Musette Stern puts a lot of stock in serendipity. Fifteen years ago she chatted up a stranger at a party and learned that a house had recently become available on a street she adored. Musette went to look at the house, with a #12 address on her birthday, March 12, and felt the stars align. The next week it was hers.
“I’ve always just mostly lived right around here,” Musette says of the Augusta Road neighborhood she has called home since her family moved from Charlotte when she was in the sixth grade. “I love this area and I love old houses.”
The latticework on the front door was designer Diana Gilbert’s inspiration for the lattice archway she crafted to create a small foyer in the living room.The 1930s-era bungalow was in dire need of updating, but Musette moved herself and her two small children in and maintained status quo for three years before tackling the kitchen. For that she called on designer Diana Gilbert, a close friend of her mother’s whose sense of style Musette had long admired.
“My sister and I thought Diana and John were about the coolest people we’d ever seen,” Musette remembers of growing up across the corner from the Gilberts on McDaniel Avenue.
Musette’s personal flair is in no short supply: she’s the “Muse” behind Muse Shoe Studio on Augusta, and she and Diana work well together. The two paired up again recently when the time was right to make some even bigger changes.
The mirror that hangs in the dining room was handed down from Musette’s great grandmother, who once presided as the first lady of North Carolina.
The archway leading from living room to dining room was replicated on the opposing wall, creating a seamless flow into the heart of the home.“A year and a half ago I decided to raise the ceilings, because I had always lived in houses with high ceilings. Because I didn’t have a second floor, I could do that,” Musette says. “Of course that led to doing other things, so it became a bigger project.”
The ceilings got a 20-inch boost in every room—save the kitchen and two bathrooms, though both bathrooms did receive a major facelift. Most ceilings were able to go straight up, but the shape of the attic necessitated angles in a few rooms. A convergence of these angles in the breakfast nook, awash in Diana’s signature color, pale blue, casts an ethereal glow over this charming little corner of the home.
“I am definitely a believer that you don’t have to be perfect to be wonderful,” Musette says. “And I like things not perfect.”
A 12-year-old kitchen renovation has stood the test of time. The only changes for the most recent renovation were a darkening of the cabinets and Gilbert’s signature blue ceiling.The genius of this renovation is in the architectural details Diana added here and there to define spaces and make the most of Musette’s 1,800 square feet. A simple bit of lattice and a well-placed light fixture worked to carve a bit of a foyer out of the living room, and an archway outside the bathroom gives the two kids’ bedrooms the feel of tucked-away suites.
The center of the house posed the biggest challenge, a cramped space with doors leading to various tiny closets at every turn. The inclination here could easily have been to knock out walls and open things up, but it was important to both Diana and Musette to improve the flow of the home without straying too far from the original design.
A timeworn hutch anchors the breakfast nook and is one of the few pieces Stern bought for her new “old” home.
Archways connect interior and exterior spaces and add historic charm throughout the home.“I like walls to hang things on and to have furniture against, and I want to get out of the kitchen, so I wanted the rooms, but I didn’t want them too tiny and choppy either,” Musette says. “This is what I wanted, and it suits the house.”
Musette kept her walls and sacrificed a linen and coat closet, the happy result being the repurposing of her antique linen press from TV stand to … linen press.
The renovation happened to coincide with Musette’s parents moving from her childhood home into assisted living, which gave Musette a place to go for the eight months she needed a roof over her head and also provided her with a number of cherished heirlooms with which to furnish her home when she moved back in. Perhaps the greatest of these treasures is a notebook in which her mother painstakingly recorded, in her own hand, the lineage and lore of each piece she herself had inherited over the years.
The dark, dismal den at the rear of the home was Stern’s least favorite room in the house, but after Gilbert worked her magic with a small addition of square footage and a big infusion of natural light it is now where she spends most of her time.“She remembered everything, and I’m glad she wrote it down while she still could remember,” Musette says.
The designing duo did do away with one wall to push the back of the house out a bit and fashion a new entrance to the master bedroom. The master was once accessed through a dismal little den that was everyone’s least favorite room in the house.
“If we watched TV in there it was when all the lights were off. It was horrible,” Musette says.
Some creative covering-over of exterior windows and doors allowed for a more efficient arrangement of furniture in the master bedroom.
Two tiny closets in the master bedroom were eliminated in favor of one crown jewel of organization, and the master bath got the boutique treatment.“And now that’s where you spend all your time,” Diana says, and Musette agrees of this serene spot that now gets plenty of light thanks to a sunny little alcove overlooking the back yard.
Landscaping is the next item on the agenda, and it’s hard not to be envious at the thought of Musette stepping out of her simple yet glamorous boudoir to sip coffee on her pretty porch, in the quiet back yard of her well-appointed cottage, in the neighborhood she has loved her whole life.
Avocado green tile and dated fixtures were replaced with classic grasscloth wallcovering and glittering lighting fixtures to create a stunning little hall bath. The clever shape of the vanity affords ample counter and storage space while still allowing the door to close on these tight quarters.
