I love my parents’ home. It is beautiful, filled with relics from their lives and travels and is kept immaculately. However, our design aesthetic is definitely different; their living room is traditional:
whereas mine is more like this:
So my parents were recently inspired to do a little update, a freshening of sorts, to give their very traditional home into a more clean and contemporary feel.
So we are in the midst, together, of a transformation. One huge improvement will occur when our painters take down their goldenrod patterned wallpaper and replace it with the paint color we used in our Living Room, Benjamin Moore Mascarpone. Like we did in our entrance hallway, they will paint their bannister, with a black handrail and white spindles. I anticipate a huge and great change.
But besides the painting, my parents are doing a decor overhaul as well. They’ve taken down things like this:
and this.
and replace them with things like this:
a more modern triptych they found at the Rago Auction this weekend.
My mom and I also worked together to create some spaces that still reflect their taste and travels while avoiding the “moldy roastbeef”* look of their past.
Here is their new dining room centerpiece. We purchased this artichoke votive holder at the beautiful Valley Forge Flowers and I added the few metallic artichokes that I found at Home Goods.
At Valley Forge Flowers we also found this beautiful, velvety moss ball to fill the urn and the dried flowers on the console table in the photo above. 
Much cleaner. 
While still remaining elegant. 
This piece was purchased from the same place where I found my chandeliers in Adamstown and I was walking out of my mom’s house it in my hands, with the hopes of using it as my kitchen table centerpiece, when I spotted a Staffordshire Cow on their Great Room Buffet and said MOLDY ROASTBEEF ALERT and put the beautiful, cool candle holder down and let my mom keep it, replacing the cow.
So, as I said, this is not yet the after–that I will post post-paint–but what we have now is a vast improvement and these little updates make my parents feel happy and bright, which is all that any of us can ask for in our homes.
*Moldy Roastbeef is a term coined by my family on a trip to New Hope; We went into a house with the most old fashioned and awful antiques and the entire place smelled of cooking Roast Beef. So now we use it to refer to paintings like the manly “Abigail” above, big displays of Staffordshire, and certain British TV shows.
511 Ever After 