What is your interior design philosophy?

[Manalto]

Matt (MT1987) made a comment about a cut-off date that was the inspiration for this thread.

Restoration of an old house can be as faithful to period correctness as you want it to be. Furniture, wallpaper, lighting, etc. may adhere strictly to the house's date of construction (or, understandably, before) while taking into consideration style and the economic resources of the original homeowner - I've seen restorations so dedicated to authenticity that only tools that were available at the time were used. (Were those who executed the restoration dressed in period clothing?)

At the other end of the spectrum, one can totally ignore a house's vintage when designing the interior.

What's the rule for your house? Do you have an interior design concept or philosophy?

[phil]

true restoration in my mind is not improvement but an effort towards creating what the object could have looked like if it were preserved.
Practicality , availability and economics often stand in the way. as an example recreating an outhouse and removing the toilet is a little extreme.
I remember when I first bought, thinking old plaster was important. I changed my mind, I can use plaster but drywall is more practical, but I still respect that others want to retain it. after restoring one plaster room I decided I like insulation and practicality outweighed true restoration.
I have no qualms about replacing rotten woodwork with new pieces but I prefer to keep to the original dimensions where possible. In doing my roof economics played a part, I could do shakes at an added cost. I think if I had bags of money I would have but I dont feel bad about using modern shingles.
Electronics bug me. I just saw my neighbor put out a gas stove, it looked like he had opened the wiring and suspect it failed due to an electronic issue. I wondered for a moment why a gas stove even needs electronics and if it could be converted to not use them. I bet most of us have a microwave, a TV and a computer of some sort.
I think sometimes there are trade offs and each of us needs to make practical decisions, and the decisions vary due to economics, time and differences in preference. i can respect why a woodworker may choose to use old tools and work a bit more slowly and gain personal satisfaction from doing so.
in the interior, I feel ok using polyurathane, but I prefer to keep old windows , strip ugly paint from where it doesn't belong and in general preserve the envelope.
for furniture, I like old stuff, but I have a mixture of eras of furniture. I dont wish to live in a museum.
I was just offered a bunch of fir flooring. Its been sanded and removed and I'm thinking of processing that into wainscot so that I can put it around my living room. The guy offering it is a friend, he will be glad to see it get used and I will pay him back in some way, probably through barter for something he would like. That way its a friendly and fair deal not involving money or a trip to the big box store.

[GinaC]

I'd rather go with the style of the house rather than the date it was built, as well as taking into account how fashionable people were in its location. Here in rural Vermont I doubt folks were interested in the latest styles. My house was built in the Art Deco period, but its style is more Tudor Revival or English Cottage, and that's what I'm choosing to honor.

Also, while I'd love to only purchase antiques, I really didn't want to spend years and years with no furniture while I found the perfect pieces, so again, I'm focusing on the style instead of true restoration.

[1918ColonialRevival]

I guess it's no surprise that mine is based on the Colonial Revival era. It encompasses all of the styles popular during the Colonial and Federal eras: Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, Adam, and even some Empire to name a few. Many interior design books and magazines of the early 20th Century referred to just about anything pre-Victorian as "Colonial", so pretty much anything before the late 1830s/early 1840s falls into this category. A few books were even calling the heavy-scroll furniture of the 1835-45 era "Colonial".

I have a few true Revival pieces from the 1890s through the early 1920s, but most of the furniture is late 1700s/early 1800s pieces.

[Gothichome]

Full on Victorian rarely venturing beyond 1910, often venturing well earlier than Victorian though.

[nhguy]

We've moved to several antiques houses over the years 1809,1840 and 1903. The craftsman bungalow we are in now is my new passion, so to speak. We drag the same furniture and associated artifacts with us to each new house. We do decorated the rooms paint wise to match the time frame, but have only added a few mission era pieces to this house. Our furniture pieces range from a late 17th century Essex County MA blanket chest to a 1910 quartersawn white oak buffet. One of my old antique collector friends said old houses had furniture from all timeframes, so never worry about mixing.

[Lily left the valley]

I agree that homes evolve over time, although time capsules are a joy to see for me as well.

What I loathe with the fire of a thousand suns is when folks strip out the original character to make the home look or feel like what they should have bought instead of the one they did.

We like a wide range of time period styles, which led us to our plan for Beebe. What we decided was we would work towards most of the house being furnished and decorated with American 20s and 30s minded bits (vintage or newly made) to reflect the combo of Arts & Crafts and late Deco Bungalow elements present. As much as we both like earlier periods...a lot of what we like about them wanders into the "too fancy" zone, and typically would require more dusting and maintenance--a definite hard no thank you.

For a scant few other rooms, those are shaping (both in our minds and over time) towards 40s to roughly mid 50s. The 50s would only be one room, our office, in an homage to a dear friend of ours that passed. This idea of the wider range overall is it's how we would likely have done things if we had lived in the house as the original owners. The previous owners did do "updates" both in positively lovely and BURN IT WITH FIRE ways--though not at the same time. We're planning to retain as much as we can of the positively lovely aspects.

Some bits in our plans are taking cues from what we can see or have learned about the prior owners. We're definitely NOT putting wall to wall carpet back in the kitchen/dining/hallway even though we know it was once there. We're also not sure if we want the original wood floor under later layers to stay in the downstairs full bath or the kitchen. We're leaving it in the upstairs ¹/₂ bath. (And that bathroom we found out was a much later conversion--when the daughter inherited it for a short time before she also passed after her mother. One of the granddaughters told me she only remembers her grandmother kept her plants in that room prior to it being turned into a bath.)

I think the hardest thing is touches where we want to add a bit more detail that could have been or definitely was not there prior. This is something we've long been on the fence about. Like, say, putting in stained glass panels in the French door between the purrlor and the dining room. Right now, it's all plexi save one empty in the center bottom (which our cats use like a pet door), but I'd love a long term project that I make myself that we both enjoy.

On the other hand, there are some bits that although not as fashionable, are definitely part of the history of the home. For instance, I've been thinking about restoring the "fake" tile made by scoring the plaster in the downstairs bath which is now covered by horrid mundane-design Masonite wall panels (It definitely won't be the current Mamie Pink I could spot behind the panels though). Technically, actual tile would be more water resistant, but I like that odd quirk that exhibits a very working class detail to make things look as "fancy" as the better offs had.

[Manalto]

What I loathe with the fire of a thousand suns is when folks strip out the original character to make the home look or feel like what they should have bought instead of the one they did.

With you 100%.

When I was still in school, I visited the house of a friend of a friend, a fine 1732 center-chimney colonial that sits at the top of a hill in Newington, Connecticut. At the time, this house had been continuously occupied by the same family for 240 years. While there was ample evidence that the family cherished their heirlooms, they weren't slaves to them and the house did indeed evolve over time. The changes didn't appear to be a mad rush to comply with current fashion or merely to "change things up." (When and why did people start adding "up" to this phrase?) Sitting on the kitchen counter was a lathe-turned piece of wood that puzzled me. I asked about it and the response was, "Oh that's a potato masher." It was probably a hundred or more years old. There were cast iron radiators, overstuffed furniture and wallpaper that could be dated by their style but demonstrated judgement in taste that held up well over time. A big dog sprawled on the sofa and the radio played a current hit (Boz Scagg's "Harbor Lights," if I recall.) The overall effect was comfort.

This is what I would like to fraudulently recreate at Thornwood, (tongue-in-cheek pretentious name for a decidedly blue collar house) a house that retains many of its original characteristics but gently evolved over time - because the changes made sense.

The main part of my house was built in 1919 (according to the architect's drawing) and a one-story wrap around addition was built in the 1950s. I've been trying to choose finishes and furnishings that are suitable to those eras respectively, and departing from that rule when it makes sense to do so. There's an eighteenth-century captain's chair (a family heirloom) and a 1970s Marantz stereo system, because it's good. I like Matt's idea of a cutoff year but for me it would probably have to be something like 1985, and then what's the point? Gentle and purposeful evolution is my philosophy, I guess.

[Lily left the valley]

The funny thing about buying and making the house into what you really wanted was actually something we almost backed ourselves into with 42 (the first old house we sought to buy). It was absolutely no bones about it a Cape, and during all the back and forth time with the Fannie Mae realtor, I started saying things to Sean like, "Well, we could put a Bungalow porch on it," and the like.

Around that time, I again ended up on the Old House Guy's post "Death of a Cottage", even posting asking if what we were planning was essentially Death of a Cape. (I just scrolled down on that page after I grabbed the link and realized what I actually wrote was, "Are we contemplating the murder of a nondescript 1940 Cape by changing details to a humble Craftsman Bungalow?")

In retrospect, I think 42 would have been a disaster for us for so many reasons despite the coveted house number. I'm forever grateful to that awful seller's agent because they certainly made us glad to walk away from that one.

[nhguy]

The funny thing about buying and making the house into what you really wanted was actually something we almost backed ourselves into with 42 (the first old house we sought to buy). It was absolutely no bones about it a Cape, and during all the back and forth time with the Fannie Mae realtor, I started saying things to Sean like, "Well, we could put a Bungalow porch on it," and the like.

Around that time, I again ended up on the Old House Guy's post "Death of a Cottage", even posting asking if what we were planning was essentially Death of a Cape. (I just scrolled down on that page after I grabbed the link and realized what I actually wrote was, "Are we contemplating the murder of a nondescript 1940 Cape by changing details to a humble Craftsman Bungalow?")

In retrospect, I think 42 would have been a disaster for us for so many reasons despite the coveted house number. I'm forever grateful to that awful seller's agent because they certainly made us glad to walk away from that one.

Our street number is 13, I still wonder why they chose it as there's only seven houses on our short street.
Maybe they had a sense of humor?