B'ellow, Old Chatham, New York
A house designed by two people who spent thirty-six years learning how to live beautifully.
1790 Federal farmhouse. Named for big yellow, and the Italian word for beautiful.
Their only client
They hired no decorator.
When Karen and Martin found B'ellow, it had good bones and bad wallpaper and the kind of potential that only two people who have spent careers in design can properly evaluate. They called no one. They made every decision — every paint color, every choice of wall treatment and floor and molding — themselves.
"We only have one client," Martin says. "Us."
What resulted is not a decorated house. It is a house that tells you, room by room, exactly who these two people are: Federal architecture with Chinoiserie accents. A teal ceiling in the black lacquer dining room. Walls the color of ancient fired clay. And everywhere, the objects — small, specific, irreplaceable — that a life of looking tends to leave behind with people who know what to do with them.
Day
The room where morning arrives first.
B'ellow moves through the day. The yellow living room is its morning — light-filled, unhurried, the house still open to whatever comes next. Karen chose the yellow: not a designer's yellow, not a statement, but the yellow of old botanical prints and rooms that have been lived in since before anyone thought to call that living a style. It is warm by conviction. The color of a house that has always known how it wants to feel.
