Tour a Hudson Valley Cottage That Embraces Weirdness
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By all appearances, New York designer Ghislaine Viñas and husband Jaime’s Arts and Crafts cottage in the Hudson Valley seems stylistically aligned to the 43 acres of bucolic idyll—complete with forested pockets and babbling brooks—that it has anchored since 1927. Purchased in early 2022, a newly painted exterior was the easiest way for Viñas, the AD PRO Directory member, to give the aging house a fresh look. While her choice of monochrome white emphasizes the home’s provincial charm, once you step inside, all preconceived notions of the countryside aesthetic take a hike.
Despite ascribing to no color palette in particular, no style of art specifically, and bearing no loyalty to anything other than the sentimental value of travel souvenirs and furniture already in the family’s possession (chalk the latter up to the mindset of downsizing empty nesters like these former Bucks County, Pennsylvania, residents and parents of two grown daughters), the home looks and feels intentional in all of its whims and weirdness.
“I acknowledge that sometimes I like things that are a little freaky,” says Viñas. From a vaguely sinister bunny-eared figurine made by a student at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), where Viñas’s youngest daughter goes to school, to entryway photographs of life-sized gnomes engaged in horticultural maintenance, to a powder room hung with vintage oil-painted portraits of women (“I’ve given them all names, too, like Pamela and Olivia,” says the designer), Viñas considers the eccentric art collection “the soul of the house.”
For all of their uneasy gazing and silent discernment, artful visages are a key element in the decor. Since familiarity is an undisputed hallmark of an inviting home, Viñas has included a few faces that are instantly recognizable. For example, an interpretive portrait of Abraham Lincoln by SCAD alum Marcus Kenney presides over the kitchen, the largest room in the house characterized by tidy black-and-white colorblocking and right angles aplenty, a departure from the seeming spontaneity of the rest of the house. In the stairwell, a multimedia work the homeowners acquired on a trip to Pakistan, Girl Without a Pearl Earring by Abil Aslam, is a mosaic rendering of the famous Vermeer oil vignette in metal eyelets. Against a backdrop of unorthodox palm-green plaid wallpaper, the portrait finds solidarity in its spin on a classic.
Such mashups strike Viñas as “comical,” and she believes that one must possess “a certain amount of audacity” to seek accord among the inherently discordant. Though Viñas never intended for the widespread plaid to convey an iota of, as she calls it, “stuffy library,” she wasn’t opposed to conjuring a cozy, insular feeling suitable for the sylvan setting. So while it appears that you can take the plaid out of the study (after all, the pattern, dubbed the “Mad Plaider,” may qualify as a contemptuous take on tartan), you can’t deny its essential nature. “Most interesting to me is to pull from something historic and look at it through a more contemporary lens,” says Viñas.
In that case, you might consider the entire cottage a kind of 1,600-square-foot “cabinet of curiosities,” an Italian Renaissance–era tradition of collecting objects for purposes of flaunt, delight, or intrigue. Here, such bibelots include a zoo’s worth of animal figures, some even serviceable, like a Seletti white-resin monkey “swinging” in the kitchen with a working light bulb in its grip, or a life-size pig table by Moooi in the entryway, poised to collect keys and mail. To underscore the siren-hued Tom Dixon chairs in the dining room, a wall-mounted assemblage of travel souvenirs is obligingly red, and comprises a fly-swish procured during a trip to Africa, as well as a weathered barber pole that appeals to the designer’s affection for candy striping.
In the den, Viñas’s favorite painting could be considered a mini freak show within the house-wide attraction: On a wood canvas provocatively (and intentionally) shaped like an arched church window, Mark Mulroney’s Look That Way depicts a subversive medley of fleshy tree limbs oozing grubs, an ominous vise grip, and an apple showing signs of rot. “I’m not 100% sure why I like this stuff. My children are like, ‘You’ve scarred us for life,’” says Viñas. “Oh well. There’s always therapy.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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