Here we are.
We are standing back in our home.
On August 9th, of last year
creosote built up in our chimney
even though we have it cleaned twice a year
and it burped onto to the roof and our house burned in
and we were declared a total loss by our insurance provider.
There was nothing left other than the foundation
and the basement.
It was totally gone.
If you've survived a fire,
the first people you owe your life to
are of course our firefighters.
Thank you!
Dennis Leary Firefighter Foundation
and the grace I've had of being associated with them,
brought me the training to know what I was hearing
and seeing when we had our fire.
We have so many people to thank for just being alive.
Did you guys want to start the tour?
We're here, we've made it, we've made it this far.
Come on, it's really exciting to show this to you.
(upbeat music)
This is all my furniture company, my furniture partners
trying to rebuild the furniture that we originally had here
that I bought before I even started designing furniture.
Every place I design, I do this weird thing
where it's already decorated in my head and I put it
I like this chair.
In storage until the house is built.
I can take a nap on this one.
And I drew this house, so it was see-through through
the middle and we had slabs of stone on both sides.
So you could sit and enjoy the fire on either side.
And then if I were in the kitchen cooking,
which I always am, you can see through the entire house.
So that's back.
Everything here is exactly the way
I drew it on a piece of paper.
Steve Colletti, our friend and builder of this house twice
goes out to wherever he has to go and reclaims fallen barns.
I originally built a home in 2009 and after the fire,
she said, let's, I, you know, put it back to what it was.
It is put together from several barns.
So we had to source the barns and then kind of
put the whole puzzle together.
To duplicate exactly the way it looked is, you know
you're not going off of blueprints or everything.
You're going off of memory.
And that was quite the challenge.
Remediation teams are all different sorts of specialists
and they come to try and find whatever they can
before your life is taken away in trucks.
And that funny lookin' lamp that my mom gave us
when we built the house 15, 16, 16 years ago, that survived.
And this survived the fire too
because it was against the stone.
It had to be shaved down a lot,
but this is an old farm tool.
All of these are stone.
All of this is stone to separate wheat.
The house fell in, but again,
everything they could take from the wreckage
they did and they did their utmost best to restore it.
I think what was the biggest challenge of something I've
never had to deal with before is going off of photos
and half burned furniture and being able to recreate them
and have them made from scratch.
They made a facsimile of what used to be our coffee table.
It needs to be weathered a little bit more.
And this door used to be covered with a tapestry
that we bought in Venice.
We couldn't get to Venice, you know, pandemic and all.
So I bought this kooky thing from Spain, that I thought
just gave texture and fun to the room
and looked a little like the sheep.
Those sheep aren't big stuffed toys, they're actually
benches that they use in Europe to sit by the fire
at ski resorts.
What is that, weird felt thing on our speaker?
Well, it's just a cover, dust cover, honey.
These are dust covers, sweetheart.
You can get rid of them, now.
Another thing that survived is my mom's grandfather clock
that she gifted us for our wedding.
It did survive, but it doesn't work yet.
It needs new insides cause of the fire.
These are all of the pieces that our furniture company
remade for us.
There isn't a corner of this house that is not completely
thought about and thought through.
She loves natural pine floors, really simple materials,
really earthy materials, nothing fancy.
There's nothing shiny in Rachel's house.
Everything has had a story.
It had a past it, you know,
and she loves to bring it all together.
She wants people to come over to her house and feel at home.
Steve built this from wood that was scrapped
after our house burned, which is pretty cool.
And I found this online.
This is a vintage barn lamp and it goes up and down
just like it used to.
And we're gonna put our first Christmas tree here this year.
I'm not gonna do the number of them I used to
'cause they're all gone and the stuff's gone.
But this we're gonna try and do at least this one this year.
And we're, we're getting there slowly, slowly,
and Italian piano, piano, step-by-step.
The first time I came here, when it was all empty.
The last time we visited with you guys,
it was very hard to even catch my breath 'cause all you saw
was what was not here.
Now that it's mostly back.
It fills me with joy to look around because it's so similar.
And these are very inexpensive outdoor lamps
that come from the local home store.
And Steve built these beautiful benches for the
breakfast table.
We replaced the big butcher block counter.
We replaced the pizza oven.
The pizza oven actually fell
a week after our house burned down.
That was the straw that broke this camel's back.
That fell seven days after the original fire, remember?
How could I forget?
The last beam of the house cracked it in half.
Well at least we got the pizza oven.
Boom!
(whistles with explosion)
Oh, no you don't, no you don't.
I had to rebuild this pantry for like
the third time in a year.
And these are the spices.
And these are the spices alphabetically.
This is tomato, this is broth
and hot sauce.
Now we gotta take a quick break 'cause I smell stuff.
Stuff is happening in the kitchen
'cause we're also making Thanksgiving today.
So I'll see ya in a minute.
Okay guys, so we're back and this is.
The guest bedroom.
The largest of our guest bedrooms, really right?
This is the lucky room, cause you're closest to the kitchen
so you can steal the late night food.
You can get the leftovers the quickest.
And this is the little breakfast nook.
There's a little book nook
And it's got a really big shower.
Look how big the shower is,
and it's got really good acoustics.
(upbeat music)
So this survived, thank God.
It was on an inside wall and this is Howard's picture
of Isaboo, that he did for me for my 50th birthday.
And it's back in its place.
And this is Casa Isadore,
which is the Patrons Saint of Brick Layers,
and my grandpa was a stone mason and agriculture.
And that's our house in Italy and our friend David Bowles,
who works with us also on the show from Italy,
made this out of all pictures and this is a quilt.
This is stitched together on his family's sewing machine.
That's part of his legacy.
He made this for us out of photographs from Italy.
So beautiful, that's our house honey.
It is.
It is, okay so up the stairs,
I've a little bit of sciatica.
So I'm walkin' a little weird.
These are little paintings done by people
trying to learn how to paint from Germany.
I got these at John Derian.
My sister and my mom gave us this alter
to kind of bless the house.
We had this owl remade by a quilter, who's British
and in the clovers are Rachael, John and Bella.
Isaboo and Bella.
All of us, were in the clover.
And this is our little reading nook
where we sit in chillax.
This our bedroom, which is really Bella's room.
We're allowed to stay in it too.
It looks pretty much the same.
We got better drapes and this little desk
all of this is from our furniture lines.
This is on rollers and you can roll the ottoman up
to sit underneath the desk.
Tommy Daddario who's on our show all the time,
his aunt painted this for us and it's us in Tuscany.
Usk in Tuscany?
Usk in Tuscany.
Us in Tuscany.
This is us in Tuscany.
But look, she put Isaboo underneath the grapevines,
isn't that beautiful?
And I'm little hoot.
When I was a little girl, I stayed up all night
so that's why the owls.
So there's, I call them bad blankets.
This is really just a tablecloth that I keep on my bed
and it has owls on it.
And that's a Manray called Nocturne, the artist man, right?
That's a vintage piece from the year I was born.
We can just eat dinner right here 'cause it's a
tablecloth, so we don't need to ever eat at the table.
So this is what I call the yellow brick road, honey.
I got this weird rug at John Darien, this vintage rug.
And all these records are Hugo Guinness.
And this was made for us, remember honey?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
It's from.
From our Anniversary.
From Neil and Daniel.
We had to reframe it, but it was saved.
The envelope was made by our friend, Daniel.
And this is the song that our friends wrote for us
and sang to us on our 12th Anniversary.
Neil and Sean and Lane.
My friend Steve, who built this house,
built this for John's studio.
So all the guys could put their boots down
and a little place for them to put their keys.
My other friend Al, Al Driver made this gorgeous bench
and This Must Be The Place, is my book and one of my
favorite talking head-songs ever.
And it's just about the discussion of what home means.
And after your home burns down, you think about that a lot.
I think John's favorite thing is that I replaced his sign.
So the house burned down.
It didn't burn after this point because this is really,
really a separate building and it's got
Yeah, it's the garage.
the soundproofing, right.
But it's a separate structure
and John's studio did not burn.
The only thing that burned was his sign that said,
Big Wood Studio.
Which is what John of course, calls his studio.
Big Wood.
There you go.
Here's the studio.
My man cave.
Well, this is where I do all my recording.
I can really geek out technically, API 35 channel console,
bunch of vintage synthesizers.
And then in here is where the musicians play music.
A drum kit, a vintage Hammond organ, a vintage Wurlitzer,
electric piano, bunch of amps, guitars.
I mean, this is obviously my happy place.
I love playing music here and I am thrilled to be back.
Okay, that's enough.