How A Cluttered Townhouse Became A Soothing Oasis
Mike Rupp calmed a Manhattan house packed with chaotic decorating.
3 min
WHEN INTERIOR DESIGNER Mike Rupp accepted the task of revamping an 1843 Greek Revival townhouse in New York’s Gramercy neighbourhood, he knew it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Decades of decoration by the client herself had yielded a cluttered, directionless space filled with traditional, oversize furniture in clashing colours and patterns. “Things were out of scale with the space, and colours didn’t harmonize,” said Mr. Rupp.
The collections the client and her husband had amassed added to the hodgepodge: art from travels to Africa and copious greyhound figurines inspired by their rescues of the oft-forsaken breed. The surfeit of stuff made visitors feel a bit like children in a preciously decorated house. “They’re not formal people,” Mr. Rupp said of the couple. “They’re casual and warmhearted and wanted guests to feel the same way.”
He introduced his client to the pared-back but handcrafted side of 20th-century modernism through artists and designers like Pierre Jeanneret, George Nakashima and Paul R. Evans. Sumptuous textures and a tight palette of blue and green pastels and neutrals further warmed the home, tying together 20th-century furniture, 19th-century architecture and many styles of art. “Don’t be afraid to surround yourself with colour,” said Mr. Rupp, “but it doesn’t have to be poppy, bold and aggressive.”
Tap the Quiet Power of Pale Blue
The second-floor parlour comprises a living and dining area, whose walls are clad in a nearly neutral pale blue paint, Whispering Spring from Benjamin Moore. In the dining space, Mr. Rupp upholstered the Wegner chairs that surround a walnut Nakashima table in a leather of a similarly muted blue. The black shades of the midcentury-styled chandelier visually connect to the shapes in a triptych by British artist Lisa Giles, and a geometrically patterned carved-wool rug with blue in the ground unifies the two rooms and “invites guests to get comfortable” on the carpet’s high pile.
Don’t Let a Bathroom Get Too Impersonal
The client fell for the furniture of Pierre Jeanneret during the design process—so much so that Mr. Rupp had to “put his foot down” to prevent her from buying too much—and so he took care to put a piece in the bathroom. “I wanted her to start her day with a piece that makes her happy,” he said. The biggest bathroom-design mistake? “Denying the space of [one’s] personality,” he said. “You don’t want to make it like a hotel bathroom.” Here, he added a Tuareg mat and the same paint as the parlor’s.
Weave Together the Handmade and Machine-Made
In the primary bedroom, Mr. Rupp covered the headboard in a Tuareg woven leather and reed mat from Morocco. “It brings colour and movement into the space,” he said. He painted the walls the same soft blue used elsewhere in the home. To balance out the room’s crafty elements, including the African mask that is part of the owners’ collection, he added a 1930s Swedish pewter lamp for “some aggressive metal.” Its gleam contrasts with the soft alpaca blanket and lamb’s wool pillow.
Integrate Off-Period Elements With a Coat of Paint
The Arts & Crafts fireplace in the parlor came from a 1992 renovation. “It was screaming at us to be changed,” Mr. Rupp said, but instead of replacing it, he painted the mantel a glossy black. “It gave it that modern edge.” The background in the painting over the mantel and the armchair’s leather again align with the home’s prevailing soft blue, but reds connect the accent pillows on the 1950s armchairs to bits of tile in the fireplace surround. Meanwhile, the curvilinear sofa clad in a fluffy lamb’s wool “beckons to be curled up on.”
For Tranquility, Connect Design to Nature
On the top floor of the home, Mr. Rupp continued to lean toward the clean lines of midcentury modernism executed in warm materials. Three curvaceous 1930s Axel Einar-Hjorth chairs in folksy pine encircle a cork-topped Paul Frankl Cloud coffee table from the 1950s. Blue leather softens the boxiness of the sofa, while on the walls, Benjamin Moore’s Hollingsworth Green, a pale sage, connects to the view of a backyard. Nature also gets a winky acknowledgment from a giant stainless-steel flower by late American sculptor Gloria Kischl. A 1940s Swedish rug hews to the home’s blue-green palette but adds touches of pink.
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Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.
4 min
What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?
At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.
Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.
Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.
A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.
Escalating expenses
One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.
One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.
Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.
Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.
“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.
Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.
Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.
“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.
Parent trade-offs
If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.
When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.
The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”
Emotional labor
For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.
Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.
“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.
Lost productivity
The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.
Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.
Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.
Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.
Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”
Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.
Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
