Take the Tour!----- 1. Project Overview 2. Builder 3. Neighborhood 4. Friends 5. Head Decorator----- ROOMS 6. Sherilyn's Room 7. Bonus Room 8. Teenage Bedroom Suite 9. Guest Suite 10. Master Suite 11. Dining Room 12. Home Theatre 13. Kitchen (Cabinets) 14. Kitchen (Appliances) 15. Kitchen (Countertop) 16. Family Room----- FEATURES 17. Details 18. Water System 19. Tile 20. Elevator 21. Staircase 22. Building Materials 23. Roof 24. Concrete Masonry 25. Concrete Countertops 26. Landscape & Hardscape 27. Pool

NHI DREAM HOME | BONUS ROOM



BY PAUL KERR/PHOTOS BY RAY STRAWBRIDGE
WINTER 2005 ISSUE

In a house full of airy rooms with soaring ceilings and walls of glass, the bonus room offers a cozy retreat for getting away from it all.

The NHI Dream Home’s honoree, 12-year-old Sherilyn Adams is a Johnny Depp fan. The design team of Michael Perry and Emily Barrett of Porto, a new custom and handmade furniture store in the refurbished North Hills Shopping Center, and Clark Hipolito, a faux finish artist and owner of The Art Company, sought to create a space with the feel of an Old World gentlemen’s club, with a few surprising modern touches.

“Johnny Depp has a home in France and he has kind of that European sensibility—like his role in ‘Chocolat’,” says Michael Perry. “We were trying to achieve a kind of Frenchman’s smoking room feel.”

A long narrow room, with a low sloping ceiling and skylights for windows, this space lent itself well to a clubby, cloistered theme. A pair of striped chairs in rich shades of burgundy, aged copper, olive green, tan, gold and black, provided the color scheme.

Hipolito visually “lifted” the space by graduating the colors in the walls from dark to light. Starting at the floor, he layered the room’s colors, with the darker burgundy dominant and blushes of copper and olive gold. As he moved up the wall, Hipolito lightened his palette, the burgundy fading to merlot, copper to peach, olive green to gold until, near the ceiling, he applied a cloudy robin’s egg- blue with a warm nutmeg wash. The layering of colors over the rough-textured walls achieves a warm aged effect.

Along the room’s back wall and onto its sloped ceiling, Hipolito freehanded scrollwork. Hearing that Sherilyn was an aspiring artist, he invited her to help with this detailed painting. After sketching the pattern on the walls and ceiling, Sherilyn and Hipolito filled the scrolls in with the same colors used in the lower walls—olive gold, burgundy and copper. “It was cool,” was Sherilyn’s assessment of her painting experience.

A soft nutmeg-colored crosshatched carpet covers the floor, and Oriental rugs in the room’s primary colors define the seating areas. In one corner, two low slung black leather chairs are paired with a mahogany side table whose striking top is glass, reverse painted in a swirling gold and black “Dali” stripe. A burgundy rug, patterned in the room’s olive gold and black, anchors this cozy seating nook.

Across the room, beneath Hipolito’s hand-painted scrollwork, another grouping includes a vintage-looking black leather sofa, set at an angle and flanked by the two striped club chairs from which the room’s color scheme was drawn. A duo of square burgundy mohair ottomans serve as coffee table, and tapestry pillows in burgundy and olive gold enliven the dark sofa. Two more satin pillows, one green and one burgundy bore the initials “J” and “D” for the room’s inspiration, Johnny Depp. Sherilyn happily took those pillows home the night of the NHI Dream Home’s black-tie gala.

A black Oriental rug, patterned in the room’s burgundy, gold, copper and green, bounds this inviting seating area. An espresso-finished, stacked-ball floor lamp is topped with a ‘40s style drum shade, as is a sister lamp atop another round mahogany side table.

One of the room’s most interesting pieces is a large, modern espresso finished buffet. “We like to break the rules sometimes—like placing this dining room piece in a sitting room,” says Porto’s Perry. “This buffet had a nice weight to it, to give the room substance.” A dark foyer table stands on the wall opposite, echoing the buffet’s dark finish, but lighter and airier in weight.

Throughout the room, an eclectic mix of accessories—from gold painted glass trays to a rustic Asian inspired compote to a vintage style table clock—give the space a singular, much-loved and lived-in ambience. “We chose pieces to look like they had been collected over the years,” says Porto’s Barrett. “A sofa bought in Paris in the ‘20s, a piece found on a trip through Indonesia—the room of a well-traveled intellectual.” ▪

PAUL KERR IS A FREELANCE WRITER FROM APEX.

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