Hi, Welcome to The No Makeup Home Tour and to my house (AKA The Woodhouse Lodge), If this is your first-time visiting my site, thanks for stopping by. I’m an interior designer, blogger and enthusiastic maker of things… and I’m pretty sure that I’ve taken this no make up thing WAY too far! Here’s the deal, a little over a year ago my husband and I moved from Brooklyn to a lodge in Upstate NY that we have been renovating for the last twelve months. We live in a second floor apartment at the lodge, and later this month we will be opening our doors for the first time to guests. We are in the final push to get this place pulled together. While I feel that we’ve made a lot of progress the lodge is not exactly ready for its big debut. If you are interested in seeing where the renovations began you can check out a blog post about the lounge from last year, but that is not what you are here for, this is an opportunity to peel back the veil of perfection and take a real unstyled look around.

The Lounge

We are calling the first-floor kitchen and living space The Lounge, this is a space open to our guest for shared meals, sitting around the fireplace and generally relaxing. The first-floor lobby has a mostly open floor plan, and from this wider angle, you can start to get a hint of the state of things beyond the tight crop of the first photo. The space, just beyond the kitchen island is where a dining table and chairs should be. Hopefully, those will arrive soon, until then we are embracing this open space as a staging area for our tools.

Yikes!!! Right? Have you quit reading? As this pile of tools indicates, we are still working.

#nomakeup #eventhecatdisapproves

The Kitchen

The kitchen is one of my favorite parts of the lounge and the first thing you see when you come in the door. We sill need to add and subtract a few items here. On the additions list is a pair of matching bar stools, and we need to remove the stack of lumber on the floor. The light that is above the kitchen island belongs in the bathroom but is here for now until our island pendant arrives, USPS willing I think is coming today!!!

In case you are curious, we are using the Shelby Mod Pendant from Schoolhouse Electric above the island, and the wall sconces are the Alabax Small Sconce, also from Schoolhouse Electric.

The countertops are soapstone that we got from Polycor. We cut the countertops on-site with the help of a wet saw; I’ll be posting more about the evolution of this kitchen soon. The short story is that we rearranged and repurposed the cabinet from the original kitchen. I painted them and swapped out the hardware, and if you look closely, you will see a few places where I still need to finish painting them. I used semigloss Behr paint in Nightclub. I love the off black/blue of the color against the pure black of the stone, knobs and sink faucets. The potential to style the big open shelves is exciting to me; hopefully, I’ll be sharing some of those images soon.

The Lounge

Just beyond the kitchen area, is the lounge zone. Try to ignore the painter’s tape on the floor. Like I said we are in the thick of wrapping this renovation up. I’m not 100 percent sure about the furniture arrangement around that central collum, but it’s closer to being right than it has ever been. Ideally, I would love to reposition this massive collum, but for structural and budget reasons we couldn’t do it. Maybe we will revisit it later on, or I might give it the same treatment that I gave the green wall in the entry.

I love how this turned out. The ceilings in the lobby are low and I think this treatment elongated the short walls and added much-needed interests.

Here is what it looked like before. Those big vents are an eyesore, right? The texture that the trim adds distracts your eye from them. Sometimes you have to make a move that is louder than the problem to distract from it.

I might do the same for our weird collum situation. What do you guys think?

The Builtins and The Fireplace

The seating arrangement in this room was a bit of a head-scratcher! What I did after a lot of trial and error was make some builtin shelving/seating/wood storage on either side of the fireplace. In previous arrangements, the space to the right and left of the hearth was awkward, no matter what I tried.  No configuration of furniture could hold it’s own against that massive fireplace. The other challenge on this wall are the short windows; I think this new builtin frames them nicely and make them feel intentional. As soon as I finish writing my The No Makeup Home Tour post, you can bet,  I’ll be busy sanding and painting those bad boys.

I like the light tone of the wood against the dark American Plaster wall treatment that Damien from Tricolor Studio NYC (@tricolorstudionyc) did for us in March. For paint on the builtins, I’m going with Farrow and Ball Setting Plaster in a semi-gloss finish. It’s an off pink color that is relatively similar to the color of the wood. I also have big plans for cushions on this bench so stay tuned!

I still need the right rug for this central seating area, but I love how it is coming together. From this side, that column is still annoying! I’m on the lookout for the right piece of art or decor to finish it off.  Above the air vent on the column is an outlet for a wall sconce. I have another one of the Alabax Small Sconces. Unfortunately, the electrical box here is a rectangle, the type you would use for a plug so connecting the new sconce is slightly more complicated than I had initially anticipated. The electrical outlet is an example of a detail that I would probably photoshop out, but in the name of keeping it real, I left that s**** in because this is The No Makeup Home Tour!

The Second Floor AKA Our Apartment

This space has not changed much since my One Room Challenge. The fundamental changes are the vintage Courboursie sofa and chair. We scored them a couple of months ago and decided to use them upstairs and migrate some of the chairs form the original arrangement to the first-floor lounge. This area is our living room; the downstairs space will be open to guests.

As you can see the kitchen table upstairs also doubles as a workspace, this will probably change once we get our second-floor kitchen up and running.

This is the current state of the kitchen if you can call it that. All the plumbing is in place we just need to add in the cabinets. I’m looking forward to tackling this project once we wrap up the guest areas of the lodge.

Our Bedroom

This is my bedroom. It’s a cool space; I love the pine ceilings, I think we will leave them unpainted. The room also has some challenges, like the closet doors that flank the bed. The spacing is not ideal for a queen sized bed and two nightstands. Because I know that I need to move the doors for this space to function well I have done very little to the room. The two things I have done are to hang the ceiling fixture and attach the Moroccan wedding blanket to the wall as a makeshift headboard. The wall colors and the nightstands came with the place. I don’t love them, but over the last year, we have had bigger fish to fry. This is another space I’m looking forward to tackling once we get the lodge open.

Outside

Like I said we are in the final push to get open and porch painting and pallets of shingles have overtaken our ordinarily dreamy garden and seating area. Our roofers are finishing tomorrow (rain gods willing), and I’m happy to report that the porch painting is complete.

Thanks so much for sticking it out through the good the bad and the ugly. The Woodhouse Lodge will be open for business in two weeks, and if all this behind the scenes talk hasn’t scared you away, we would love for you to visit us. We have ten privet guest rooms (not pictured in this post) that are ready and waiting to host you and your upstate NY getaway. You can book a room here. 

Be sure an check out the rest of the No Makeup Home Tours; I’ll link to them below. And a special thanks to Kyla from House Of Hipster for keeping it real and organizing the tour!

House of Hipsters // Room for Tuesday // Anita Yokota // copycatchic // Making it Lovely // Bigger Than The Three Of Us // Oleander + Palm // Yellow Brick Home // The Makerista // Centered by Design // Francois et Moi // House of Brinson // Erica Reitman // brittanyMakes // Anne Sage