Bones and beauty

Patricia West-Barker | The New Mexican

9/21/2007 -

Linda Applewhite talks about houses the way a modeling agent or casting director might talk about aspiring new stars: It's all about bones and beauty, the veteran interior designer says.

By "bones" Applewhite means built-in features such as beams, arches, niches, windows, doors, moldings, columns, stairways, fireplaces and cabinetry — the architectural details that help define and distinguish a room or a building.

Although her work has been featured in magazines such as House Beautiful, Elle, Sunset Magazine, in The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, on HGTV's Sensible Chic and Food TV's Ultimate Kitchens, it's her new book, Architectural Interiors: Transforming Your Home with Decorative Structural Elements — published by Gibbs Smith earlier this summer — that brings her thinking about enhancing the bones of a space — or creating bones where none presently exist — to a wider audience.

Applewhite will be discussing her ideas and showing examples of remodels and redesigns from her book — as well as offering tours of two local projects, one her own home — during her first Santa Fe-based weekend workshop, "Design in the Desert," Sept. 28 to 30.

"I'd always dreamed of buying an old adobe and living part-time in Santa Fe," Applewhite said during a recent interview. "I love Northern New Mexico; I'm very drawn here. I even started a business selling Southwest furniture, art and accessories in California just so I could come and do a buying trip here every year."

Needing a new focus after the loss of a beloved dog, the designer and her husband started looking at old adobes in Santa Fe. While many had been ruined by previous remodels, she said, she finally found a house on the Eastside that she could work with and live in.

If you go:

What: Design in the Desert: A Weekend Design Seminar with Linda Applewhite, author of Architectural Interiors: Transforming Your Home with Decorative Structural Elements
When: Sept. 28 through 30
Where: Moves from a Friday night reception at Thirteen Moons Gallery to Saturday stops at an Eastside artist’s compound, the Santa Fe Design Center and Applewhite’s own recently remodeled adobe to Sunday class, garden luncheon and closing cocktail party at La Posada.
Price: $250 includes all field trips, two cocktail parties, one luncheon, a dinner, workshop notebook including material from presentation and a surprise gift bag.
To register: Call 415-331-2040 or log onto www.LindaApplewhite.com.
"I found that adobes are a lot like Victorians in San Francisco," Applewhite said. "They have little rooms and they tend to be dark."

The house she bought "had good bones," the designer said, "but we embellished it even further ... opening up the stairway — which looked like it was from New England, with little tiny pickets — while still keeping the lintels and the posts. We could have sheetrocked that (feature) and we didn't do it. We respected it."

Applewhite also took on the narrow galley kitchen and the three tiny dark rooms on the first floor, removing walls and bringing light and color into the space.

To maintain the flavor of New Mexico — honoring the existing architecture is another key tenet of her work — Applewhite did extensive research before she picked up a trowel or a color chart. The two books she found most helpful, she said, were two Museum of New Mexico publications: New Mexico Style: A Sourcebook of Traditional Architectural Details and New Mexico Furniture 1600-1940: The Origins, Survival and Revival of Furniture in the Hispanic Southwest.

From these books she selected the scallop and chip-carving details that became the themes of the house, embellishing custom-designed tiles, cabinetry and furniture. The design for the new balusters on the staircase came from those sources as well.

Applewhite left the livingroom fireplace and the windows as they were, but added new French doors to brighten the dining area and help connect the garden outside with the interior of the home. She also added eight new nichos to the one she found in the house.

"Hopefully we've kept the flavor of New Mexico," Applewhite said. "This is an old adobe so I tried to honor it — but this is really where we live and I felt that opening (the house) up to today's living style was an appropriate thing to do."

Her book is all about embellishing architecture, Applewhite said, and she did everything in the book in her Santa Fe home "except for (changing or embellishing) the moldings," which, she noted, were already perfectly in proportion and tune with the style of the home.

During her weekend workshop, Applewhite will host a catered dinner at her now-completed home and garden so participants can see firsthand the results of her work. She will also be leading the group through another Eastside project, the home of artist Kirby Kendrick, whose remodel is the cover story of the issue of Su Casa magazine that hits the newsstands during the program.

Later in the weekend, Applewhite will give a slide presentation of the "befores" of both her and Kendricks' homes (as well as projects highlighted in her book) so participants can see the step-by-step transformation of the spaces.

Readers need not be on the verge of a major remodel — or own a million-dollar or historic home — Applewhite said, to benefit from her workshop or her book.

"This is a great book for people with tract homes," she said, "because a lot of the chapters are about decorative rather than structural changes. There's a lot you can do without remodeling your whole house to give it more character."

You can do a lot with inexpensive cabinetry and lighting and with paint, she said, noting that all the colors on her walls were off the Sherwin Williams shelf.

The goal of both her workshop and the book, Applewhite said, is to help people bring more beauty into their lives. A painter as well as a designer and decorator, Applewhite works with color and light as well as structure to create what she calls "a house that glows."

"A lot of people are a little bit afraid of color," Applewhite said, "but I'm not. I think color is life-enhancing and it has a vibrational quality. I think it really can nurture you."

Applewhite's own pallette runs toward sunny yellows, golds, apricots and greens — Mediterranean hues that reflect and enhance a sun-kissed environment. But, she said, she has found that people are often most attracted to colors that reflect their own skin tones, eye and hair color. (She is a green-eyed blonde with a lot of yellow in her skin.)

"I find that people like to live with warm colors," Applewhite said, although there are a few exceptions in her book. "Even when I've done a cool palette (for homeowners on a little island in San Francisco Bay who wanted everything in blue and green)," she said, "they ended up calling me and saying, 'Linda we're freezing to death in this house' ... we want some warmth."

Whatever a client's color choices, Applewhite "always creates homes that feel good." So much of creating a beautiful space, she said, "is about the way a room feels, not just the way it looks."