Designer Harry Allen revives his upstate New York cottage with diffused modernist makeover
New York-based commercial and indoor designer Harry Allen founded his eponymous brand in 1993. From producing furnishings collections and tableware to business and residential initiatives, Allen’s profession spans the breadth of layout disciplines – in 2007, he truly broke the mold with his pig-formed resin piggy financial institution. We visited his upstate New York domestic in 2009 (W*118), a nineteenth-century cottage in suburban Bedford that had just emerged from a mild modernist makeover.
When diehard modernists dream about U.S. life, they generally conjure pictures of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House out of doors Chicago and Philip Johnson’s iconic House of Glass in Connecticut. Harry Allen, a multidisciplinary New York-based clothier, appreciates the appeal of these precise archetypes. For years, he nurtured the delusion of escaping to the city to a sublime modern-day box nestled discreetly in an idyllic meadow.
However, Allen’s direction closer to Miesian splendor took an abrupt detour while he met his accomplice, John Holm, a property gardener in upstate New York. Holm’s nineteenth-century cottage in suburban Bedford was captivating, to make sure, but modernist rigor became no longer among its virtues. When the time came here to renovate the erstwhile schoolhouse, Allen entertained the idea of radical architectural intervention; however, he ultimately eschewed that approach in favor of a more subtle approach.
This residence has top-notch bones and integrity,’ says the fashion designer. ‘We didn’t want to do a traditional renovation. However, we also didn’t want to blow out the lower back of the house, so we installed a glass wall. If you cross down that street, you can wind up with a genuinely horrific hybrid.’ Allen selected to nudge the house in a cutting-edge path by retaining the simple structure and exterior but tweaking the interior spaces’ performance on color and cloth. He gave every room a special ecosystem and personality by emphasizing one-floor cloth or color.
For instance, Allen abstracted the acquainted elements of American farmhouse vernacular in the dining room. He applied the same purple wall planks to the floors, walls, and ceiling, creating an impact alongside the strains of a pristine Japanese sauna. He then underscored the room’s bizarre high quality, immediately familiar and strange, with a dramatic play on the scale – a French farm table dwarfed underneath a monumental Japanese paper lantern.
As a very last gesture to punctuate the relatively private, over-the-rainbow ambiance, Allen hung a sculpture through Norwegian artist Rune Olsen of two stag heads – one licking the other – fabricated from protecting tape wrapped over a twine armature. ‘It’s our riff at the conventional searching hotel subject,’ he says.
The access to the house is the airier one, with partitions and the ceiling painted faded sky blue. The ground is paved in bluestone, a plentiful neighborhood fabric used to assemble the existing patio. ‘I delivered the stone inner to set up an indoor/outside connection,’ Allen explains. ‘The tiles within the access are honed, in preference to the more rustic ones outdoors. I like the juxtaposition of the uncooked and the cooked.’
Allen’s palette swings toward the croquet of the spectrum in the dwelling room bathed in numerous brown shades. Once again, he nodded inside the traditional United States route but then subverted the culture with present-day flourishes. Midcentury Danish chairs, for example, are all of a sudden upholstered in plaid fabrics. Wainscoting runs alongside the walls, but it’s miles implemented in a non-traditional sample of panels instead of the strip to give it an ‘extra summary modern flavor,’ in Allen’s words. The colorful striped carpet that anchors the room echoes the striped business-match cloth by Paul Smith on the custom sofa.
Like many fixtures, the paintings in the living room are an idiosyncratic assemblage of pieces inherited from the couple’s families. They include a painting by 19th-century French artist Rosa Bonheur and a 1920s English pastoral scene of undetermined pedigree. ‘This is our Old Masters room,’ Allen says with amusement.
The ornamental pendulum swings again to Chiaro in the main suite, in which the brick walls and beamed ceiling are lined in white paint, and the floor is covered in blond timber. A Sixties addition, the bedroom projects out from the authentic structure into the lawn. Allen’s sentence, impartial palette, and avoidance of strong styles defer to the lawn views, as does his choice of artwork – a huge digital print of a month by photographer Douglas Scheer.
The new kitchen, which became the preservation catalyst, is a symphony of metal tones and materials played out in stainless steel tiles and home equipment, pewter-colored Corian surfaces, and a crown of copper pots that belonged to Holm’s mom. Like the gardens, the kitchen is the domain of Allen’s partner, who became a classically skilled French chef before focusing on plants and timber. ‘I by no means even had a plant earlier than I met John,’ Allen confesses. ‘I’m all about the container’s layout, and he’s about what goes in the field.’
So, in the end, Allen might not have obtained the chic glass box of his dreams, but his appropriate standing in the fellowship of modernists stays intact. ‘The house appears like an expression of my sensibility as a dressmaker,’ he says, ‘however it’s greater than that. It represents the grounding that John has brought to me.
