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Anyone familiar with the typical Upstate New York aesthetic knows that it often involves a lot of white on white on white. So when interior designer Nicole Fisher of BNR Interiors came across this British family’s four-bedroom, builder-grade row house in Hudson, a charming city about an hour north of New York City, she went in a perfectly prismatic direction to bring warmth into the space.
“It was an older home bought by a developer who stripped everything to make it really easy to sell,” Fisher says of the hardware store moldings and blah fixtures that filled the previous space. “But that takes away all of the character, so we had to just infuse everything back in.”
The first step to flipping the generic farmhouse energy? Deciding on a palette that would make the home feel cohesive—especially because when you enter the front door, you see all the way through to the back of the house. Enter House of Hackney’s Avalon wallpaper, a striped and floral pattern that she put to use in the dining room, therefore determining the 14 paint colors that appear throughout the space to make it feel more British than barn-like.
Did such a bold wallpaper take a lot of convincing for the homeowners? Or were they game?
I had a feeling they would go for it. When we first started chatting, they sent me a picture of their London house, and they had a lime green kitchen so I thought, “If they’re okay with that, I think anything I throw at them will be okay.”
How did them being English influence the design?
I think Brits tend to have a little bit more fun with their interiors. They don’t just stop at one or two patterns. They just keep going and layering, and I really wanted to lean into that. I love how there is no sense of time in these spaces. There’s not a specific era that we’re trying to work within. Everything is just beautiful, and when you choose things that you love, if they’re done in the right way, it just works.
There are two hidden doors—one in the pantry, and another in the TV room. Why create those spaces?
With a house like this, you can see everything from the front door, so keeping some spaces a little more private was pretty important. Also, the kids are also really young, so the parents liked the idea of separating a speakeasy. Plus, a hidden pantry is a great spot to put your mess when you’re entertaining. The rooms are cool, but they’re also very functional.
How do you take so many patterns, like in the primary bedroom, and make them all work?
The biggest thing is that they all have a common color in mind. You can see that the cranberry color is the constant—there’s some in the bed, there’s some in the wallpaper, there’s some on that chair in the tassels. It’s pulled out throughout to make it make sense. Then there’s scale. You want some small, some big. The big, chunky floral that wraps the headboard is a Liberty fabric, and the wife freaked out because Liberty was her wedding dress designer, so she just fell in love with it. I like that the room feels like it could be a more modern version of like your grandmother’s house in the country.
Ok, and that kitchen island! Is that marble really faux?
Yes! The second piece of this massive color puzzle—after deciding the palette—was finding the kitchen island. It came up on one of my searches on 1stDibs, and I knew we had to have it. It took the colors tied so nicely with the wallpaper, and set the tone for the rest of the kitchen. The island was a one-off find that kept building this project to be over-the-top but still inviting and warm. It’s so layered, which is something I really strive for. I don’t want things to feel too new or too precious. I want them to feel collected over time.
