Inside the Colorful Queens Home of the Cold Picnic Founders

Morgan Goldberg

January 30, 2025 at 8:00 a.m.·8 min read

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Open floor plans may be all the rage these days, but for Phoebe Sung and Peter Buer, the traditional, closed layout of their 1910s Ridgewood, Queens, town house is perfect. The couple, who founded New York–based textile brand Cold Picnic in 2010, took advantage of the segmented setup to create a distinct vibe in each of the rooms—many of which are defined by their own colorful designs. “We’ve always liked separate feelings for each space,” Sung confirms.

The living room is dedicated to the duo’s Denis Denis rug, an abstract homage to the film Beau Travail that combines pale peach, cream, lavender, and olive hues. It’s both laid on the white-painted wood floors and used as durable upholstery for a Hay Mags sectional that they recovered after the original pink tweed was ruined by pets. “With the dogs and the kids, it’s always a matter of trying to make things look nice enough but also have it be completely functional,” Sung says.

“We decided to paint the floors white because, with the porch, the room doesn’t get a ton of light and it’s a railroad home,” Buer (right) explains. “When it had the brown floors, it could get a little dingy. The white floors really brightened up the whole place.”

Large paper lanterns appear in multiple rooms throughout the house. “I like how much space they take up,” Sung says.

The living room offers a sight line through the citron playroom and into the dining room, where red accents enliven the white walls and floors.

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In the adjacent playroom, Sung and Buer embraced the lack of natural light by curating a rich monochromatic look with citron walls and a pear green Audience rug, which references the anthropomorphic quality of homes with an eye motif border. Sung hand-painted a matching eye trim along the ceiling and then hung their daughters’ artwork in ornate, antique frames. The small area is complete with Moonrise Kingdom–inspired built-ins by KLN Studio.

“All of the art in the playroom is done by the children,” Sung shares. “We got all these really great, big, antique frames and stuck this stuff in there. It’s cute. There are certain phases where you just have to make them make a lot of things before they start getting too figurative.”

Buer crafted built-in bookshelves himself to flank the original marble fireplace in the dining room, giving it an abundant library feel. “When we used to live in Boston, we would go to a book sale at a church in a neighboring town every weekend,” he remembers. “Phoebe laid out all the books and calculated how high each shelf should be to perfectly house them. And then I put that together. Those are just all our books from about 20 years of collecting.”

The dining room is furnished with a vintage laminate table, four 1970s red tubular chairs from Yugoslavia, and a custom cherry-colored bench. A Pierre Boncompain print hangs above the mantel, while a vintage pendant gifted from the founders of Manhattan design shop Coming Soon illuminates the space. “We realized that all of the light fixtures were the basic landlord rental unit ones, so our friends Fabi and Helena gave us our first nice light,” Sung notes.

Sung is “always looking for” tubular furniture, so she was thrilled to find the vintage red tubular chairs that now surround her dining table. The pinstripe upholstery is just a bonus.

The couple thought marble was too grand and opulent for their style, so they went with a peach Corian countertop in their updated kitchen. “We knew it came in a bunch of really great colors,” Buer says of the composite material. “It’s also really easy to clean. You can use an electric buffer or sander and just take off any stains.”

In the compact kitchen, the couple punched up their flat-front white cabinets with a peach Corian countertop and a mustard yellow Nemo tile backsplash. “There’s something about a pretty, light color and then a more challenging, heavy color,” Sung says. “We do that a lot with our rugs. It’s a nice contrast.” A royal blue cotton runner adds extra flair.

Twin beds swathed in Dusen Dusen Tulip duvets are pushed together so Sung and Buer’s daughters can sleep near one another (when they’re not in their parents’ room).

“Our friend has a Taiwanese pantry store and we saw these cute green mailboxes,” Sung says. “We put a mailbox in their room and they like to send themselves postcards, letters, and things.” The girls have a vintage Belgian convertible high chair-desk and a Chen Chen & Kai Williams paper chair pulled up to a little glass table for all their writing needs.

Upstairs, Sung and Buer’s daughters share a cheerful bedroom with a dusty blue Embrace rug, an oversized lantern that the girls painted themselves, geometric 1980s IKEA sconces, and bold Dusen Dusen Tulip duvets. “Our friend, [founder Ellen Van Dusen], is our older daughter’s godmother and the print was just perfect for their room,” Sung says. “We just wanted it to be fun and cozy.”

For nightstands, the couple sourced neon yellow reproductions of IKEA’s 1971 coffee table; for decor, they opted to display a portrait of themselves by Camilla Engström, a Taiwanese mailbox from Yun Hai, and a vintage Fante Asafo flag from Ghana; and for window treatments, they tied up vintage lace curtains with old scarves. “We realized they don’t sleep any better in a pitch dark room, so we figured we would let in as much light as possible,” Sung explains.

Sung reads to one of her daughters in the aviary-inspired dressing room, while her other daughter lounges in bed with two pups at her feet.

The dressing room next door is an ode to Cold Picnic’s grassy green The Aviary Early Spring pattern, which appears on a rug, wallpaper, armchair upholstery, and a paper mache lamp in the space. “It’s inspired by trips to the Queens Zoo,” Sung reveals. “It has this beautiful aviary that kind of seems like a 1970s science fiction. It feels like you’re in another world. You’re just surrounded by birds.”

“Oh my gosh, I love those cork lampshades,” Buer gushes. “We got a lot of lamps that didn’t have lampshades, so we actually found those lampshades at Lowe’s for $10. They’re so great. We should have bought a hundred of them.”

A vintage oil portrait hangs above the closed-up fireplace in the primary bedroom. “We design a lot in landscapes, but more figurative stuff has always appealed to us,” Sung says. “Maybe it’s just a balance to all the color, to avoid having too much abstract.”

A vintage Donald Deskey dressing table with a built-in mirror brings a quirky, midcentury edge to the primary bedroom.

In the primary bedroom, the duo experimented with their butter yellow Crabby Flower wallpaper, a nod to Sung’s childhood memories of crab feasts in Maryland. They weren’t convinced the lively print was soothing enough for their sleep quarters until they balanced it out with a white oak Hedge House Furniture bed, two 1980s red tubular nightstands from Belgium, and a fiery orange quilt they’ll be releasing soon. “At first, you felt like you just couldn’t relax in there, but the pops of red and some of the other extras really helped tie it together,” Buer explains.

The downstairs bathroom riffs on the kitchen’s color palette, with blush tiles on the wall and macaroni orange tiles in the shower niche.

The final Cold Picnic pattern that Sung and Buer chose to employ is their cherry blossom collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum that was created to complement an exhibition of mid-19th-century prints by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige. Pale pink sakura tree flowers cover the walls, floor, and sofa in their basement for an immersive experience that celebrates the brand’s playful ethos, a spirit that’s evident throughout the entire home.