The Big Spring Clean | The Metamorphosis Revealed

We not only spiffed, we covered those black walls with Benjamin Moore’s Aura in Warm Springs #682 and the moldings in Glidden’s Bone White semi-gloss. It’s like living inside a slightly lighter version of a Tiffany box (if Tiffany boxes were also lined in that iconic blue).

Our chrome, silk moiret and leather chairs now hover around our mom's old ceramic Moroccan (oops - Italian!) pouf on the zebra skin rug.

The chesterfield sofa, which had been the great room divider, now sits against the eastern wall beneath the big Venetian mirror, four of my Scottish military prints, two vintage pith helmets and Cormac, the highland bull.

The new "office"

We clustered three of the heads so they'd have company over the desk (which had been oddly housed in the dining room) and replaced the $7 painting of a priest with a portrait of a man with pipe and ascot painted in England in 1947 (an Ebay purchase from about a year ago).

The old "office" now transformed into a drinks station right off the dining room table - an utterly more logical use of space. We added our should've-died-years-ago-given-how-we-treat-them palm trees and the circa-1910 falcon chart we found in an old bookshop in Prague.

(Photos by Porter Hovey)