Three years ago when Lisa Ewing began looking for a new home, she wasn’t up for an extreme makeover.
“I’d been through a lot of changes right before that . . . closing my furniture showroom in Miami and moving to Chicago because of my husband’s new job, resettling our family here and rebuilding an interior-design business from scratch. And now I was getting divorced. So I needed to simplify things, not make them more complicated,” she explains.
Tops on her list was finding a place as light, airy and sleek as the West Loop loft she was leaving–but with less space to fill and maintain. She hardly expected to end up in a narrow Victorian in Lincoln Park.
“I wasn’t even considering the neighborhood because the buildings are so close together that they usually don’t have a lot of natural light. But a friend in the real estate business saw this condo and insisted I look at it,” she says.
“It was the first floor of a three-story house that had been converted into condominiums in the mid-1980s, with the elaborate architectural elements and flamboyant decorative treatments still in place from that period.
There were Corinthian columns and a sunken pit in the living room, glitzy ornamental moldings throughout, a bulky black-marble fireplace and “those speckled granite countertops everyone used to have back then,” reports Ewing. Flamboyant decorative treatments that epitomized the period ranged from acorn-brown or red-and-green papered walls to beige shag carpeting and heavy gold fixtures.
But thanks to Ewing’s design acumen, she was able to see the place’s potential beneath the structural and decorative drawbacks. And much to her surprise, it was, indeed, flooded with light. It was also geographically desirable for her pre-teen son thanks to the kid-friendly amenities in the neighborhood.
So she bought it at a bargain price–everyone else was scared off by its gaudy demeanor–and set about remaking it to suit her needs and reflect her aesthetic, which she describes as “minimalist, but restful and warm at the same time. I wanted it to be simple and serene, and was determined to use as little furniture as possible, because I don’t like crowded places.”
Out came all the gratuitous decorative embellishments, leaving the space open and airy. All the walls were painted pure white, and the red oak floors were bleached blond. “It took two tries to get them there,” says Ewing.
In the living area, the black-marble hearth and two of three sets of steps that led down into the pit were also eliminated. In went a streamlined hearth, flanked with built-in storage cabinets to house electronic equipment and firewood.
Ewing faced the cabinets with sandblasted mirrors, a surface treatment she had been experimenting with, to give the wall a burnished, iridescent gleam that emphasizes the natural light in the room. And by making the pit less accessible from the upper level, Ewing gave it new definition as a separate sunken entity.
Furnishings were used to define and enhance the living areas.
Since the columns were gone, Ewing emphasized the boundaries of the pit for the sake of safety and aesthetics with a streamlined, L-shaped sectional sofa that wraps around much of its perimeter and creates a cozy seating area that faces the hearth. A wool rug striped in tawny hues came from a mail-order catalog. She found chunky upholstered stools at a discount home-design store and altered them with slipcovers and casters to make them mobile and easy to clean. She designed the clear acrylic coffee table that is visually weightless so the room maintains an airy mood. An alcove at the far end of the pit, bordered by the front window, was transformed into an office with seemingly nothing more than a desk and chair, but Ewing has a built-in storage bank underneath the front window that houses equipment, files and supplies.
For the dining area, Ewing outfitted an elevated zone between the pit and the kitchen with a plain glass table of her own design that incorporates a simple stainless-steel base and a sandblasted glass top, and Philippe Starck’s Dr. No chairs slipcovered for a more formal demeanor. She choose them because “they stack, and I can easily break the whole room down and put everything in storage when I have Latin dance parties,” she says.
Throughout the loftlike living area, translucent white curtains were extended from ceiling to floor and over whole walls instead of made-to-measure for the windows, giving the austere white walls texture and depth. The tactic also helped unify the activity areas in the large room.
Opening the kitchen to the rest of the space was a no-brainer. “Everyone ends up there when you invite them over, so this way it’s literally in the living room and much more friendly and efficient,” says Ewing. But to make it as visually arresting as the rest of the space, she slipcovered everything in the room–from the prosaic white Formica cabinets she got at Home Depot to the countertops, sink, shelves and walls–with stainless steel. She also installed appliances faced with stainless steel.
But the piece de resistance for Ewing, and the heart of her home, is the chalkboard wall she dreamed up and installed in the kitchen. It not only warms up the kitchen aesthetically, it has both practical and emotional applications. She and her son, Harrison, use it to keep each other up to date on their schedules, while her friends leave her messages when they visit. “I make everyone who comes over write something,”she explains. n
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RESOURCES: Design: Ewing Design Group, www.ewingdesigngrp.com.
Living and dining room: Sofa–Room & Board, Chicago; coffee table–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; pillows–Expo Design Center, Chicago; dining table–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; dining chairs–Philippe Starck’s Dr. No chairs–Design Within Reach, www.dwr.com; slipcovers–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; Philippe Starck torchiere–Lightology, Chicago; drapes–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; stools–European Furniture Warehouse, Chicago; sculpture–Lisa Ewing. Kitchen: Design–Ewing Design Group; fabrication–Stainless Steel Kitchens, ww.stainlesssteelkitchen.com; chalkboard–Benjamin Moore’s Crayola Chalkboard Paint, Ace Hardware, Chicago. Living room detail: Sofa–Room & Board, Chicago; coffee table–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; stool–Bed Bath & Beyond; rug–Garnet Hill catalog; fireplace surround–Expo; built-in wall unit–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group; antique desk and chair–collection of owner; drapes–design and fabrication by Ewing Design Group. Bathroom detail: Refurbished antique mirror–through Ewing Design Group.
