By Michele Deluca
Niagara Gazette
NIAGARA FALLS —
It's easy to imagine how Karin Rafter must have felt.
She and her family had just won an extensive makeover of the living room in their Wheatfield home and three designers were hard at work stripping the room down to its barest elements.
The plan was to recreate it into a showplace of her dreams, based on the family’s love of the beach.
There was a total redesign in progress including fresh paint, new rugs and furniture. But then one of the designers asked if they could go look in the garage, where Karin’s husband, Bill Jr., had had collected years of treasures from "curbside shopping" and garage sale hunts.
The designers brought in mottled metal milk cans, old milk bottles, pottery, jugs and wooden soap boxes. Before she knew it, she was washing spider webs out of turn of the century bottles.
She was, understandably, a little worried.
By the time they were finished, the new living space included old window panes used as photo frames, an old weather vane and an old book case.
All had been brought back to work as design elements in a finished room that Karen Rafter calls "unbelievable."
The Rafters had won a contest to receive a complete room redesign at the Buffalo Home and Garden Show in a contest sponsored by the Design Association of Western New York.
“We incorporated some of Karin’s thoughts and dreams and transformed them into a functional, up-to-date, trendy coastal cottage,” explained James Harasimowicz of Space Innovations, who completed the showplace room over the course of about a week with the help of Andrew Contra of Estate Interior Design and Ann Medinac of Ann Medinac Interiors.
The trio of designers led a team of volunteer carpenters and painters in changing the look of the whole room so that it has the feel of a setting in a seaside village.
There was no lack of character to begin with at the home. It was built as a bed and breakfast on what is now called Old Niagara Falls Boulevard by Bill Richter’s grandparents in 1929. The home is centered around a giant living room that, for Karin Rafter, has always been a challenge to decorate.
“It was way too big,” she said. “It had so much potential. I just couldn’t pull it together.”
So prior to the extreme makeover, there were drums in one corner, a couch and love seat in the middle and, basically, seating for four people in a 375-square-foot room.
After the big reveal, televised on Channel 7 WKBW, the family saw how many more people could fit comfortably into the room and how old can be blended so beautifully with new.
“Adaptive reuse is my passion,” Harasimowicz said. “That’s something that enables me to be effective, not only as a designer but as a environmentally conscious human.”
Here are some of the trends the designers incorporated into the room:
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: Designers played off architectural details that existed in the space.
“The banister was a substantial point of inspiration, as were the built in bookcases with leaded glass doors on either side of the fireplace. We tried to capitalize on the details. Karin hated the brick around the fireplace so we completely covered the fireplace in slate to incorporate earth tones and the sea element,” Harasimowicz said.
WALL MOLDINGS: “We took off the dental molding in the middle of the walls temporarily (dental molding is called such because it looks like teeth). We applied four-inch vertical strips of fiberboard, reapplied the dental molding. This really gave the space an architecturally rich interior,” Harasimowicz said.
COLOR: Browns and light blues are used together in the room.
Harasimowicz noted: “We used a lighter color pallet. We chose a new product by Glidden, a fresh air product called Organic Garden. Then we added a sedate blue color similar to that of Wedgwood Blue and we incorporated that with some brown tones to make the room feel rich, but sedate and subdued.”
MULTI-USE: The room previously only had seating for four. The sofa and love seat were replaced with smaller scaled furniture that more than tripled the amount of seating, including a small love seat, two small chairs, two fireside chairs and a ottoman (created from an old coffee table) and an office space with a desk and chair.
ADAPTIVE REUSE: The budget was very small. Designers wanted to use things the client already had and give them a new life. They took an old coffee table, cut off the legs, added some casters AND upholstered the top, and it became fireplace seating that could be converted into a coffee table using a large tray.
PERSONALITY: Designers tried to capture the essence of the family and bring their personality into the space. The team brought in some window panes and used them as frames for a collection of family photos capturing three generations. The photos were all converted to creamy black and white pictures giving the whole setup an distressed cottage feeling.
DISTRESSED ELEMENTS: “With everything being so crisp, these distressed elements really pull everything together,” he said.
Regardless of the design elements, the room simply “works” for the family.
“It’s so modern and yet it makes my husband very happy,” Rafter said.
Her daughters, Sarah, 4, Grace, 12, and her son, Will, 9, love the room as well, she said.
“Grace comes in here to work on the computer,” Rafter said, “and she’ll say to me, ‘Some day when I grow up and have my own office, it’s going to look just like this.’ ”
