Over the years, in many houses that I’ve owned, I furnished and decorated them in almost as many different ways as one could. 50 years ago my first house, purchased when I was only 23 years old, was decorated with discount furniture, American style. That was by necessity since the purchase of that home tapped out all of my savings and all of my borrowing power on my credit cards. By the time I purchased my second house about three years later I had prospered enough in my banking career that I was able to furnish the house in what I would describe as suburban Ethan Allen style. It was a colonial house and we chose to decorate it with very traditional furnishings. After that, all bets were off. I bought a cabin up in the woods by the Berkshires, which was decorated in Alpine, “knotty pine” and then a beach house in the Hamptons (technically in Quiogue) that was a postmodern, and lent itself to a blend of contemporary Kriess furniture and modern beachy decorations.
When I was in high school, I vacillated between wanting to be a chemist and wanting to be an architect. My older sister, Kathy, went off to college several years before me and went to architecture school. She has indeed spent her life in pursuit of that profession, and is still practicing to this day. The whole chemistry notion faded very quickly after my first college course of inorganic chemistry (not even the tough stuff or organic chemistry), but my interest in architecture never waned despite pursuing a career in finance rather than architecture. I had some visions of what I wanted to have in a home, and I kept those visions largely intact over the years even though my professional career had little or nothing to do with architecture (or chemistry for that matter).
In the central part of my career, I lived in Manhattan in a series of seven or so apartments ranging from 1200 to 2500 ft.². I’m well aware that one can decorate an apartment in whatever style they choose, but the general tightness of space caused me to decorate all of my apartments in what I would call modern New York City comfortable style. One of those apartments, a penthouse triplex in Tudor city was decorated in a way that might have qualified it for Architectural Digest, but it would’ve been mostly on a count of the dramatic setting and views from the apartment (towards the UN and East River) rather than the furnishings. None of my other apartments would’ve ever qualified for House & Garden much less Architectural Digest.
I owned five homes in Park City, Utah and one of those was a dramatic 11,000 ft.² Frank Lloyd Wright style home for which I commissioned a large amount of furnishings replicated from the Frank Lloyd Wright catalog. I owned that house for five years and I will say that it was spectacular and was seriously a showcase house. After 15 years in Utah, Kim and I chose to move on towards California and we bought this house on our hilltop, which we named Casa Moonstruck. It’s a one story house of approximately 4000 ft.² spread out laterally across this hilltop in such a way as to maximize the views west to the ocean and north to the mountains. From the outside, the house has a decidedly Southwestern look, with its earth-toned stucco and flat roof, that might seem more at home in Tucson than in San Diego. But the North County of San Diego is more like Tucson than not, both for its dryer climate (not quite desert-like, but also not quite sub-tropical like the coastline down by San Diego proper. The floorplan of the house is very sprawling, focused around a Great Room that’s more or less oval shaped with floor-to-ceiling windows facing west (5 of them) and east (2 of them). The Master Suite and office are to the north and the Kitchen, Dining Room and Guest suite are to the south. When you look at the floorplan it looks both sprawling and somewhat random because additions made by the prior owners (they were the second owners of this now 27-year old house, which we have owned for half that time) and renovations made by us (mostly expanding the kitchen/dining room footprint and redoing the deck) have left the layout looking pretty damn eclectic. We love it and think it works perfectly, but guests and future buyers might well ponder its quirky layout.
In terms of decorating, neither Kim nor I are inclined to use decorators, she because she never has and me because I did way too much of that in the middle years of my life when money flowed more fluidly than good sense. Since we set the place up from afar and didn’t move into it full-time for seven years, we sort of decorated it from the online stores, blending in pieces we had from our shut-down fifth house is Utah that was emptied from our Park City storage room. There are pieces here that went from my house in the Hamptons to Utah to Casa Moonstruck, and there are pieces that went from our house in Ithaca to Casa Moonstruck. There are even some pieces that rattled free from our moving around NYC apartments as we went from here to there, not to mention several pieced that we negotiated to stay from the prior owners of the house. For instance, we have a big round glass table on a pottery(?) pedestal in the dining room. In the living room there is still a large live-edge wooden coffe table that looks like it came from Northern California somewhere. We had a few pieces custom made for the Great Room and a few miscellaneous pieces like that etagere I mentioned that come from various episodes of my prior lives. Kim has very little from her itinerant minstrel days, but there is a piece here and there that she prizes from her mother’s Asian collections. As for decorations, we have mostly supplemented our “get it up on the walls quick for now” approach with a vast array of eclectic items ranging from a pained Turkish bowl, a tin Moroccan hanging lamp, tribal masks from Africa, Latin America and the Pacific and a wide assortment of curios and items we have been given or that jumped out at us as we have travelled the world.
What we have ended up with is an eclectic array of interesting things that all have stories attached. As a native storyteller, that appeals to me a great deal. My mother accumulated a similar array of curios and pieces of furniture over her life (mostly from Latin America and Rome) and I suspect that Kim’s mother did likewise from her days of living in Japan. Kim and I often comment that we very much enjoy our eclectic style and feel that it goes perfectly with the eclectic life we have each crafted for ourselves and now with one another.