Featured Homes
Calm, Cool and Collected
A well-known local interior designer shows how to blend current design trends with historical treasures from the past.
BY
Brooke Pearl
PHOTOGRAPHY
James Maidhof

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An interior designer for more than 40 years, Janet Alholm knows what she wants and what looks good when it comes to designing spaces, as demonstrated within her own home. Located in the Villas at the Links at LionsGate, her seventh home incorporates years past with current styles.

The Tuscan influence is evident. But look closer. Each room tells a story, with eclectic furniture pieces that don’t always match and antique accessories that mesh well with various works of art. “To me, there’s no one particular style,” she says. “If I like something, I buy it and find a place to put it.” Most generally, those pieces also have a practical purpose. “With everything I do, I want it to be useful,” she adds. Each room is an extension of another, highlighting wood-beam ceilings, a variety of chandeliers and mirrors, and many custom-designed features like the decorative iron above several walkways. Also found throughout the home are faux-painted ceilings and walls that “all stay in the rich and warm gold tones,” Janet notes. “Each [surface] is different but blends together,” just like the home itself.

The reverse story-and-a-half, 5,000-square-foot home includes the formal living room with plenty of seating and a custom-made, cast travertine limestone see-through fireplace that is shared with the hearth room. Janet’s collection of antique crystal ink wells, which she considers works of art, started more than 40 years ago and covers the coffee and side tables in the living room. “As I travel, I like to find accessories from the past because it’s our history and you can’t reproduce it,” she says.

The hearth room presents a leather chair with cow hide, comfy ottoman and pillows covered in kilim rugs, among a mix of additional seating options. The bear-shaped accessories, made from whale bones that are several thousand years old, share the space with an antique box, once used by traveling men, and dates back to the Civil War era.

A couple steps away, the kitchen’s granite countertops provide enough work space for another of Janet’s passions: cooking. She also has custom-made knotty alder cabinets and a great “woman’s pantry,” she says. The close-by wooden harvest table seats six (with matching chairs). Each morning, though, with cups of coffee in hand, Janet and her husband, John, bypass it, heading instead to their favorite room in the house: the year-round sunroom. “Whether there’s snow, rain or sunshine, this is just a great room,” she says. The space overlooking the golf course incorporates heated floors, ledge slate fireplace, a mix of wicker furniture and printed fabrics, oriental antique jars and John’s only request in the entire house — the port hole, which helps capture early morning light.

The master bedroom, located to the right of the entrance, is calm, cool and collected, with built-in bookshelves around a window sofa and antique perfume bottles that sit atop a contemporary mirrored coffee table. The bottles Janet started collecting 20 years ago date back to the stage coach era, where some were apparently used to hold talcum powder in one end and perfume in the other (since air conditioning didn’t exist). Others came with a dainty chain for women to carry like a purse. The collection continues into the master bathroom, which also displays Janet’s creativity. Designed for barrel walls, she instead expanded the bathroom and included vaulted ceilings with plant ledges and indirect lighting.

The lower level, like most, is designed for entertaining, with two guest bedrooms, a kitchen, laundry room, John’s office and an open living area. The full bar is complete with an island that features a flat stone pebble and porcelain countertop outlined in copper with a copper sink. Handmade light fixtures hang overhead. Housing antique decanters, the glass shelving on the wall is surrounded by limestone columns. Janet’s eclectic and practical mindset also can be found in the copper table with rolling suede-and-leather chairs and a leather ottoman that can be used as a tabletop or additional seating.

It’s easy to notice a designer’s touch in every room, but especially the new-verses-old groupings, such as pairing the contemporary statue in her first-floor office with tin pre-Civil war picture frames that show off her family and early-1900s book collections.

“John and I say it all the time, ‘We just love this home’,” Janet says. And it’s not hard to see why when current design trends and historical “treasures” link together to create a comfortable, timeless home.

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