Newly Married, in Search of a Style
High style from a low budget, for a newly wed couple in their starter apartment. From an article in the NY Times.
LIKE many newlyweds, Elizabeth and Andrew Wooten eagerly anticipated making a home together. The couple, who met when he moved to her West Village neighborhood in 2006, were married in her hometown of St. Francisville, La., last May. But they began hunting for the right apartment in Manhattan several months before the big day.
After touring more than 70 places — “We drove our broker crazy,” Ms. Wooten said — they eventually found it: an 850-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on the ground floor of a stately town house off Washington Square Park, “one of those houses you walk past and stare at.”
Ms. Wooten, 27, who works in the development office of a private school on the Upper East Side, and Mr. Wooten, 30, a management consultant, hoped they could make the inside as appealing as the outside.
Employing the time-honored method of furnishing a starter apartment, they began asking family members for hand-me-downs and searching Craigslist, an approach that was somewhat successful: by late June, they had amassed a number of pieces in addition to the few they already owned, including a set of six French Empire dining chairs (courtesy of Ms. Wooten’s parents) and a dining table (found on Craigslist).
Ms. Wooten began setting out their wedding gifts, and they hung art. But despite their efforts, the living area felt dark and didn’t reflect the life they envisioned for themselves. They tried rearranging the furniture, but were still dissatisfied.
That was when Ms. Wooten saw a posting (no longer online) on The New York Times Web site, offering help to people struggling with “a furniture budget that feels too tight.” In an e-mail response, she described her dilemma as “not having much furniture” and feeling “not quite sure where to place the furniture we actually do have.”
There was also the issue of the couple’s conflicting tastes: “I lean toward French traditional but my husband likes modern, so it’s a challenge to blend our styles,” she wrote.
And although they could afford to buy a few new things, they had to be cost conscious: Ms. Wooten’s father had suffered congestive heart failure the year before, and was hospitalized shortly after the wedding, and Ms. Wooten wanted to be able to pay for frequent flights to Louisiana.
Brendan Kwinter-Schwartz, an interior designer who owns Kwinter & Company, a New York firm, agreed to help the couple achieve their goals without charging a fee, and a meeting was scheduled for mid-August.
Several days before they could meet for the first time, though, the project was put on hold when Ms. Wooten found out her father was dying and went to join her family at his bedside.
Back in New York a month later, after he had died, she was ready to move forward, citing the enthusiasm he had shown for the project during the five weeks he spent in the hospital. “He loved phone calls, so I called him three times a day,” she said. “He was very entertained by the whole idea of us doing this design project.”
When the meeting finally took place, at the newlyweds’ apartment, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz arrived with two assistants, Kevin Jackson and Sabina Orlander, carrying tape measures and cameras. Looking around the living room, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz immediately announced her first task: paring down the accessories.
“You’ve got lovely things,” she said gently, “but you’ve got them all out at once.”
Then she turned her attention to the furniture. The dark wood pieces were making the room feel dim, she said. “Something Lucite might brighten up” the space, she suggested, and could provide a “little break from all the wood and clutter.”
When she raised the issue of replacing the sofa, it became clear she had Mr. Wooten’s support: “It can definitely go,” he said, explaining that his wife had bought it used years ago from roommates and that it had seemed “old” and “crusty” even before they moved into the apartment.
Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz asked her clients to point out anything they couldn’t part with — only the paintings were nonnegotiable, she was told — and seemed relieved that they were willing to get rid of some of the more baroque items.
“Do you think there’s too much gold in here?” Ms. Wooten asked, alluding to a pair of gold lamps, two gold mirrors and several gold picture frames.
“When I’m done,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz promised, “there won’t be.”
Then she demonstrated a gift that sets many successful designers apart from their peers: providing constructive criticism in a diplomatic way.
“You have a beautiful aesthetic,” she said, indicating Ms. Wooten’s carefully assembled outfit. “Your apartment should look like you.” A polite way of saying, she later acknowledged privately, that the room looked as if it belonged to the couple’s grandparents.
The Wootens established a budget of about $2,000, and set to work on their first assignment: packing up the wedding gifts and storing them in the laundry room.
Over the next eight weeks, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz reached out to a variety of contacts to find high-quality bargain-priced furnishings and sent near-daily e-mail messages to her clients.
One early e-mail discussion addressed the couple’s desire for a sleeper sofa: Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz suggested the Manstad from Ikea, but then found out that Avery Boardman, a high-end custom upholstery company in the Decoration & Design Building, was planning to start selling some merchandise at clearance prices, so she called a contact there to ask for an early look.
After identifying a sofa bed with “clean lines,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz invited Ms. Wooten to accompany her to the showroom and explained why she thought the piece — marked down from $5,800 to $1,950 (including delivery) — was a good investment. Their current apartment might be “a temporary space,” she said, but this piece was both “versatile” and “elegant” and would “be a permanent part of their collection.” And when Ms. Wooten’s mother visited, she added, “You want to have someplace she can come and stay and be comfortable.”
The couple talked it over and decided to increase their budget to $4,000 so they could buy the sofa.
Satisfied that the couple’s biggest expenditure was behind them, the designer began scouring estate sales for other pieces, eventually purchasing a coffee table, a chair and a ceramic lamp. A search for “midcentury table lamps” on eBay yielded a pair of “spectacular” Lucite lamps for $165: “I am so excited,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz reported after they arrived. “If someone said they were $4,000, I wouldn’t blink.”
The process was not without a few bumps, however. When Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz suggested reupholstering the dining chairs in a brighter material, for example, Ms. Wooten protested: “But my mother just reupholstered them before she sent them to us,” although she eventually agreed.
Then there was the prospect of adjusting to a new style. One night, the couple returned home after one of the designer’s many visits and were shocked to find she had hung a deer skull and antlers over the television and applied broad brown vinyl stripes to the wall behind the dining table.
“I would never have spent $150 on that,” Ms. Wooten said, referring to the stripes. “It’s a little out there.”
A design-savvy friend advised her that “antlers are so in right now,” and she responded with uncharacteristic frankness, telling him: “I so don’t care. They’re creeping me out.”
But when she voiced her concerns to the designer in a more polite way, she didn’t get the response she had hoped for: “Brendan said live with them for a few weeks, and I think they’ll grow on you,” Ms. Wooten said.
Finally, she decided to set aside her reservations. “I feel like I just have to let go,” she said. “She’s the pro. She’s a little bit more modern, but it’s good, because it’s making me try things.”
And in August, when she found out that her mother had breast cancer, it strengthened her Zen-like attitude. “I was like, you know what? What’s hanging on the wall doesn’t really matter.”
But even with that relaxed attitude, tensions arose after Will Erickson, an artist friend who was creating an enormous painting to hang over the couch, e-mailed a digital photo of the work in progress, and Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz decided she didn’t want to use it. Ms. Wooten, who loved the piece, was unable to bear the idea that it wouldn’t be used, and didn’t like Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz’s insistence that several pieces found at an estate sale, which she didn’t particularly like, be hung instead.
“It’s hard sometimes to stand up to her,” Ms. Wooten said in a moment of frustration. “She gets a little bit pushy.”
Once Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz saw Mr. Erickson’s painting in person, though, she decided it was the best of several options she had tried. “I’m really happy with it,” she said. “It’s so funny, because I put up such a fuss not having seen it.”
By the time the apartment was completed in November, all parties seemed thrilled with the outcome.
“They are such a sweet couple and I really wanted them to have very beautiful, quality pieces that are going to get better in time,” the designer said, adding that she was especially happy that the space “looks like Andrew and Elizabeth live here, and kind of echoes their style.”
Ms. Wooten agreed, noting that “it feels a lot more open and light — and more modern, too.”
She admitted that she had come to enjoy bargain hunting, was delighted when she managed to recoup nearly $500 by selling their old desk and trunk on Craigslist, and felt victorious after buying a slightly used version of the West Elm desk Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz selected for almost $200 less than it would have cost in the store.
And despite her initial reaction to the stripes, she said: “Now I think they’re really cool. And it really does define the dining space.”
Mr. Wooten, who left most of the decisions to his wife, said he liked the changes as well. “I wouldn’t say I’m ultramodern or supermodern by any means,” he said. “But I think we changed the room a lot, and it looks good.”
Except for the antlers, that is. “Maybe it’s hot in the market, but I don’t think it ties into anything else in the room,” he said, adding that he could only imagine them working “if you were going to have a motif with game hunting or safari.” (After the photo shoot, the Wootens returned the antlers to Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz, who had bought them on eBay for $76.)
Some of the aesthetic changes weren’t easy for his wife, Mr. Wooten said, but he appreciated her willingness to try something new: “I think it definitely stretched her taste in a good way.”
The final touch — which caused Ms. Wooten some sticker shock — were luxury throw pillows she picked out with the designer.
“I didn’t even know throw pillows could cost this much,” she said, holding a pillow that retails for more than $200.
“I just can’t believe how expensive things are, even when you’re shopping design on a dime,” she added. “It’s just funny how things add up.”
LIKE many newlyweds, Elizabeth and Andrew Wooten eagerly anticipated making a home together. The couple, who met when he moved to her West Village neighborhood in 2006, were married in her hometown of St. Francisville, La., last May. But they began hunting for the right apartment in Manhattan several months before the big day.
After touring more than 70 places — “We drove our broker crazy,” Ms. Wooten said — they eventually found it: an 850-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on the ground floor of a stately town house off Washington Square Park, “one of those houses you walk past and stare at.”
Ms. Wooten, 27, who works in the development office of a private school on the Upper East Side, and Mr. Wooten, 30, a management consultant, hoped they could make the inside as appealing as the outside.
Employing the time-honored method of furnishing a starter apartment, they began asking family members for hand-me-downs and searching Craigslist, an approach that was somewhat successful: by late June, they had amassed a number of pieces in addition to the few they already owned, including a set of six French Empire dining chairs (courtesy of Ms. Wooten’s parents) and a dining table (found on Craigslist).
Ms. Wooten began setting out their wedding gifts, and they hung art. But despite their efforts, the living area felt dark and didn’t reflect the life they envisioned for themselves. They tried rearranging the furniture, but were still dissatisfied.
That was when Ms. Wooten saw a posting (no longer online) on The New York Times Web site, offering help to people struggling with “a furniture budget that feels too tight.” In an e-mail response, she described her dilemma as “not having much furniture” and feeling “not quite sure where to place the furniture we actually do have.”
There was also the issue of the couple’s conflicting tastes: “I lean toward French traditional but my husband likes modern, so it’s a challenge to blend our styles,” she wrote.
And although they could afford to buy a few new things, they had to be cost conscious: Ms. Wooten’s father had suffered congestive heart failure the year before, and was hospitalized shortly after the wedding, and Ms. Wooten wanted to be able to pay for frequent flights to Louisiana.
Brendan Kwinter-Schwartz, an interior designer who owns Kwinter & Company, a New York firm, agreed to help the couple achieve their goals without charging a fee, and a meeting was scheduled for mid-August.
Several days before they could meet for the first time, though, the project was put on hold when Ms. Wooten found out her father was dying and went to join her family at his bedside.
Back in New York a month later, after he had died, she was ready to move forward, citing the enthusiasm he had shown for the project during the five weeks he spent in the hospital. “He loved phone calls, so I called him three times a day,” she said. “He was very entertained by the whole idea of us doing this design project.”
When the meeting finally took place, at the newlyweds’ apartment, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz arrived with two assistants, Kevin Jackson and Sabina Orlander, carrying tape measures and cameras. Looking around the living room, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz immediately announced her first task: paring down the accessories.
“You’ve got lovely things,” she said gently, “but you’ve got them all out at once.”
Then she turned her attention to the furniture. The dark wood pieces were making the room feel dim, she said. “Something Lucite might brighten up” the space, she suggested, and could provide a “little break from all the wood and clutter.”
When she raised the issue of replacing the sofa, it became clear she had Mr. Wooten’s support: “It can definitely go,” he said, explaining that his wife had bought it used years ago from roommates and that it had seemed “old” and “crusty” even before they moved into the apartment.
Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz asked her clients to point out anything they couldn’t part with — only the paintings were nonnegotiable, she was told — and seemed relieved that they were willing to get rid of some of the more baroque items.
“Do you think there’s too much gold in here?” Ms. Wooten asked, alluding to a pair of gold lamps, two gold mirrors and several gold picture frames.
“When I’m done,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz promised, “there won’t be.”
Then she demonstrated a gift that sets many successful designers apart from their peers: providing constructive criticism in a diplomatic way.
“You have a beautiful aesthetic,” she said, indicating Ms. Wooten’s carefully assembled outfit. “Your apartment should look like you.” A polite way of saying, she later acknowledged privately, that the room looked as if it belonged to the couple’s grandparents.
The Wootens established a budget of about $2,000, and set to work on their first assignment: packing up the wedding gifts and storing them in the laundry room.
Over the next eight weeks, Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz reached out to a variety of contacts to find high-quality bargain-priced furnishings and sent near-daily e-mail messages to her clients.
One early e-mail discussion addressed the couple’s desire for a sleeper sofa: Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz suggested the Manstad from Ikea, but then found out that Avery Boardman, a high-end custom upholstery company in the Decoration & Design Building, was planning to start selling some merchandise at clearance prices, so she called a contact there to ask for an early look.
After identifying a sofa bed with “clean lines,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz invited Ms. Wooten to accompany her to the showroom and explained why she thought the piece — marked down from $5,800 to $1,950 (including delivery) — was a good investment. Their current apartment might be “a temporary space,” she said, but this piece was both “versatile” and “elegant” and would “be a permanent part of their collection.” And when Ms. Wooten’s mother visited, she added, “You want to have someplace she can come and stay and be comfortable.”
The couple talked it over and decided to increase their budget to $4,000 so they could buy the sofa.
Satisfied that the couple’s biggest expenditure was behind them, the designer began scouring estate sales for other pieces, eventually purchasing a coffee table, a chair and a ceramic lamp. A search for “midcentury table lamps” on eBay yielded a pair of “spectacular” Lucite lamps for $165: “I am so excited,” Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz reported after they arrived. “If someone said they were $4,000, I wouldn’t blink.”
The process was not without a few bumps, however. When Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz suggested reupholstering the dining chairs in a brighter material, for example, Ms. Wooten protested: “But my mother just reupholstered them before she sent them to us,” although she eventually agreed.
Then there was the prospect of adjusting to a new style. One night, the couple returned home after one of the designer’s many visits and were shocked to find she had hung a deer skull and antlers over the television and applied broad brown vinyl stripes to the wall behind the dining table.
“I would never have spent $150 on that,” Ms. Wooten said, referring to the stripes. “It’s a little out there.”
A design-savvy friend advised her that “antlers are so in right now,” and she responded with uncharacteristic frankness, telling him: “I so don’t care. They’re creeping me out.”
But when she voiced her concerns to the designer in a more polite way, she didn’t get the response she had hoped for: “Brendan said live with them for a few weeks, and I think they’ll grow on you,” Ms. Wooten said.
Finally, she decided to set aside her reservations. “I feel like I just have to let go,” she said. “She’s the pro. She’s a little bit more modern, but it’s good, because it’s making me try things.”
And in August, when she found out that her mother had breast cancer, it strengthened her Zen-like attitude. “I was like, you know what? What’s hanging on the wall doesn’t really matter.”
But even with that relaxed attitude, tensions arose after Will Erickson, an artist friend who was creating an enormous painting to hang over the couch, e-mailed a digital photo of the work in progress, and Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz decided she didn’t want to use it. Ms. Wooten, who loved the piece, was unable to bear the idea that it wouldn’t be used, and didn’t like Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz’s insistence that several pieces found at an estate sale, which she didn’t particularly like, be hung instead.
“It’s hard sometimes to stand up to her,” Ms. Wooten said in a moment of frustration. “She gets a little bit pushy.”
Once Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz saw Mr. Erickson’s painting in person, though, she decided it was the best of several options she had tried. “I’m really happy with it,” she said. “It’s so funny, because I put up such a fuss not having seen it.”
By the time the apartment was completed in November, all parties seemed thrilled with the outcome.
“They are such a sweet couple and I really wanted them to have very beautiful, quality pieces that are going to get better in time,” the designer said, adding that she was especially happy that the space “looks like Andrew and Elizabeth live here, and kind of echoes their style.”
Ms. Wooten agreed, noting that “it feels a lot more open and light — and more modern, too.”
She admitted that she had come to enjoy bargain hunting, was delighted when she managed to recoup nearly $500 by selling their old desk and trunk on Craigslist, and felt victorious after buying a slightly used version of the West Elm desk Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz selected for almost $200 less than it would have cost in the store.
And despite her initial reaction to the stripes, she said: “Now I think they’re really cool. And it really does define the dining space.”
Mr. Wooten, who left most of the decisions to his wife, said he liked the changes as well. “I wouldn’t say I’m ultramodern or supermodern by any means,” he said. “But I think we changed the room a lot, and it looks good.”
Except for the antlers, that is. “Maybe it’s hot in the market, but I don’t think it ties into anything else in the room,” he said, adding that he could only imagine them working “if you were going to have a motif with game hunting or safari.” (After the photo shoot, the Wootens returned the antlers to Ms. Kwinter-Schwartz, who had bought them on eBay for $76.)
Some of the aesthetic changes weren’t easy for his wife, Mr. Wooten said, but he appreciated her willingness to try something new: “I think it definitely stretched her taste in a good way.”
The final touch — which caused Ms. Wooten some sticker shock — were luxury throw pillows she picked out with the designer.
“I didn’t even know throw pillows could cost this much,” she said, holding a pillow that retails for more than $200.
“I just can’t believe how expensive things are, even when you’re shopping design on a dime,” she added. “It’s just funny how things add up.”
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