Suzanne Tucker’s shoppers wished to replace the kitchen of their weekend cottage in Napa Valley, which they’d owned for greater than 30 years. It was a comparatively small job for Tucker, an skilled designer who’s normally tasked with reworking complete residences. But the shoppers have been longtime mates, and so the kitchen renovation started. It didn’t take very lengthy for brand new concepts to come up. Tucker quickly discovered herself redecorating the lounge, then the library, adopted by a bed room, a rest room, and ultimately the pool pavilion and the entire residence’s out of doors terraces, which overlook a picturesque backyard stuffed with rose bushes, climbing vines, and intricately pruned boxwoods. “There was a domino impact,” says the designer, whose agency, Tucker & Marks Inc., has been in enterprise since 1986. “It grew to become a kind of fantastic initiatives that had a stunning lifespan.”
The backyard, designed by the late Jack Chandler and included within the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens, drove a lot of Tucker’s aesthetic selections for the interiors. Within the aforementioned kitchen, which was opened into the household room to create one massive gathering house, she painted the cupboards a delicate wheat colour and picked a pale inexperienced glazed ceramic tile for the backsplash, permitting the brightness of the foliage behind the home windows to actually stand out. “We lightened all the pieces as much as make the most of this unimaginable backyard,” Tucker says. “It’s a focus of mine to have a fluid context, with colours that movement into what’s exterior.”
Maintaining that precept in thoughts, she picked a collection of floral materials that resemble the assortment of roses and peonies seen on the eight acres of land surrounding the property. In the lounge, home windows have been wearing Robert Kime’s Opium Poppy linen printed with large-scale blooms, and a set of customized membership chairs have been upholstered in Kime’s Cory Minor, a traditional motif impressed by the British countryside. Flowers additionally adorn a set of famille rose vintage porcelain vases (uncommon items present in Paris’s Galerie Steinitz), and a mauve-tinged Persian rug from the early 1900s.
