Walking into Designer ShowHouse 2016 is a little like stepping into a shelter magazine.
Turn one page, and you’re kicking back in a sophisticated sun room. Turn another, and you can almost smell the cigar smoke in an overstuffed gentleman’s study.
Each room has its own personality, thanks to the interior designers and vendors who worked their decorative magic there. You can see their work starting Sunday, when the show house opens to the public for tours.
Designer ShowHouse is a periodic fundraiser organized by the Junior League of Akron to raise money for the programs it supports.
Usually the house is a private residence, which is turned over to decorators to make over individual rooms. This time, though, the show house is a little closer to home for the Junior League: It’s the league’s headquarters, a classic brick Colonial in Akron’s Highland Square.
The house was built around 1915 by Ellsworth M. and Mary Statler, founders of the Statler hotel chain. According to Beacon Journal files, they built the house for Mary Statler’s sisters and brother, but the siblings changed their minds before they finished moving their furniture in. They decided instead to move to Buffalo to be near the Statlers and their new hotel.
The house was later home to William J. Laub, who served as Akron’s mayor from 1916 to 1917 and again from 1920 to 1921. His widow, Lois, gave the house to the Junior League in 1968.
The building had gotten a little tired in the intervening decades, said Jacqui Flaherty-Ricchiuti, who co-chaired the Designer ShowHouse with Melissa Adams and Emily Ochsenhirt-Fernandez.
“For years, a lot of designers have come here for meetings and seen how dated it was,” she said. But they could also see the potential in the wide moldings, the wood floors and the multi-paned doors that divide the rooms, and time and again they urged the Junior League to hold the show house there.
When the league’s plans for a different house fell through, the organization decided this was the time.
The league held a campaign among its members to raise the $60,000 needed to make basic repairs and updates, and then it placed the house in the hands of the decorators. The result is an eclectic mix of styles that all somehow manage to complement one another.
Here are some highlights.
Great fakes
You might swear the flooring in the kitchen and butler’s pantry is hand-scraped wood, but it’s not. It’s vinyl planks, a product chosen by designer Holly Everson for its durability as well as its looks.
The countertops? No, not marble. They’re quartz countertops from Cambria. And the walls are covered in three-dimensional wallpaper that’s been painted, even though they look like pressed tin.
Everson, of H. Everson Designs in Bath, incorporated the look-alike products to give the adjoining kitchen and pantry modern functionality without sacrificing their vintage charm. She kept what she could, updating the original upper cabinets with glass doors, refinishing the cabinet hardware and even giving the old dining room chandelier an unexpected new use as kitchen lighting.
Double duty
The dining room serves as a kind of thoroughfare from the front entrance to the kitchen, so mother-daughter designers Amy Douglass and Katie Heinz of the Interior Design Studio in Medina opted not to fight the traffic but instead divide the room into two areas — one for dining, the other for sitting.
The dining table is situated to one side of the room, where it might be used to serve a buffet, Heinz explained. On the other side is a seating area with a lacquered black bar and a pair of unmatched but complementary armchairs.
Instead of hanging a chandelier in the expected spot over the table, they kept the room’s ceiling light in the center of the room and substituted a contemporary fixture with bronze-colored arms in a spidery shape.
Modern vibe
The midcentury modern look is back, and it shows up in several of the rooms in the show house.
Closest to the authentic midcentury style is the living room, furnished by father-daughter team Jeff and Gillian Andrew with pieces from 20th-century design luminaries such as Warren Platner, Eero Saarinen and Walter Von Nessen. There’s even one of Charles and Ray Eames’ famous molded plywood lounge chairs, just like the very first chair Jeff Andrew’s parents sold when they started the family business, Garth Andrew’s in Bath, in 1948.
The two designers freshened some of the older elements in the room, painting the fireplace terra cotta and adding a sleek porcelain product to the hearth, mantel and the tops of a pair of old bookcases.
Midcentury modern got a contemporary tweak in an upstairs sitting room decorated by Becky Harrell, Laura Shannon and Sarah Wilson of Akron’s Chez-Del Interiors. They strived to bring the outdoors in, incorporating the beachy colors of an abstract painting over the sofa and adding faux fur accents for panache.
Furniture in the room was chosen for its flexibility, Chez-Del President Vince Del Medico said. Side-by-side ottomans double as a cocktail table and can even be used for seating. Molded plastic chairs are easy to move around.
Great cover-ups
Sheers on the windows in Chez-Del’s sitting room give privacy without blocking light, and the gray decorative stitching adds interest. The sheers are just flat panels, hung from a curtain rod inside the window frame — “a real inexpensive way to treat a window,” Del Medico said.
Curtain panels cover just the edges of the dining room windows, lending softness and decorative interest without the weight of full curtains. Douglass and Heinz hung each panel from its own short rod instead of mounting a rod across an entire window.
Jackson Township interior designer Dan West skipped the curtains altogether and used potted fiddle-leaf figs to soften the edges of the windows in the sun room, which are covered with sun screens. “They just kind of give you a cozy feeling,” he said.
West pulled off some camouflage in the adjoining back entry by using artwork to cover a couple of unattractive windows, one of which had been closed up at some point.
A sense of antiquity
Visitors to the house are greeted immediately with a since of the past, thanks to the work of Laura Sirpilla Bosworth and Karen Fehlman of the home furnishings and clothing boutique Laura of Pembroke in Jackson Township. They outfitted the vestibule and foyer with reminders of what might be part of a family’s history — artwork of famous landmarks, family photos, even a pair of women’s shoes that are part of a vignette atop a long console.
Up the stairs and along the upstairs hallway, the walls are covered with the work of artist Bruce Stebner of Patois by Stebner in Akron. He captures flowers, gardens, the French countryside and even nooks inside houses in his oil paintings, which appear to have been collected over time.
But there’s no bigger nod to the past in the show house than the upstairs study designed by Jenifer Bemis and Meg Ready of Akron’s Jones Group Interiors. The room is cluttered with antiques that are ornate and slightly worn, as if a well-to-do widower were living out his final years there.
The room’s style contrasts with the sleeker look of much of the rest of the house. “It’s definitely a shocker when you turn the corner,” Jones Group’s Brianna Piccirilli said with a laugh.
Lighten up
When you take in the cheerful light in the sun room, you might be surprised to realize the room faces north. The room is bathed in what almost seems like daylight, thanks to the energy-saving LED bulbs that West added to the ceiling can lights.
LEDs have come a long way from the harsh white light of their early days, West said. By choosing bulbs that produce the right color of light, he was able to brighten the space without making the artificial lighting obvious. Design tricks like painting the dark brick a pearly champagne, choosing a light-color carpet and fabrics with metallic threads, and using a mirror-top cocktail table lighten the mood even more.
LED lights were used to purely decorative effect in the bedroom decorated by Dennie Carroll of DC Designs in Cleveland. Wall-mounted bedside tables have display nooks that are illuminated by LEDs, which continually change color to highlight the decorative objects inside.
Farmhouse reimagined
The rustic-meets-refined look of farmhouse chic makes an appearance in a few rooms in the show house, most notably the bedroom decorated by Nick Giancola of Spruce Home Decor in Niles. The room includes reclaimed furniture revived with milk paint, a metal bed with a dark matte finish and an enormous ceiling light fixture that resembles a round iron cage. Its size makes a statement, but its see-through nature keeps it from overwhelming the room.
Denise Liszka and Sal Messina of the KKP Group in Northfield Center Township used a wood-distressing technique to create the look of barn wood in the upstairs bathroom they decorated. Tall panels built from the wood flank one of two entrances into the bathroom, and another panel is mounted above the sink, behind a mirror and sconces. Liszka and Messina also repurposed some old shutters into a rustic radiator cover and repainted an old dresser to serve as a vanity, which they topped with a rectangular vessel sink.
Cheap chic
You can’t get much more bang for your buck than by decorating with thrift-store furniture. But the bedroom decorated by Goodwill Industries of Akron proves that you don’t have to scrimp on style.
Goodwill’s Dee Dee Collura and Heather Hydel used all donated items in the room, save the bedding, rug and lampshades. They were lucky enough to get unused furniture — some of it donated because it couldn’t be returned to an online retailer — but Collura noted that a coat of paint might be all that’s needed to rescue used pieces. That’s what the decorators did with an old mirror, painted gray to complement the furniture, and two off-white lamp bases they updated by adding a barely-there coat of gray to highlight the imprinted design.
That’s the spirit
One of the aspects of the Designer ShowHouse that its co-chairs like best is the team spirit it has engendered.
Junior League sustainers — members who are no longer active — stepped up to sponsor rooms, and many are volunteering to staff the show house when active members can’t be present, Flaherty-Ricchiuti said.
One sustainer, Chris Petracca Gee, even took on the decoration of the first-floor powder room, working with Ted Wetzel of Akron painting company the Final Coat.
Help also came from Lowe’s in Fairlawn, which sent more than 50 volunteers to spruce up the front and back porches and the flower beds. A few of them came back on their own time to donate dozens of additional hours to the project, the co-chairs said.
“It really has become a community event,” Ochsenhirt-Fernandez said.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.