One Room Challenge Week One, Philly Stone Queen Dining Room
Hello friends!
Welcome to another round of the One Room Challenge! If you are new around here, the One Room Challenge is a bi-annual event hosted by Linda Weinstein of Calling it Home and Better Homes and Gardens. Over the next six weeks, designers and homeowners across the internet will be transforming a space in just six short weeks and sharing all the behind-the-scenes details so you can follow along! This is my fourth One Room Challenge and I am excited to finish yet another space in our early 1900’s Philadelphia home that we purchased two years ago. For those of you who have been following along for a while, you might remember that very shortly after we moved in, we worked on our last One Room Challenge, our main bedroom.
If you’re new here, I’m Nicole, Principal Designer and CEO of vestige HOME, a full-service interior design firm located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a designer, I strive to create soulful, personal spaces that truly serve our clients both through thoughtful design and purposeful functionality. Throughout this challenge you will get a behind-the-scenes look at how we approach our design projects. From space planning to sourcing, project management to installation - I’ll be utilizing many of the same tools that we regularly use for all of our residential clients. I will admit that I find designing for myself sometimes even more challenging than designing for clients but I’m ready to buckle down and see this space go from dreams to reality!
On a personal note, it’s a weird time to be doing a room transformation challenge like this and dedicating time each week to documenting this progress. Between the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and a contentious election year, talking about decorating and design can at times feel a bit frivolous. I’ve even had to laugh at the fact we’re going to be transforming our dining room since upcoming holidays will be very quiet around here with the pandemic still in full force. But what I do know, is that right now, inspiration is more important that ever. Feeling a sense of safety and comfort in your home is more important that ever. It’s my hope that by participating in this challenge and sharing the process, you will find some glimmers of joy and inspiration for yourself as well. One of my favorite things about the One Room Challenge is being surrounded by fellow design-focused home-lovers who get excited about the same things I do. Having that sense of community with so many other people working towards the goal of improving a space in their home is such a delight! So without further ado, let’s chat about this space we’re tackling shall we?
Our Philly Stone Queen Dining Room - “The Before”
When we were house hunting a couple of years back, our dining room was one of the rooms that really sold me on this home. The bay window that looks out onto the garden was a big draw for me - it lets so much light into the space! It’s a wonderful spot for my ever-growing plant collection and gets fairly loaded up in the winter months when we need to bring the succulents and citrus tree inside!
Opposite the bay window, there is also an incredible old mirror that the previous owners left in the space (and I suspect the owners before that as well, it’s so huge I can’t imagine the logistics to move it!) It’s in a bit of rough shape with some cracks and pieces missing, but I love it anyway. It’s part of the story of the home and it does a wonderful job reflecting lighting from the window.
My other favorite feature in the space (and really throughout the whole house) are the embossed radiators. The pattern on them is so elegant, and the one in the dining room is just so darn cute! We’ve been working on exposing any radiators in the home that were previously covered.
The dining room is the heart of the first floor, positioned centrally between the living room and the kitchen. It’s flanked on the side by a butler’s pantry (behind the mirrored wall) and we’ve decided to update this spot along with the dining room. Am I crazy to take on not one but two rooms in six short weeks? Maybe? But I feel that these two spaces need to feel connected in style and function, while also seamlessly serving the kitchen space as a storage overflow.
Let’s go over where we are in the space right now. Since we moved into our home, we’ve made a few big modifications to the first floor. We added an additional cased opening between the living room and dining room that let some of that beautiful light from the bay window brighten our living room and set up the first floor for optimal space flow. This is an old house, so room separation is to be expected, but before adding the opening the wall of the living room felt very imposing and the living room and dining room felt very disconnected. We added the opening about a year and a half and it’s one of my favorite things we’ve done, it let’s so much more light into the space and I love to be able to peek into the dining room from the living room.
Adding a new cased opening between the living room and dining room | The finished opening with the old floors | The refinished floors with the cased opening
The other big project that we finished was to refinish the wood floors. We completed the first floor refinishing about a year and a half ago. When we moved in the floors on our ground level were in terrible shape, and when we opened up the wall and made some other modifications, we knew they’d need to be refinished. If you followed along for our kitchen refresh, you know we had some work to do there as well (So. Many. Staples!).
So after getting those foundational items taken care of, we’re finally ready to tackle the remaining unfinished spaces on our first floor. I’ll be sharing all of our design plans next week but we plan on adding architectural elements, new lighting, furnishings, color and a major installation by a local Philadelphia artist that I have long admired. The only things that will be staying in the space are the old mirror and our hutch - a family piece. The rest is going to be completely transformed! We’ll be kicking off the work this week and I can’t wait to take you all along on this journey!
You can check out all of the other One Room Challenge featured designers and guest participants here.
