Beaux Arts Beauty

This is Annie Brahler's gorgeous 1886 Beaux Arts Style home in Illinois. Dana and I like to play, what we call, design a house on her computer. Weird, I know but there are worse things we could be doing in our spare time don't ya think? Any way, when she was down here the first part of June we designed a house using Mrs. Brahler's home as our inspiration. These pictures are from Mary Engelbreit's site where you can see and read more about Mrs. Brahler's home and business Euro Trash.
We think this is the back or the side view of her house. Isn't the chunky trim on this house beautiful. Love the round windows, the lattice covered porch and the deep wrap around porch.
This shot of the porch shows just how deep it is. We had a wrap around porch on our little cottage up north that was so narrow that it was hard to arrange the seating. This beauty would be a breeze to arrange comfy seating areas with lots of room left over for extras.
They give us a peak inside through this arch topped door way. The stairway treatment is so elegant with it's crisp white paint and graceful lines.
Here is a peak into her kitchen where she uses shades of gray and white as her color scheme. Notice the way she has combined an old piece of furniture with new cabinets to create the center island that is topped with gray and white marble to finish off the unit.

Back to the original story. With this home as our inspiration I gathered up my old, old, old books on Home Decoration and we were off and running. These old books focus a lot on proportion so we use the well proportioned room sizes as our main guide and build from there. They give you all kinds of pictures of well proportioned rooms with windows and doors placed in pleasing arrangement and then they show you rooms with bad proportion and poorly placed windows and doors. We try to put the rooms together kind of like a puzzle getting the right rooms facing the right direction to get the best sunlight for the time of day that you will be using the room the most. Kind of like, you never want to have your kitchen window over the sink, where most of us spend many hours later in the day, facing west into the setting sun.

Well we spent a couple of hours and came up with a pretty good floor plan. A few days later after Dana was home I had a few other thoughts that might have fit into the plan. When I talked to her about it she said that she had fussed around with the plan so much that she finally abandoned it. We probably should learn to save a plan and start with a fresh one;)

Hope you enjoy seeing this pretty house and thank you for your comments about Aaron!

Hugs,
Sue