DWELLING
In a unique home with more than its fair share of nooks, every one comes with an inspiring view of the unspoiled setting.
By Scott Edwards
Location: Ottsville, Bucks County Price: $2.2 million
When New York interior designer Laura Bohn, dubbed “the queen of soft modern” by Interior Design magazine, renovated this 50-year-old home in 2012, she capitalized on the countless interesting nooks and vantages of the surrounding landscape. The home is tucked into a hillside on over 13 acres of rolling terrain, not far from Lake Nockamixon.
The step-down great room and dining room, made even greater by a cathedral ceiling and fireplaces on each end, share views of the sprawling, partially wooded valley, complete with a pond, through a series of floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors. There’s still another fireplace in the neighboring living room.
[column size=one_half position=first ][/column]
[column size=one_half position=last ][/column]
[column size=one_half position=first ][/column]
[column size=one_half position=last ][/column]
It’s the kitchen, however, that serves as the home’s most attractive landing spot, because of both its sheer size—37 feet by 23 feet—and attractiveness. A bank of windows and two sets of glass doors floods the open space with sunlight and enables the patio to become an extension in the warm-weather months. In the dead of summer, a pitched-roof screened porch sits just through the mudroom. At the center of the kitchen, sits a T-shaped island with a white Corian countertop that features seating for five, a five-burner gas range, a double sink and a large walnut cutting board.
The cathedral ceilings run throughout all three of the bedrooms, as do skylights and custom built-ins. Each also has its own full bathroom. And over the three-car garage, there’s a billiards room that doubles as an office. With an inspiring view, of course.
Tracey and Rod Berkowitz specialize in marrying centuries-old features with the vestiges of modern industry, creating a niche of the contemporary-farmhouse aesthetic that’s all their own. In their own home, it carries the added benefit of holding up to their young family.
By Scott Edwards Photography by Josh DeHonney
Just inside the front door sits a small, square room—10 feet by 10 feet, maybe a bit more. It’s part of the home’s original, 1,200-square foot footprint, which dates back to 1794. To the left, there’s a considerable fireplace. The rear opens to the wide-open addition Tracey and Rod Berkowitz added seven years ago. But the eye settles on the circle of four low-slung lounge chairs in the center of the room. It’s here where Tracey and Rod will settle in at the end of another relentless day, the kids in bed, the only light coming from the crackling fire in front of them. It’s also where their guests, during parties, will play a discreet game of musical chairs.
In a home filled with interesting nooks and features, this little room is Tracey’s favorite place to be, as much for its intimate nature as its unexpected presence. This is what they do. They reimagine the home. They source unusual furniture and accessories from all over the world—crank tables from England, large Moroccan pillows, a quilted-linen wing chair, huge oil paintings on reclaimed metal—that make little sense until they’re seen through the filter of their Lambertville, New Jersey, shop, Zinc Home. There, a raw, urban energy amplifies the familiar modern-farmhouse aesthetic, sharpening splintered, worn-down corners to a precise edge. And they approach their home with the same audacity.
It still needs to be practical
Over the course of a single month late in the summer of 2002, Tracey and Rod moved into their home in Sergeantsville, NJ, a few miles north of Lambertville, got married and opened their store (in New Hope, originally). It was owned by a realtor who, at least, restored the original, wide-plank pine floors that were painted blue by the previous owner.
“We loved the charm of it, but it was a beater,” Tracey says. “The outside needed so much work. It was a hideous mint green. It was peeling. But, I don’t know, as soon as we walked in, we knew this was the house that we had to live in.”
Tracey became pregnant with their first child, Noah, the following summer, and once he grew into a toddler, they finally started to feel the pinch of their precious little house on the prairie. When Tracey became pregnant with their second, Piper, in 2007, it was either move or grow the house. Piper was born in June 2008. They broke ground on an 1,800-square foot addition—about a third larger than the home itself—that November. And it was completed by her first birthday.
The two-story addition extends from the rear of the original home. On the outside, a porch wraps around the front of the home and its south side, erasing any noticeable division between old and new. Inside, two large, open rooms comprise the new space, the living room downstairs and the master bedroom upstairs, which is separated from the en suite bathroom by a partial wall, the only interior wall, really, in the entire addition.
Tracey and Rod knew exactly what they wanted it to look like before a blueprint was even rendered. “And then we worked with our contractor to tweak some things that we thought would be one way and ended up being another,” Tracey says. “But, overall, it’s pretty much like a rectangle.”
They needed the space. But they also seized the opportunity to mold the home into their own shape. The reclaimed wood beams and exposed, raw-side pine that form the ceiling grid (and tie the old in with the new) juxtapose the concrete floor in the living room. The rear walls of the entry and dining rooms in the original home were removed, turning those spaces into extensions of the addition and, in turn, creating the illusion that they’re a bit larger than they actually are. Basically, all of the old was preserved and made practical again, while the addition afforded them new leeway, physically and aesthetically.
“We love industrial,” Tracey says. “But, we wanted to make sure that we could keep that [farmhouse] vibe and not have it look too country—even though we do live in that kind of house.”
With the store as a fallback and a couple whose tastes are constantly evolving, it’s easy to envision a high turnover rate for the furnishings, but the opposite is closer to the truth. Relatively little has changed from the initial installation.
“We spent more money and more time to find just the right pieces, instead of just trying to decorate because we had the space to decorate,” Tracey says. “I get bored with how things are merchandized,” so the accessories are shuffled often. But the furniture—“actually, we’ve had three couches so far,” she says and then laughs at the realization.
“I just love it. But the cushions are all down and it’s super-uncomfortable,” Tracey says. “But I love the couch so much that I’m willing to suffer.”
She is not willing to suffer for it, or any other piece of furniture, for that matter.
“It’s on my to-do list, to make sure I get those stuffed, because then it’ll be super-comfortable and we can go back to where I sit here and Rod sits over there,” on the other sofa, which faces the French one from the other side of the coffee table. “I’m infringing on Rod’s sofa. He’s like, ‘This is my space. But because you had to have this uncomfortable sofa, you have to watch TV with me over here.’ And the kids don’t care. They love it over here,” on the French sofa.
How much, I ask, do two young kids, now 12 and 8, influence what you bring into the house?
“They don’t influence it at all. Like, I don’t care what they think,” Tracey says, laughing with me at her bluntness. Sarcasm tends to not be read as well as it’s heard, so I feel obligated to note that she’s kidding. “Our house is not a museum. The kids are allowed to lay all over everything. The dogs”—there are two of them, both around 85 pounds each—“lay all over the sofas. It’s a totally livable space, which is why I think the kids like it. We don’t put restrictions on them at all.
“However,” she adds, “they do know that, I don’t know if it’s because we’re in the business, they do know that they have to be respectful of the stuff that we have, that stuff costs money, that we look for stuff that’s really special that we may never be able to replace if it was ruined. As with anything, I don’t let them sit on the back of the sofa because they shouldn’t be doing that with anybody’s sofa.”
Later, Noah comes downstairs to alert Tracey that he’s due at soccer practice soon. He’s polite and personable. He stays with us for the next half-hour or so, while we finish talking and Tracey shows me around upstairs. Throughout, he’s wearing his neon-green Nike soccer spikes. Tracey never flinches.
The thrill of the hunt
When you work long hours, six days a week, in an industry as finicky and aloof as theirs, inspiration dries up fast. So it’s not unremarkable that Tracey and Rod’s home remains a wellspring of it for them. There are two reasons for that, Tracey says. One, it took them a long time to arrive here. And two, the home, in her eyes, is still very much a work in progress. The kitchen, an addition somewhere around the middle of the last century, appears next in line. They recently covered the north wall, floor to ceiling, in white subway tile with dark gray grout. Changed the complexion of the room entirely, Tracey says. She fantasizes openly now about replacing the cabinets with a sleek, modern kind.
This is not a couple, though, that loses itself every weekend in renovation projects. The home, after all, isn’t going anywhere. And Tracey feels that in order for them to remain relevant (and feed their insatiable addiction to design), they need to be closer to the action. So, they make regular trips to New York for two, three days at a time—kids in tow.
“I just want them to appreciate what we do,” she says. “A lot of people, their parents leave for work, they don’t know what they do. But my kids have to live with what we do. At times, it stinks for them. I want them to understand that it’s hard. Like, the things that we bring into the store and the things that we bring into the house, we don’t just go to a store, normally, and buy them. We found it somewhere. It has a story.”
Sitting in one of those low-slung lounge chairs in the entry room, Tracey smiles at the memory of the late-night bidding war on eBay that played out before they finally secured them.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” she says. “Then we were like, ‘Oh, shit. I hope they’re nice.’ ”
Tracey insists that of their two kids, their daughter, Piper, is the clear favorite to follow in their footsteps, or at least, walk nearby. She’s creative and she’s already helping with the merchandizing in the store. But, “Noah won’t, for sure,” she says. “He wants nothing to do with it. He wants a nice house. He wants us to do it.”
My tour of the upstairs finishes in his bedroom. It’s the largest upstairs room in the original part of the house, but it’s modest by modern expectations. Still there’s room for a queen-size bed and a leather loveseat and a small table. The walls, up to about waist-high, are covered in square metal diamond plates, the kind you’d find on the floor of an exotic mechanic’s garage. But Noah’s grown out of them, and much of the rest of the motif—he’s 12, remember—so they’ll be coming down soon, likely with a lot of aggravation and cursing from Rod, who’ll be doing the prying. The bed was the first part of the makeover. Noah is filled with ideas for the rest of it.
“We’re gonna do a butcher-block desk. And we’re gonna mount my TV to the wall,” he says. “And we’re thinking of getting a—what’s that called?”
“An end table?” Tracey answers. “We’ll talk about that.”
“I could definitely design, like, boys’ rooms my age,” he says.
“Oh, really?” Tracey says with mock surprise. This is hardly the first time she’s heard this.
“Yeah. I’ll pay people. I’ll have people pay me. And I’ll design their rooms.”
Polished as her Northampton home may seem to her thousands of followers, Julia Konya’s life is in constant upheaval. And that’s just how she likes it. By Sean Downey
Julia Konya isn’t comfortable in the spotlight. She’s never thought of herself as a writer, much less an Internet personality. Yet her face is front and center on the interior design blog, Cuckoo4Design, she created from scratch and relentlessly updates each day. The blog has become a source of inspiration for the tens of thousands who regularly return for the never-ending flow of whimsical design and clever decorating ideas. Check in once and you’ll soon be immersed in painted curtains, secretary desk makeovers and an endless stream of other intricate DIY projects.
But beyond all that, she’d prefer to be left to her own devices. “When I’m alone, I can be creative,” Konya says. “That’s pretty much how I’ve always been. As a child, I used to lock myself in my room and just color or do craft projects.”
Konya grew up in Germany, where she studied art and visual merchandising before moving to the United States at 21 for a marketing internship at an engineering firm based in Bethlehem. That’s where she met her husband, Jarrid Konya.
After the couple settled in Northampton to raise their two children and four cats, Julia continued working with her hands. And every time she would refinish a piece of furniture, remodel a bedroom or fashion new drapes, her friends would ask how she created such a distinct look. “So I decided to start a blog and put everything in there,” she says. “I figured it would let my family in Germany see what I was doing too.”
Her visual approach to blogging turned out to be perfect for Pinterest and Instagram, where she quickly developed a following of 28,000 strong.
“I had to get over my fear people might think I was saying something wrong,” Konya says. “But I’ve grown to love blogging because I get to do what I love and I make my own hours.”
For all her time and effort, the posts that prove the most popular seem to take on lives of their own, like the outdoor enclosure she built for their cats. “I built them an outdoor play area with tunnels that are connected along the fence to our living room window, but I was scared to write about it because I thought people would think I was completely nuts,” Konya says. “But that post has received the most traffic ever.” The project even caught the eye of modern cat magazine.
Design is temporary
Spend any time on Cuckoo4Design and it’s immediately apparent how much Konya looks at her home as a work of art. Graphic lines on the front porch and in the living room give way to geometric patterns in the bathrooms and bright accents in the kitchen. Every corner, every surface is fair game.
“I get an idea, I get an inspiration and I do it. And if I don’t like what I’ve done, I just redo it or take it down,” she says. “When I complete a project, I take pictures and write about it.”
She’s also adamant about not plotting her projects well in advance. That’s too structured for her liking. “I feel like the people who follow me like the spontaneity.”
Who’s afraid of a little heavy lifting?
Konya’s designs and her home life often bleed together as one, and she’s quick to point out that her house doesn’t always look as perfect as it does in the blog. Most of the time, actually, it’s a mess. “My family is used to the house being torn apart most of the time,” she says.
She also tackles the handyman work—“I’m a perfectionist, and I don’t like it when Jarrid helps.”
Her approach, she says, is always even-keeled, even in the face of the kind of trauma that usually sends a couple into a fiery rage. Case in point, earlier this year, the Konyas bought a new sectional for their basement. It wasn’t until they got it home that they realized it wasn’t going to fit down the stairs. After much deliberation, Julia took it upon herself to bring it down in pieces.
“When it came to cutting the sofa in half, I just figured I’d be able to put it back together again later,” she says.
She carefully stripped the upholstery, cut the feet off and then, impossibly, put it all back together downstairs.
Home is where the heart is
While Konya’s built her following around letting people into her home, she’s cautious about making her blog too personal. “But I realize that I have to keep things somewhat personal or else the readers don’t have anything to connect with,” she says.
A few years ago, Konya confided about her daughter’s sensory issues and candida overgrowth. The emotional posts conveyed a deeply personal and difficult struggle to help her daughter get through painful periods in her young life.
“I felt like it connected with a lot more people and helped them in some way because there are a lot of people going through the same thing,” Konya says.
For the most part, though, Konya’s posts are focused on her insatiable desire to make all the spaces in her home—“Half of my husband’s man cave is ripped apart right now”—as dynamic as she can. The attention’s flattering, but it’s by no means an affirmation. Interior design, for Konya, is about the means, not so much the end.
“I’m a big believer in going with the flow and not dreaming too big,” she says. “I want to stay focused on doing what I like to do. And if something happens, it happens.”
At least so far, it’s happening.
Photos (interiors) courtesy Cuckoo4Design / Julia Konya; (portrait) courtesy Cuckoo4Design / Jules & George Photography
Some modest, seasonal tweaks to your interior design will work wonders on your perspective.
By David J. Witchell
Before you start scattering dead leaves around the house, there are other ways to go about introducing those fall colors.
Neutral hues have always formed the base layer around my home. I get bored with colors quickly, and the vanilla canvas allows me to overhaul the accessories from season to season. Honing in on a new part of the spectrum every few months has a way of refreshing all of the fixtures, not to mention my own spirit.
Still, it’s a bittersweet time of year. It’s invigorating to reintroduce fall’s shades, but it’s just as hard stowing away the summer stuff. Turquoise encourages communication and clarity, and indigo is the color of intuition. Blues, in general, tend to facilitate peace and grounded order, which makes them the ideal palette for the year’s most carefree, restorative months.
Fall, for me, looks like warm metals and hits of crimson, cayenne, rust and goldenrod. I may be especially partial to the season because orange is my favorite color. I’ve also come to learn that it represents optimism. Blending in reds helps me feel energetic and fuels my ambition and determination, a particularly productive cocktail of qualities. Yellow just makes me smile. I throw in some green or magenta for balance and harmony. And somewhere in my office, visible from my desk, I make sure there’s a splash of purple to spark my creativity.
Beneath it all are the browns, grays and whites, the ideal companions for my seasonal whims. It’s easy to look straight past them, but without them, there’d be no anchor, no context. Instead of flowing with the landscape on the other side of the windows, the accents would appear to be at war with the spaces around them. It all works and, just as importantly, it all transitions relatively effortlessly because there’s a consistent, objective platform upon which I can express some personality. Less discretion would back me into corners that I’d be stuck in for years at a time.
And those neutral colors have some personality of their own. Brown embodies warmth and bit of gravity. Gray represents compromise. Little wonder, then, that I’ve used it so liberally. And white connects us to innocence and a sense of fruition.
Interior design is not unlike how we go about dressing ourselves. If I was to go around draped in jewelry, a loud-patterned sweater, putting-green colored khakis and a pair of Christmas-red boots, what would that say about me? I know mixing patterns and colors is having a moment, but with that kind of wild abandon, it all turns into white noise. I love my home. And when I switch out a few well-placed variables, it reminds me why I love it, because those pieces manage to cast it in new light. And that’s all it needs most of the time. To constantly repaint walls and interchange furniture and art would only be masking that appeal.
