New York Designer Lisa Panitz Makes Over a Georgian Home in New Albany

The home’s sunroom redesign features inspirational greens and other comfortable furnishings. Panitz likes the blank canvas that her home’s white walls offer.

For New Albany inside designer Lisa Panitz, work—like life—is ever-evolving.

“With design and style, points have constantly been about alter,” she states. But that is also the situation for existence in today’s earth. “Everything these times is consistently going,” Panitz continues. “If you can discover a way to be relaxed with alter, that is 50 {a57a8b399caa4911091be19c47013a92763fdea5dcb0fe03ef6810df8f2f239d} the struggle of lifetime.”

Two a long time in the past, Panitz and her spouse and children reframed their life in sizeable manner, going to Central Ohio from New York, the place they had lived in Westchester County and Manhattan’s Higher West Facet for nearly 30 many years.

They purchased their New Albany residence through the early times of COVID, using only FaceTime to tour the home. In the course of the 90-moment inspection that followed their offer, Panitz remaining the mechanicals to her spouse, David, although she, armed with a tape evaluate and her designer’s eye, calculated each house in the property.

“I did not get a one piece of furniture,” she suggests. “Everything we had just seemed to match.” In addition to the household furniture, the transfer concerned 460 packing containers and 20 to 30 crates that Panitz managed to unpack in days. “Everything just took place organically,” she remembers.

The idea of a all-natural progression appeals to her style and design aesthetic. “With design, I enjoy the plan of making use of classics as your foundations but allowing for factors close to you to evolve, based on wherever you are living and what is inspiring you at the time,” Panitz describes. In her residence, for illustration, distinct rooms are utilised extra at diverse instances of the yr. “I think a home should evolve by time,” she adds.

When she and her loved ones moved into the 6,350-square-foot Georgian brick house in New Albany, Panitz appreciated its excellent bones, and she favored its thoroughly clean canvas of white walls, darkish hardwood flooring and loads of pure mild. The just one exception to the dark flooring was in the extensive sunroom with its shiny, honey-colored floors reminiscent of gymnasiums. Just after staining all those to match the relaxation of the dwelling, Panitz started layering the room with a significant sisal rug, cozy white, slipcovered seating and botanical influences, these types of as toss pillows that includes fern motifs, potted orchids (some fake) and a pair of George Smith velvet ottomans in moss inexperienced, a person of her favorite shades.

The sunroom has beadboard and brick partitions painted white, which sets off distinctive items these kinds of as white lacquered home furnishings and just one-of-a-variety, unmatching, substantial wood console tables. Vintage blue and white porcelain vessels that she acquired from a seller in New York give accents.

“The blue and white is timeless, it is forever. I try to pull that in with all my shoppers,” Panitz suggests.

The blue-and-white topic repeats in the living space the place upholstered household furniture in three distinct designs blends with combine-and-match lamps and a zebra rug layered around sisal. More porcelain parts line cabinets on possibly side of the hearth and maintain extra orchids. “We’re in this room most of the winter,” Panitz suggests.

In hotter months, the family’s two Airedale terriers, Oliver and Katie, and a rescue border collie combine named Ash can be found lounging on a patio at the facet entry or just inside the door, in an spot that prospects to the kitchen area. Pet dog beds and rugs encompass a sleek glass-and-nickel Ralph Lauren desk that Panitz introduced with her. “I like how the table sort of disappears in the house and is light-weight,” she claims.

When it will come to animals and little ones, Panitz’s comfortable angle is mirrored in her choices. The white slipcovers and the Cambria kitchen countertops make feeling. “I just bleach them,” she says of the slipcovers’ cleaning regimen. She remembers earlier decades, when she fretted around spills, and knicks that marred the marble counters in her earlier dwelling. Now she tells her purchasers: “Don’t be that mother.’’

The New Albany kitchen area is all white, with tiles from counter to ceiling. “I have a really like for small areas, and the kitchen area experienced that monotone, small glimpse that felt suitable to me when we saw the household,” she states. “We shell out a lot of time in the kitchen cooking, entertaining and just hanging out, and the clean up, easy space is the perfect tranquil ecosystem. I come across I function greater in a cleanse, uncomplicated kitchen.”

When it comes to livability, lights is one more key ingredient for Panitz. She replaced all fixtures in the property and added smooth delicate illumination with picture lights, wall sconces and 15-watt incandescent bulbs. “I definitely like [the] layering of light-weight, primarily at night time. I believe lighting is 1 of the most important factors of a household and of style and design,” she suggests. “It’s a position to make a assertion or to end a house with a extra easy assertion.”

One of the far more extraordinary fixtures is a large, crystal chandelier that Panitz introduced with her from New York. It hangs over a mahogany pedestal eating desk, which her grandparents acquired as a marriage ceremony present. She fondly recalls expending Friday night around—and under—the table when her grandparents hosted weekly relatives dinners. “I used my childhood beneath the tablecloth,” she states.

Panitz goes to New York several times a thirty day period to hold recent with the most up-to-date layout developments and goods. She’s also grateful for the proficient artisans and craftspeople she has discovered in Central Ohio. Many of her jobs involve renovations, so considering the fact that arriving in the location she has prioritized developing interactions with top-notch common contractors. “That was my most significant be concerned about shifting right here,” she says.

Her daughters experienced problems of their personal about leaving close friends and their family members household. “There were being a lot of tears,” she recalls, but distress degrees lowered with time. Daughter Josephine, who is a member of Ohio State University’s swim crew, even went to open residences on her parents’ behalf when they could not be there in individual. “The capacity to embrace change and even delight in it is anything we really wanted our children to learn,” claims Panitz. “I want them to respect the fluidity of lifetime.”

Like other interior designers, Panitz experienced to embrace modify in her operate throughout COVID. She remembers a person of her first New Albany initiatives, which she did with no leaving her home. “It turned out to be one particular of my finest presentations,” she suggests.

Her future project at property is to fully overhaul the outdoor room and vogue it right after her past property, a 4,000-sq.-foot, typical New England white shingle property that initially was the caretaker cottage to a large Westchester estate. “It experienced a stunning pool place and several perennial gardens,” states Panitz, who appears to be like forward to capturing the similar truly feel in New Albany. “I’m heading to do it my way.”

This story is from the December 2022 situation of Columbus Every month.

Tags: Albany, Designer, Georgian, home, Lisa, Panitz, York