D6 | Saturday/Sunday, June 21 - 22, 2025
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
DESIGN & DECORATING HOUSE TOUR
THE BIGGEST BITE In the suburban-Philadelphia project designed by Miggy Mason, the combined kitchen and dining room storage ate up $305K of the $500K budget for millwork.
Enough Cabinets for the Costco Old houses notoriously lack storage—irksome for this family of five in the age of bulk buying. Their solution? $500K of built-ins. BY MICHELLE SLATALLA
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HEN Gilded Age architect Addison Hutton designed a grand, circa-1870s mansion for the family of a prominent attorney in a bucolic town near Philadelphia, nobody was worried about where to put the extra rolls of paper towels. Such things weren’t invented yet. Neither were those wholesaleclub stores that sell bulk-packaged pallets of everything from canned tuna to Ziploc bags to meet the needs of families with, say, three young boys and a golden retriever. After Patrick and Dava Murray moved their family into Hutton’s lovely, 7,500-square-foot masterpiece of Second Empire style, they opened the doors of the tiny timecapsule closets and wondered: Where will all the Costco stuff go? “Patrick really brought it up several times. At the time, they were storing everything down in the basement or in a small pantry cupboard in the mudroom,” said Miggy Mason, the designer whom the couple hired to reconfigure the layout, to redo the kitchen, bedrooms, laundry and baths, and— most crucial—to add $500,000 worth of new cabinetry. Mason, the founder of West Chester, Penn., design firm Holley Alley, started on the job five years ago. By then, the Murrays had already made their affinity for their house’s history clear: They’d painstakingly restored original win-
dows, repaired the slate roof and built a garage with a facade of green serpentine stone, matching that of the house. “They loved the charm and all the quirks, and wanted to embrace the character of the house, so even the built-ins needed to feel very intentional and not like an afterthought,” Mason said. “I wanted to make sure the house also felt fresh and approachable for a young family.” So how do you add nearly 160 linear feet of modern storage to a historic house in a way that doesn’t look boring or overwhelming? You make it look as if all those new cabinets and wardrobes and closets had been there for 150 years. Luckily, channeling the 19th century—and translating its architectural vernacular for the 21st— comes naturally to Mason, who lives in a nearby Queen Anne Victorian built in 1890. It helped that she had a secret weapon: Bluebell Fine Cabinetry & Design, in Wayne, Penn. “They’re the premier cabinet designer and builder in our area, and they built every cabinet in the house with solid wood, thicker-than-standard doors, and special wavy glass panels in the kitchen,” she said. While Shaker-style door panels visually link the storage units throughout the house, the team made tweaks here and there because “every room called for something a little different,” said Mason. For instance, the $305,000 of cabinetry in the open-plan kitchen-dining room includes not
From left: A well-stocked kitchen pantry cupboard features shelving, dovetail drawer boxes and door racks. The laundry room, located upstairs, includes drying pegs and three clothes hampers, one for each boy. only a wall of stately paneled-oak cabinets but the sort of rolling ladder that Victorians loved to scale in their bustles. (No one would ever guess that lurking behind the paneled cabinet doors are shelves stacked with facial tissue, aluminum foil and flavored carbonated water.) To visually define the separate kitchen workspace, Mason painted
its cabinets a dusky green shade (Farrow & Ball’s French Gray) and installed them against walls tiled floor-to-ceiling with subway tile in the same simple, running-bond pattern one might have seen at Philly’s City Hall metro stop more than a century ago. The 72 linear feet of kitchen millwork includes a custom stove hood; a pantry closet whose doors
custom built-in wardrobes (and a built-in window seat that invites you to curl up on it with a hardcover copy of “Little Women”). In all, the storage adds up to 40 linear feet of specially configured shelves and drawers to hold everything from luggage to shoes. The $80,000 of carpentry adds “an architectural detail that elevates what had been sort of a nonde-
Oak cabinets, bin-pull hardware and a rolling ladder give the dining room the feel of a decades-old library.
accommodate shallow shelves like a refrigerator’s; and paneled facings that hide a 36-inch Sub-Zero fridge and a 24-inch Sub-Zero freezer. Still, the kitchen manages to feel airy and open. The reason? “Nearly 11-foot-high ceilings and very large windows,” Mason said. Upstairs, a conveniently situated laundry room has been wallpapered with the Morris & Co. pattern Bellflowers and painted Farrow & Ball’s Light Blue. In addition to 11 linear feet of storage—hello, jumbo-sized jugs of detergent—the $25,000 of millwork included a shelf with custom-size baskets to hide unmentionables, wooden pegs on which to hang clothes to dry and three Steele Canvas hampers (one for each boy’s laundry). In the primary bedroom, Mason wrapped three of the four walls in
script, plain room,” Mason said. Painted in a serene shade—Farrow & Ball’s Joa’s White—the wardrobes are a neutral backdrop for a room dominated by the simple, architectural lines of a custom fourposter bed built in Pennsylvania. Mason’s clients helped brainstorm other ways to camouflage all that storage. When they asked for a coffee station in the kitchen, they suggested disguising it as an old-fashioned pantry behind glass doors. “Patrick drinks tea, Dava drinks coffee, and we planned where every item would go,” Mason said. In fact, said Mason, “Dava took my drawings and labeled every drawer and shelf on them with where she wanted everything to go, including a label where she wanted the dishes and dish towels, and even the tea bags.”
KIRSTEN FRANCIS; STYLING BY GABRIELLE LANGDON (3); MIGGY MASON (PANTRY INTERIOR)
No one would ever guess that lurking behind the paneled cabinet doors are shelves stacked with facial tissue, aluminum foil and flavored water.