On their honeymoon, Kimberly and Greg Shapiro had tea at The Ritz London. When they came home and began redecorating their 1896 house, Kimberly still had tea on her mind. Beyond the dining room was the sort of drawing room where ladies might have repaired while the gentlemen went off to puff on their stogeys. Why not turn it into a room where she could have friends over for tea?
Everything—walls, ceiling, molding—was off-white, and Kimberly wanted a little more atmosphere. A soft green, maybe, to pick up a green vein in the white onyx fireplace? The light fixture was original, brass vines set in a huge oval cove, and she tried painting the sides a color she calls “celadon” and Greg calls “asparagus.”
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It didn’t work.
The Challenge
She was ready to push on, “leave the horrible color and add another and a different wall color,” but he shook his head: “Let’s just go back to white.” It was their first impasse. They solved it in the way they do most disagreements: The one who feels most passionately about it (in this case, Greg) prevails.
But Kimberly still wasn’t wild about the sterile off-white. She sought advice from designer Arlene Lilie, who said to start with the floor covering. They found a gorgeous Aubusson rug, and its swirls of peach gave Kimberly her perfect wall color. Wary, she painted five big swaths of different shades of peach in four parts of the room and left them there for 10 days, watching them change as sun streamed in and twilight fell. To her relief, “the right one was obvious. Now I can’t imagine this room in any other color!”
The Details
The next decisions were easier. The spinet piano had to stay: Greg’s mom gave lessons at 50 cents an hour to buy it at one time, and it was an Everett made in the year Steinway bought little Everett. “They only knew how to make pianos a certain way,” he chuckles, “so it was made like a Steinway.” At Baker Odds & Ends (whose closure they mourned), the Shapiros found what they dubbed “the big-ass mirror,” a gorgeous 10-foot-wide beveled mirror in an ornate gold European frame. Oddly—or perhaps not—what also worked in the room was a simply framed Milton Greene photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
Kimberly had envisioned dramatically long sofas, but then she realized that they’d be awkward for conversation: “There’d been two little bitty loveseats shoved up against the wall, and they looked so forlorn. I wanted the sofas to face each other.” Lilie helped her find poufy sofas covered in jacquard.
Greg says now the only missing piece was a coffee—no, tea—table. The couple looked and looked, but nothing was big enough, and then one was, but it was “some ridiculous price,” Greg says, “so I told Kim, ‘I’ll just make it.’”
He’d already built a library that “looks original to the house,” she marvels, “and a reading room for me that’s next to it.” She trusted him. He ordered carved table legs from Enkeboll, a company in California that sells carved and custom wood pieces, and on them he set a thick, elegantly beveled piece of glass, 5 feet square. “It took longer just getting the glass out of the box,” Greg recalls, amused.
The Conclusion
The table has ample room for a tea service, scones, a bowl of Devonshire cream—and pretty china plates for friends who come to relax and exchange confidences. The Shapiros both have hard-paced professional lives, Kimberly as an attorney and Greg as chief financial officer of Strayos. But with a little compromise and ingenuity, they’ve created a refuge so soothing, airy, and refined, men tiptoe in to enjoy it, too.
