TABLE TALK
DESIGN by STYLED BY STORMS
PHOTOGRAPHY by AIMEE RYAN TEXT by NAYDA RONDON
In a confident designer’s hands, features of a South Orange dining room that could have been problems become pluses instead.
C Sarah Storms of Maplewood-based Styled by Storms was aiming to conjure for the dining room of her clients’ home in South Orange.
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ALM, CONTEMPORARY, COMFORTABLE. THAT’S THE ATMOSPHERE
Result: three Cs out of three. “My clients wanted a beautiful dining room full of color and comfort for family dinners and larger holiday gatherings,” says Storms, adding that as repeat clients, they felt comfortable letting her take the lead. “The trust has already been established; it allows you to jump right in and propose ideas that may be a little out of the ordinary.” Employing her trademark color and pattern mixing, Storms set about connecting the dining room—centrally located within the 1950 center-hall colonial—to the rest of the main floor, where blue is the ruling color of choice. Storms leaned into the homeowners’ attraction to coastal blues and whites by incorporating those colors into the space, starting with the metallic navy blue grass cloth from York Wallcoverings, which she paired with the original-to-the home millwork newly painted in Benjamin Moore White Heron. Respecting the home’s traditional bones—dentil crown molding, chair railing, fluted casing trim, 6-inch baseboards—Storms’s design played off and enhanced these elements, elevating the style to another level of casual chic. She incorporated large-scale art, such as a 36-inch-by-48-inch framed Ka’iuliani print by Hayley Mitchell, to make a big design statement. Storms also felt strongly about the bold choice of the Bernhardt sideboard, which is artistically carved and overlaid with German silver. “It could have made some people uncomfortable, but my clients wanted to go for it,” she says. Given the intentionally minimalist aesthetics, it was essential that “There is something fresh and elevated, but still comfortable, about this room,” says designer Sarah Storms of the dining space she created for the owners of a South Orange center-hall colonial. Because it involved no construction, the project, completed in fall 2022, took only four months to finish.
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10/30/23 4:15 PM