The Riverfront Farmhouse in Architectural Digest

The Riverfront Farmhouse is in the December issue of Architectural Digest, on a page in the Excellence in Design: Cleveland section. The page is called Collected Works, and it shows the house along with the three of us who made it: Adam, Rob and Kay.

The full page and its text are on our Press page. What follows is the part one page has no room for.

Thank you to Tiffany Joy for the photographs, and to the trades who built the house. And to the owner. It is her house, and it was designed around how she lives in it.

What is on the page

The page opens on the living room. Two deep red sofas face a limestone fireplace with shearling chairs pulled in close, and there is a plaster arch on either side.

Below that, the kitchen and the dining room. The island is a table, built new for the house on turned legs with brass bail pulls, and it stands free of the cabinetry behind it the way a piece of furniture would. The marble behind it carries a violet vein. Past the arch, a trestle table, oak chairs in bouclé, and a second limestone fireplace at the far end of the room.

What the page leaves out

The biggest change we made to the house is not on it. There was an open wood deck under a green awning. We enclosed it and made a four-seasons room, a green room with a floor the color of brick. It did not make the page.

The other thing a photograph cannot show is how new the house was when we started. It was a newer build, with almond raised-panel cabinets, brown-gold granite, and a checkerboard floor in a columned entry. In the piece, Adam says the finished house has the feeling of a French farmhouse or an Italian villa that has evolved over a century. None of that century came with the house.

Where the age came from

Some of it was already there. The owner had antiques, oriental rugs, oil paintings and leather-bound books, and several of them carry through into the finished rooms. Things with a past do their work whether or not anyone designs around them. We designed around them.

The rest was built. The arch is struck once at the entry and repeated through the house, and by the third room it reads as the house's own idea. The entry floor is terracotta octagons, stopped clean where the white oak begins, and it is the part of this house we would bet on in 2050.

A house does not have to be old to feel inherited. Age is mostly a matter of materials and of what you let stay, and both can be decided in any decade.

Thinking about color for a room you are about to renovate? That decision is easier to make inside a plan than on its own. See how renovation projects run, or start a project.