When designer Ame Gold first saw the room, it was strewn with playthings. “There were toys and woven wood [blinds] on the windows, and that was it,” she says. “Otherwise, the room was empty.”
It was the first thing people saw upon stepping into the foyer of her clients’ Lyon Village Arts and Crafts-style home. The couple had liked having a playroom right in the center of things when their kids were little. Now they were ready to reclaim the space as a dining room—but they wanted to keep it playful.
“[She] likes things a little whimsical, a bit obscure,” Gold says. “I think she wanted something that felt a bit like a conversation piece and unpredictable. I said, ‘Well, what about wallpapering the ceiling? That’s always kind of fun.’ ”
In came a wallpaper with a repeating feather motif in a palette of taupe, gold, slate blue and gray that draws the eye upward. Those same muted neutrals recur in other elements, including floor-to-ceiling drapes with a slightly iridescent metallic thread running through them, and an abstract portrait painting on the wall outside the kitchen.
The walls are clad in what Gold describes as a “tweed menswear pattern with a little bit of graphic design raised over it, all tone on tone. In person, it gives the room a lot of texture and depth.” A Currey and Co. light fixture acts as a centerpiece, with vertical bronze fins reprising the shape of the ceiling’s feathers.
The client found the dining table and chairs at a Stickley furniture outlet in her native Syracuse. The charcoal hue of the chairs’ floral damask upholstery is repeated in a smoky wall color in the entryway. (Gold updated the living room, kitchen and foyer at the same time as the dining room.)
And what of the room’s former inhabitants? The children became tweens and decamped to the basement. All that remains of the original play space are the woven blinds—now part of a grownup dining experience, with a soupçon of fun.