(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Shelby Gerard,
and welcome to our newly renovated Connecticut home.
Come on in.
Right off our entry is our formal living room,
which is our favorite room in the house.
It's what really sold us on the house,
and it's where we spend a lot of our time.
The history of this room is actually interesting.
It used to be a carriage house
to what was once a mansion across the way.
We updated the lighting in this room,
so we replaced the sconces above the fireplace,
and then we actually installed an overhead fixture.
We don't actually use it all that often,
but I just love how it's kind of
a sculptural piece of art for the room.
Another piece we love is this artwork.
It was done by my grandfather in the sixties.
He was an artist and we've had this
in every home we've lived in.
So we moved from Brooklyn.
We had an 850 square foot apartment.
This is a 3000 square foot house,
so we had to buy a lot of furniture,
but we brought most of the pieces
we had in Brooklyn with us,
including these travertine coffee tables
and this R.H. white sofa.
We needed to get a really extra large rug for this room,
just because of the scale of the space.
So this wool rug is from Dash and Albert,
and I think it just cozies up the space a lot.
One of my favorite pieces in the room is this day bed.
It's from CB2.
I love how it kind of keeps the room open
since it's lower, and it's surprisingly comfortable.
So our style is very neutral and pretty minimal,
but we love to add organic materials and texture,
so while we keep a really neutral palette
with whites and creams and ivories,
I love to add wood, cane, jute,
lots of natural materials to kind of warm things up.
Heading into our dining room,
I wanted this space to feel a little bit more rustic,
so we added a big wood dining table.
This room we use for formal entertaining,
but we actually eat most of our meals
in the kitchen when it's just the two of us.
I love these dining chairs.
These are from a collaboration Christian Limo
did with Anthropology.
I love the arch shape and how they're woven.
Another favorite piece, which is very key,
is this credenza from CB2.
It holds all of our liquor and booze and wine,
so it's very important.
So now we are in our kitchen and this is the room
where we did the most renovation work.
We completely gutted this room
and rebuilt it from the ground up.
My husband and I did most of the work ourselves.
We added new cabinetry.
We actually used Ikea bases
and semi-handmade cabinet fronts.
This color I get asked about all the time,
it's Clare Paint's No Filter.
It's just a really nice warm beige.
We also did marble countertops.
This is Imperial Danby marble.
We also added this work surface in the middle,
which is really nice for prep so that I don't have to worry
about staining and etching the marble countertops.
This faucet, we found on Etsy,
it came from Morocco and it's unlacquered brass,
which really shows age.
We like things that really show age and wear,
which is another reason we went with marble countertops.
So we did most of this renovation ourselves,
which was a really large undertaking.
I think there were about three months
where we didn't have a functioning kitchen.
We ordered a lot of takeout.
My favorite piece in the kitchen has to be our range.
It's Ilve, which is an Italian brand.
And I just love the stainless steel brass mix.
I get a lot of questions on this
and I actually found it on Wayfare.
(laid-back music)
This is my office.
The nice thing about moving
from a small apartment in Brooklyn
to a 3000 square foot house
is that both my husband and I have dedicated workspaces
which is really important when we are working
from home the majority of the time.
A couple favorite pieces in here
are this Burl wood desk from CB2.
I also love this vintage Italian alabaster lamp
that I found on Etsy.
Over here is a little book moment.
This table used to be our dining table in Brooklyn,
and now I kind of use it to display
some of my favorite design books.
This is our TV room.
This is where we really just watch movies
and lounge, mostly in the evenings.
This sectional is from Sixpenny.
It's the Aria, it's super comfortable,
and it basically takes up the entire width of the room.
A very meaningful piece in here
is this portrait of my grandmother
painted by my grandfather.
She likes to just hang out
and watch The Real Housewives with me.
Now we're upstairs and this is our primary bedroom.
Something I love in this room
is this vintage Turkish oushak.
It's from Etsy, one of my favorite sources.
I also love this linen throw,
which is from Zara Home,
as are some wooden stools I have in the corner.
I feel like that is a little bit
of an unused source for people, so Zara Home is great.
These pillows are from my friend Pia's shop, hello Pia.
They're hemp, and just nice neutral texture.
So we had an interesting challenge with the windows in here.
They were very much to the edges of the wall.
So we did a French drapery rod,
which creates this really kind of tight edge.
And while we only did one panel on the two sides,
we actually filled in the center
with four panels per window,
just to kind of fill in some of the space on this big wall.
Across from our bedroom is our guest room.
This is basically what our bedroom looked like in Brooklyn.
We just replicated the whole thing here.
All the furniture is the same.
This is a favorite piece, this is an antique dresser
I found in Denver when we lived there.
I also love this chair,
which I found on Craigslist many years ago.
It's a 1950 spoon back chair and I reupholstered it
during quarantine with this mud cloth fabric.
One pattern pillow, I don't have a lot of pattern
in the house, but this is something I love.
It's a design by Kelly Wearstler,
who is one of my favorite designers.
This room actually gets the best light in the house
and it has one of the better views,
so it's really a nice treat for our guests.
And this is our sunroom.
When we moved in this room was painted dark green.
There was like a reddish pink tile floor.
We added a lot of comfy cozy furniture.
With the weather being nice,
we've been spending a lot of time in here.
All of these windows actually open up
and there's screens behind them.
So we spend a lot of time out here when the weather is nice
on this big comfy sectional,
drinking wine, listening to music.
(calm music)
That's it, that's the tour.
Thanks for stopping by.