When you’re smitten by love, it’s hard to forget the first time that jolt of fervor hits. For Catherine Pondel, it happened almost 30 years ago while she was poking around an antiques fair in northern Wisconsin. A black and white lithograph caught her eye, and she snagged it on the spot for her first apartment.
Black and white artworks became a passion, and she purchased more. Some cost little more than pennies; others were a splurge; but all gave her that rush of adrenaline.
“I love them. They’re still hanging all over my house,” says Pondel, who lives on the North Shore and recently became a partner with Barbara Melcher in the latter’s eponymous interior-design firm based in Glencoe.
Next came a picture-pretty brass bed. “I bought it with the insurance money I got when a gold watch my parents gave me for graduation was stolen. It was so big I couldn’t even fit it in my little apartment, so I put it in my mother’s basement until I bought my first house,” she recalls. Today it’s nestled under the eaves in her daughter’s room, where it’s artfully dressed in pink quilts and rosy pillows. “I still love it, as much for the memories as the piece,” she muses.
Today there’s a lot to love in her home, such as the curvy Victorian sofa with the propriety of a grand dame-bought at a Gold Coast estate sale not long after that first black and white print and long before she had room for it-and a gilt-framed fauteuil she spotted at a Highland Park Judaica gallery (“I went in for menorahs and came out with a chair,” she quips). The list goes on and on; when Pondel spots something she can’t live without, she doesn’t. “If I obsess about it for nights, I buy it.”
Pondel is a romantic of a very specific sort. Some love to be in love, some love cars or clothes, some love sports or travel. Pondel loves whatever home she’s in and everything in it. It’s been the most long-term affair of her life, transcending five apartments, two houses and her 15-year marriage, and leading her to forge a warm, comfortable, nurturing environment based on her own particular brand of style, which she calls “classic with a kick.”
Her love affair with her homes has had an impact on several key aspects of her life. Among the highlights: She met her current partner, Melcher, when she hired her to help her finish the oversized living room in her last home, which had her stumped; she knew things were amiss with her husband when he called a cabinet she snagged at auction for a great price “nothing but junk”; and finding a handsome, vintage-inspired stove for her kitchen has prompted her to cook, something she’s rarely done in the past, she says.
Her passion for furnishings and design also helped her recover from the breakup of her marriage and move on. When the divorce forced to sell her rambling, 120-year-old Victorian four years ago, she saw it as an adventure. She bought a nearby cedar-shingle Colonial, which was roughly half the size of her former place and in total shambles. “It was a challenging design project,” she concedes, “but it also took my mind off my troubles.”
Moving on and scaling down also revealed just how circumspect she had been at her avocation over the years. “I had to get rid of some things, but nothing I really loved and treasured,” she says. “There was a place for everything important in my new home.”
How did she manage that? “It’s all about the kind of pieces I buy, and what I pair them with,” she explains. “Something that is good-looking, well-proportioned and interesting is going to look good, wherever you put it, and basically everything I buy meets that criteria. Then I tie it all together with neutral upholstered pieces and fabrics.
But neutral doesn’t necessarily mean clean-lined or bland. Take upholstered pieces. “We advise clients to buy classic ones. Not traditional, or modern, or even anything as exaggerated as those enormous cushy sofas that were the trend five years ago,” says Melcher, who helped Pondel pick an enormous, sumptuous Chesterfield sofa for her first home.
When Pondel bought her current, more compact place, she called Melcher and said, “I guess I’m getting rid of the sofa.”
“That’s nonsense,” Melcher told her. “You can’t expect a dinky little sofa to anchor a room.” Today it looks perfectly appropriate in its smaller venue, where it’s paired with more modestly scaled trappings.
Curtains are another case of collaboration between the design duo. Melcher’s first suggestion to Pondel for a problem space-the oversized living room in her old house-was to get curtains, and she came up with a few bolts of fabric to choose from. Pondel picked a shimmering green and purple taffeta stripe and found that “these ethereal ball gowns” were perfect.
“Nothing ties things together, warms things up or finishes off a room as well [as curtains]” says Melcher, who learned this and other fundamentals while living and working as a designer in London for 10 years. She also learned the key to great curtains lies in their construction. “Lining them with bump cloth gives them the right weight and drape,” she notes.
As for color, Pondel’s largest pieces of living-room furniture are upholstered in a creamy white fabric and her walls are painted a soothing sage green. Together, these colors counterbalance the bolder strokes in the room, such as chairs upholstered in a wild eggplant and scarlet print, and other quirky colors.
The same approach to balancing design elements is at work in the dining room, where a blowsy, chocolate chinoiserie-inspired wallpaper and frothy crystal chandelier are tempered with elegant, honey-toned Georgian furniture and demure white drapes.
Pondel and Melcher even have their own version of the “rules,” albeit a short one: “Stick to classics when it comes to the big things,” says Pondel. Adds Melcher: “Never forget that doing a whole room in the same kind of thing is the kiss of death.”
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RESOURCES
CONTENTS: Living room detail: Sofa-Holly Hunt Ltd., Merchandise Mart, covered in silk and cotton blend-Coraggio Textiles, Mart; gilt chair-Arthur M. Feldman Gallery, Highland Park; covered in silk velvet-Clarence House Imports, Mart; table and mirror-Pavilion, Chicago; sisall carpet-Village Carpets, Winnetka. )
A PRACTICAL PASSION: Pg. 51: Dining room: Georgian dining table, chairs, prints, Indonesian bowl and Venetian mirror-personal collection; LeCirque wallpaper-Hinson & Co., Merchandise Mart, Chicago; chandelier-Bellows Shoppe, Winnetka; sideboard-Donald Stuart Antiques, Winnetka.
Pg 53: Clockwise from top left: 1. Chinoiserie cabinet-Sotheby’s Chicago; blue and white porcelains-personal collection; celadon procelains-Pagoda Red, Chicago; coffee table-Pavilion, Chicago; rug-Village Carpets, Winnetka. 2. Chair-Interior Crafts, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, covered in white cotton-Coraggio Textiles, Mart; prints-personal collection. 3. Kitchen: Heartland stove-AbtElectronics, Glenview; Woodwork cabinets-Distinctive Kitchen Designs, Wauconda; kitchen design-Distinctive Kitchen Designs, Wauconda. 4. Vintage chair-personal collection, covered in Jim Thompson Silk-Holly Hunt Ltd., Mart.
Pg. 54-55: Living room: Sofa-Holly Hunt Ltd., Merchandise Mart, covered in silk and cotton blend-Coraggio Textiles, Mart; gilt chair-Arthur M. Feldman Gallery, Highland Park; covered in silk velvet-Clarence House Imports, Mart; club chairs-Melvin Wolf & Assoc., Mart; Designers Guild silk-Osbourne & Little, Mart; green paint-Benjamin Moore #8C115; coffee table and mirror-Pavilion, Chicago; pair of white vases-Restoration Hardware; vintage portraits-Donald Stuart, Winnetka; sisal carpet-Village Carpets, Winnetka.
