnold, Anthony Hail and Albert
Hadley.
The most distinctive room in the house is the great room, or formal
living room. Where the designers' talents and the only distinguishing
architectural element in this deliberately unobtrusive house-its
two twenty-six-foot-tall peaked windows-come together.
"We could dictate colors and floor surfaces and furniture,
but we really had no control over room size or architectural details,"
Weaver explains. "The challenge, therefore, was to create surface
details that masqueraded as architectural details and to do something
that made the scale of the room less intimidating."
Over the fireplace they added an eighteen-foot-tall mirror that
repeats the shape of the windows at the room's ends. "We needed
something architectural to balance the windows," says Weaver.
"The mirror seems sculptural."
To unify the vast space, the designers opted for a neutral palette-from
walls to floors to furnishings. "Because of its size, we didn't
want to use bright colors in the great room," notes Leavitt.
"It called for natural walls, bleached floors. Also, with all
the windows, we used few colors that would keep the eye focused
indoors." "Since the woods outside are changing colors
all the time, we thought they should stand out," Weaver adds.
To give the room variety as well as character, Leavitt and Weaver
created a cowskin rug that defines the middle of the floor. They
also mixed fabrics such as silk velvet, suede and needlepoint and
covered a prominent sofa with the reverse side of a zebra fabric.
"It's less severe and more woven-looking," says Weaver.
"Texture does the same thing as color in terms of interesting
the eye."
The designers employed similar techniques to transform the bland
master bedroom. "It was dullsville," says Leavitt. "So
we used textured wall coverings in two colors-two walls are celadon
and two are taupe. The rug is gray and taupe." They even went
so far as to add a bit of color to seven botanical prints that hang
throughout the room. "Just as we were framing them," recalls
Weaver, "we realized they'd look better if they were softer.
So we got out our watercolors and pastels and touched them up."
"We're very hands-on decorators," explains Weaver. "We
get in our shop and mix paints, and we get down on the floor in
the metal shop and work with the welders. If we're too tied to a
plan on a piece of paper, we're not learning. When we can reinterpret
ideas as we're creating-whether we're in the shop or installing
a design-we come up with something stronger." |
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