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This past spring, 42 Chicago-area interior designers and 12 landscape pros took on the formidable task of adorning the 2007 Lake Forest Showhouse
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The master sitting room ::: view gallery |
THE MASTER SITTING ROOM
A whimsical Swedish touch is just what every French country–style estate needs. And who better to provide it than Swedish-born Annika Christensen, who moved to the U.S. some 17 years ago and who for the past five years has been stocking her Libertyville shop, Midnight Sun Antiques, with containers full of Gustavian pieces imported directly from her motherland? “Gustav the Third traveled to France in the 1700s and fell in love with the style,” she explains. “He brought it back to Sweden with him, but because the country was not as wealthy as France, the style got simplified. Painted maple, birch, and pine replaced the cherry and mahogany.” The favored palette of the time was “creamy and grayish,” the same neutral scheme Christensen chose for her room. She used textures, including wool (the fluffy flokati rug), linen (on the carved-rose-motif 1850s Swedish bergère chairs), and grasscloth (on the walls) as her “colors.” A glass and aluminum round side table designed by Warren Platner and a Lucite table from Todd Hass (not shown) add that bit of “tension between contemporary and old” that Christensen loves. As for the quirky grandfather clock, well, that is both timeless and quintessentially Swedish.
THE MASTER BATH
W. David Adams of Ann Sacks did everything in his power to make sure this master bathroom was extraordinary, starting by creating his own design for tiles to be used on some walls and on the tub surround, then having each tile hand-painted in London. “I wanted it to look like wallpaper,” he says. He also wanted the room to serve multiple functions: bathing room, dressing room, and “a wonderful place to read a book while the tub is filling.” Hence the Baker dressing table and chair, above which hangs a lovely Asian-inspired print by Jacques Garcia for Baker. The picture’s cool colors inspired the room’s palette, and Adams had fully intended to hang it behind the tub. “But when I put it up there, I realized making it the focus detracted from the tiles and the garden,” he says. Now the stars of the show are Adams’s diamond-and-bead-patterned tiles and a gorgeous, glittering gold and Murano glass chandelier from Baker that makes bath time oh so much fun.
Photography: Alan Shortall
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