Art Class
Designer Leah Bolger creates a picture-perfect environment for her clients’ carefully assembled collection.
In the family room, a gallery wall of Photography by Jed Fielding hangs over a plush sofa with pillows covered in Great Plains fabric, through Holly Hunt. The coffee table has a polished-concrete top. Hardwood flooring throughout the home is from Carlisle Wide Plank Floors.
Good things come to those who wait. For one couple with an eye for art, creating a perfectly composed home meant relocating from the traditional house they’d long occupied on the North Shore, to a contemporary condo in the city. The move meant not only a new canvas on which to arrange their treasures, but a chance to start anew when it came to furniture and accessories. “Their things were bit of a hodgepodge that didn’t really reflect their aesthetic,” shares veteran designer, Leah Bolger, who helped the couple settle artfully into their new digs.
Left: In the living room, the Brimstone console, through Holly Hunt, has a machined, steel surface and sides that are hand-patinated. The interior of the table has a bright, lacquer finish. Over it hangs an encaustic-on-panel work by Marlena Novak.
Right: The guest bath features a wall clad in textile-like Pannelli Bianco Carrara marble dimensional tile from Artistic Tile. Wallcovering by Phillip Jeffries. Graff’s Mod Collection polished-nickel faucets have Carrara marble handles.
Unified with a subtle color palette and set with pieces—including a classic Eames Lounge Chair—that clearly telegraph an urbane sensibility, the apartment hits a cool, serene note utterly in concert with the homeowners’ collection of black-and-white photography. Touches of bright color, such as the purple cushions perched on Saarinen Tulip chairs at the breakfast table, take a cue from the hues of nearby canvases (in this case, a huge image of a grape Popsicle by Brian Bonebrake).
The Leah Bolger-designed guest bed is upholstered in Great Plains fabric from Holly Hunt. Bolger designed the substantial bookcase, made of rift-sawn white oak.
As with most design projects, not everything fell perfectly into place here, admits Bolger. “It was a bit of a struggle to get our heads around the guest suite, which, for a while was just filled with boxes and boxes from the move.” Appropriate storage space was of the essence, but Bolger wanted to avoid anything that was too intrusive. Taking matters into her own hands, she designed a commodious bookcase and a complementary bed, both made of rift-sawn white oak. The expanse of the bookcase is balanced by the horizontality of the headboard, which extends to incorporate two night tables.
The ample seating in the living room includes sofas from Interior Crafts, covered in fabric by Dedar, through Holly Hunt, and Cowtan & Tout, and Holly Hunt slipper chairs. The coffee table is by Paul Ferrante.
Appropriately informal, the kitchen-adjacent family room sports a sectional sofa and a steel and polished-concrete coffee table. The living room, on the other hand, is marked by an understated formality, with sofas from Interior Crafts and a pair of Holly Hunt slipper chairs gathered around a Paul Ferrante coffee table. Where many interiors driven by a contemporary art collection appear more gallery-like than residential, Bolger’s approach hits that happy medium where what’s hung on the wall and the chair you sink into are equal partners. Like a flawlessly paired frame and canvas, neither outshines the other and the eye delights in all that it sees.