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When Beth Webb went about updating a traditional English home for a client, she used the homeowner's personality as inspiration for the design, right down to the limestone floors and painted furniture. "My client was very eclectic, quite the artist—with an incredibly artistic sensibility, anyway. When she walked in she'd have 8,000 tear sheets. She had a huge library, she painted, her husband painted...," recounts the Atlanta-based designer, whose upcoming book Beth Webb: An Eye for Beauty: Rooms That Speak to the Senses (Rizzoli, September 2017) details this whole home and others from her portfolio. The "dark, dark, and darker" kitchen was ripped out to make way for a brighter, quirkier scheme, leaving an arch-shaped recess in one of the walls. During a trip to BoBo Intriguing Objects in Atlanta, Webb found the perfect piece to fit the opening: a breakfront.
Yes, it would do the "really truly functional, practical," duty of fitting in the nook and holding a collection of porcelain plateware, but the breakfront's unique look would also intrigue: Its four windowed doors are original antiques, paint peeling from the wood, old glass gleaming—plucked right from another era—but the rest of the construction is brand new and painted a crisp flax hue. Bobo's owner Mark Sage, a specialist in Belgian antiques, designed the whole thing around the original windows. You wouldn't know this all at first glance, of course. The mystery of it—part old and soulful, part newly glossed, but how?—is what makes it so transfixing. (Not to mention the perfect addition to a mélange of antiques and neutral washes that Webb selected for the rest of the room: "Everything is a little bit off," she fondly explains.)
And the same look could be achieved even if you don't have a specialist fashioning contemporary pieces out of antique details in your neighborhood (we're jealous, if you do): Just omit or add a little bit of paint. Paint only the legs of an old club chair, leaving the warm, worn-out leather on the frame just as it came. Or pick up one of those completely shallaced wood furnishings at an antique fair and take a paint scraper to just a single part of it—the top of a side table, the bevel of a mirror frame—revealing the old wood underneath. (If Webb had told us that the whole breakfront was an antique, painted allover except for the window frames, we'd have believed her.) "We need a little bit of grunge and soul," Webb says, "to tone down and ground the room." So don't cover every inch of it up!
