Southampton Historic Dining Room
A colonial-era Southampton dining room — once buried under dated floral wallpaper and dark beams — reimagined as a luminous, Architectural Digest–featured showpiece around its original walk-in cooking hearth.
The challenge
A late-18th-century Southampton farmhouse held a dining room with extraordinary bones — a hand-laid stone walk-in cooking hearth with a beehive bake oven and original exposed beams — but they were lost behind busy floral wallpaper, soot-darkened stone, dark-stained timber, and an assortment of mismatched, dated furnishings. The room read as a cluttered relic rather than the heart of a historic home.
The vision
We honored the architecture instead of fighting it. Walls were wrapped in a warm gold metallic damask, the beams and built-ins painted to lift the ceiling, and the hearth carefully restored so its hand-hewn timber lintel and stonework became the room’s focal point. A sculptural branch-and-crystal chandelier, white tufted wingback dining chairs around a wood trestle table, layered Oushak rugs, and a collected mix of antique oil lamps, framed historic prints, and silver brought period soul and modern polish into balance.
The result
A luminous, livable dining room that lets a piece of colonial American history shine — styled for the holidays with a lavish gold-and-pinecone tablescape and ultimately featured in Architectural Digest as a model of sensitive historic restoration.
Drag to compare
The dining room from the doorway — same bones, transformed by paint, paper, and a fresh palette.
The 18th-century cooking hearth — the soul of the room, brought back as its centerpiece.
As featured in
A connected vision
Let’s design something timeless
Tell us about your home and your vision. We begin with a considered conversation and a clear, white-glove path forward.