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Where I Live John and Patty Dilks
Well I think when we built the house
one of the first things we told the architect
Vladimir Ossipoff, we told him, "Val,
we'd like you to build us a house that looks like it's been here
forty or fifty years the day we move in."
We wanted that old style Hawaiian house, very open,
All the rooms open on to one another,
and so when we're entertaining in this house
the walls hide the doors, the doors and windows all disappear into the wall
so it just becomes
one huge Lanai-like house.
Redwood board construction,
died concrete floors
lofty, Hawaiian style tikki roof
and he pulled it off and
gave us exactly what we wanted.
In doing that
we were very cognisant
of how we wanted to live decorating-wise,
furniture-wise, and so we tried to
enhance the house
with period furniture,
old kalua antiques,
and artifacts from Hawaii
that are all period to the look of
this house,
which is
his territorial period.
which dates back to the twenties and thirties.
When we built this house, of course,
we had no money for furniture so
it didn't have a lot of furnishings in it
so it did grow slowly,
and I think when that's the case i think you're more selective about what you're choosing and I
think it makes
everything more interesting, if it's not all from the same period, we didn't go out and just instantly make a room, create a room.
It takes years to evolve a house because you have to wait to find the right thing
and that's the fun of it is the hunt and
the chase finding these right pieces.
A friend of ours
has a saying that he calls it layering, and
I think that's such a good word,
he says that you know when you're building a room
you're just sort of layering things on top of each other to get the look that you want,
without having any particular thing dominate the whole room.
I think because I keep it very simple on the patterns,
it allows me to do other
wilder things like
you know blue and white lot of different blue and white porcelain,
or lots of bright colored paintings,
and that's what we attempt to do is try to
in harmony with the house and the furniture
and the paintings to
make it all work together.
It's fun for me to see what Pottery Barn's going to do i feel like I'm getting a preview of
what the colors are going to be for next year. I'm already picking out pieces I want.
Their pieces are a little more contemporary than what we have
so I enjoy seeing that
juxtaposition between the oldness of the house and the newness of the pieces,
and I think the juxtaposition
works because
the design works
no matter where it is,
I like to intersperse pieces, I like to have some pieces that are really new and some pieces that are really old in the same room.
I don't feel like like I have to stick to one period or one scheme, and I think it makes
everything more interesting if it's not all
from the same period.
As we hit retirement age,
and retirement lasts so much longer
we're not worried about summer just being
June through September,
summer becomes more of a mood and a spirit
and certainly in hawaii
you can feel like summer here
twelve months of the year
Pottery barn