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Monumentally Contemporary
Modern furniture, a new color scheme, creative use of textures and a newly built sunroom help update Judy and Tom O’Brien’s s traditional home.
Story by Doug Callahan
Photographs by Tony Giammarino
When interior designer Kathy Morgan arrived at Judy O’Brien’s house on Monument Avenue, O’Brien was eager to get the entire house remodeled.
“Normally, I don’t encourage that with clients,” laughs Morgan, who works for Williams & Sherrill Interiors. “I like them to do a room, and then stand back and take a deep breath before we do another room. But Judy’s not that kind of girl. She wanted to do the whole thing.”
In fact, remodeling her home wasn’t quite enough of a change for O’Brien. She also hired architect Shelley Myers, who was working for Grace Street Home Additions, which is now a part of 3North, to design a 10x10 sunroom to add off of the kitchen. “She wanted to improve the flow and feel of the first floor. It made it seem much more spacious just by adding a little 10 foot by 10 foot room.”
From there, Morgan says they started the long process of interior remodeling (still two years and running) with a color concept, and they began implementing it in the family room. “She wanted it to be serene,” Morgan says. “She’s got a pretty high-powered job, so when she came home, she wanted to be able to just mellow out right away.”
The soft shades of blue and gray throughout the house are key to that sense of serenity.
Morgan says that O’Brien’s aversion to patterns required her to use more textures, and they moved toward a more contemporary look. It all started with the blue chairs in the family room. “They have a metal frame, and they’re very contemporary with stainless steel,” Morgan says. “And we found a pale blue patent leather that was the starting point.”
Morgan says the next step toward a simpler, cleaner look was consolidating the seating in the family room.
“She had lots and lots of chairs,” Morgan says. “So I put in a sectional, which she wasn’t sure about, but it fits the room and they really like it now. It was a way of changing how they sat in the room, too. We made everything streamlined, but not hard modern. More of a soft, contemporary feel.”
Morgan says that, when she arrived at the house, it was definitely in need of some modern touches.
“It was very traditional,” Morgan says. “It was pretty, but it was very dated. Lots of wood, and dated-looking fabrics.” But with the new look, they were careful to keep a touch of that traditional home feel with a modern twist.
“We changed everything,” Morgan says. “We changed almost all the big pieces of furniture. We made the furniture sleeker and incorporated more metal, as opposed to it all being wood. But it’s still a very warm room.”
Doug Callahan is a former newspaper editor and a graduate of James Madison University and Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently a production coordinator for Ross Publishing.
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