Tour a Family’s Historic Chevy Chase Home With a Colorful Redesign

Katherine McGrath

March 24, 2025 at 8:00 a.m.·10 min read

All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by Architectural Digest editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission.

With its abundance of historic charm—leafy, walkable streets and a tight-knit feeling —Chevy Chase Village, a Maryland community on the edge of Washington, DC, provided the perfect setting for Jennifer Skalka Tulumello and her husband, Drew, to plant roots with their family. When it came time to look for a new home, the couple, a writer and a lawyer, respectively, wanted something reflective of history but that would also eschew traditional Washingtonian design. Their newly purchased Queen Anne–style home, with a handsome white frame, wraparound porch, and Craftsman-style windows, offered just that.

The structure, built in 1905, had belonged to only a small handful of families prior, and had a warm, happy feel that suggested it would be the ideal place for their young children, ages 7 and 11, to grow up. “We wanted a house that had a lot of love in it,” explains Tulumello, “somewhere our children could build happy childhood memories.”

To bring the home into its next chapter, the family worked closely with AD PRO Directory designer Nina Farmer, whose firm specializes in restoring and renovating historic residences. “Nina has this incredibly strong sense of how to bring a historic home into the modern era, especially for young families,” notes Tulumello. “She really understands how to use color and texture and period pieces from across decades to let the home’s natural charm shine through.” Nina Farmer Interiors also worked with architecture firm Wouter Boer and construction company Zantzinger on the project.

AD PRO Directory designer Nina Farmer stands in the Maryland home.

In the living room, a pair of Paolo Buffa chairs covered in La Manche fabric by Pierre Frey flank a glass Fazzo lamp by In Common With atop a 1920s French Art Deco side table. “We fell in love with those Paolo Buffa frames, and they helped us build the room,” Farmer says.

Following an extensive review by the local historic preservation board—whose regulations forbid any changes to the home’s facade to ensure it retains its original early 20th-century appearance—the house was stripped down to its foundation and Farmer set to work. “In a historic house, you need to be mindful of putting the patina back into some of the hard surfaces,” explains the designer. “You have to consider how, and where, to go about that—asking questions like, ‘Is it reclaimed? Or, is it something that’s new, but will look old?’ Otherwise, it gives the wrong impression of just being done all at once without care.” And so Farmer and her team rebuilt the framework to reflect its original era by installing period-appropriate mouldings, sourcing fireplaces, adding tile, and laying flooring that would honor its heritage while still remaining modern.

To pull off a convincing interior rebuild of this nature, a strong sense of trust was built between Tulumello and the designer, which allowed Farmer to guide her in taking risks she might otherwise avoid—especially when it came to color. “We wanted a bright, cheerful home. And Nina understood that,” Tulumello says, praising the designer’s ability to handle saturation with a strong sense of elegance. And so Farmer dressed the home in rich jewel tones: glossed olive walls in Drew’s office; saffron yellow trim in the dining room; rusted auburn fabric on a living room sofa; cerulean blue tiles along their son’s bathroom. “I like complex colors and unexpected combinations, and Jenn didn’t shy away from that,” explains Farmer of their collaboration. “She was game for anything.”

Shop out the look of this house⤵

The home’s unconventional floor plan made designing the asymmetrically thin, elongated living room a challenge, but Nina Farmer Interiors made clever use of a corner, placing a custom sofa in Russet velvet by Holland & Sherry and a Brighton coffee table by The Lacquer Company beneath built-in bookshelves for a quiet moment of reading or contemplation. “I felt like she really understood how to manage the quirkier parts of the historic house in such a way that the flow of our entertaining space is immaculate,” shares Tulumello.

While Tulumello placed her full trust in Farmer, she was admittedly a touch hesitant initially about the deep hues, worrying it might make the house too dark. “As the project went on and she was able to be in the house at different times of the day, and experience how the scale of the spaces and layouts create quite a light atmosphere, she let us run with color,” says Farmer.

Generated image
While the preservation board stipulated that the front needed to remain unchanged, there was a bit of room to play in the back of the house with a more contemporary addition that lends an indoor-outdoor element. Vintage pillows from Central Asia rest on a Roman Thomas sofa, which is surrounded by a daybed dressed in Atohi 16007 fabric by Design of the Times as well as chairs in linen striped Jasper Jaipur fabric. The stone and metal vintage side table is from Obsolete, and the pendants RW Guild.

Farmer called upon an eclectic melange of periods and styles to build out the home. “We wanted to find a mix of interesting magic of pieces that juxtaposed against the architecture of the house; to create a tension between pieces that one might not expect to see together.”

And so pieces across various eras, design movements, and styles were carefully layered in, with moments of unexpected pairings unfolding all over the house. Whether in Drew’s office, where a rigid brutalist brass game table stands just a few feet from a wabi sabi coffee table crafted from Japanese burl wood. Or in the dining room, where a bronze and alabaster 1920s Art Deco pendant hangs above an Italian dining table, which is surrounded by Studio Van den Akker dining chairs that feel midcentury with their softly curved legs.

“She really sees the family, and the family’s preferences, and enhances them,” Tulumello says of Farmer. “Throughout the project, she often asked us, ‘what does this house want to be?’ We wanted to honor the home and give it its next happy iteration while maintaining its integrity, and her framework for design allowed us to do just that.”