“You are going to die when you see this room,” says Lauren Midlam, spinning her laptop around to show off a before picture that would make any potential homebuyer understandably faint of heart. It’s hard to reconcile the lime-green ceiling and fabric-covered walls—pleated, floral and bright orange—with the simple, floor-length sheer drapes and subdued color scheme in the room today.
Harder still is imagining the leap of faith it would take to buy the house in the before photo. Lauren, a rising star of the local fashion scene (and recipient of Lehigh Valley Style’s Fashion & Beauty Award last year), had both the well-honed aesthetic and the vision to look beyond what she calls a bit of “overdesigning.” “Just taking the wallpaper down and painting helped a lot,” she says.
But more than that, she had—and still has—a deep, true appreciation for style, even one that’s not particularly her own. “The woman we bought the house from had a very classic style,” Lauren says. “It’s almost like a Regency, Art Deco kind of feel, but also very fresh. Everything that woman did,” she says, unmistakable admiration in her voice, “she did right for the time.”
Something Old, Something New
Not every prospective buyer saw it that way. The Bethlehem home sat vacant for so long that Lauren and her husband, Ray, passed up their first chance to view it. “It was on the market for a while, so we figured something was wrong with it,” she says. But when they finally did, “It grabbed us when we walked in the door.”
The house hit on just about everything from their wish list: loads of natural light; home offices for both Lauren, who’d recently launched her retail and wholesale fashion line, LM StyleBar, and her husband, a Planning and Business Developer at St. Luke’s University Health Network; and that distinctive old-home character that comes from pre-war built-ins and period detailing. In the face of all that, what was a little floor-to-ceiling flowered wallpaper and folksy wall murals?
The result: a clean look and a charming homage.
Although Lauren set about stripping the paper from the living room almost immediately (“To make the space look bigger,” she says), one of the home’s now-defining characteristics is the seamless way elements of the previous décor wend their way into the updated rooms. These remnants can be as small as the Art Deco light fixture in Lauren’s home office, or as large as the hand-painted geometric-patterned wall in the stairwell. What they have in common is the organic feel of not having been pre-planned or designed around; if something caught Lauren’s eye or seemed to fit into her vision for the room, she kept it.
In one wallpaper-laden guest bedroom, for instance, she stripped the closet doors and, showing uncommon restraint, just the top few feet of paper around the room, then added a chair rail to set off the delicate floral pattern below. The result: a clean look and a charming homage.
The majority of these tributes to the previous homeowner’s sometimes quirky aesthetic are small and painted, like tattoos, and their content is just as widely varied. On the wall of the small alcove between dining room and kitchen flits a tiny butterfly, the only remnant of the garden scene once painted there, which Lauren kept because, she says, butterflies are supposed to be
signs of good luck. Above the kitchen’s eat-in nook, the scrolling words “Eat = Drink = Be Merry” float on a valance, evidence of the previous owner’s humor, and marching down the back stairway wall is an elaborate hot air balloon scene that Lauren refers to as “a folk art mural thing.” “It’s grown on me,” she says.
Style Maven
Certainly, Lauren’s decision to embrace all these design odds and ends doesn’t stem from her own sense of style, which, at least when it comes to fashion, runs toward classic with a modern edge. At home, she favors contemporary stylings and geometric patterns, like the black and cream rug in her office or the white and silver fabric she liked so much, she used it for both the living room’s airy, floor-length drapes and to reupholster a pair of antique chairs in the foyer that she got at auction (she painted their frames silver).
Lauren credits some of her home design sensibility to a good role model: “My mother was into changing the décor every season, which is a very fashion-driven mindset,” she says. “It helps the house feel new.” Although she’s not quite as meticulous about it as her mother had been, during the summer months, she tends to swap in blues, purples, softer silver-grays, and pieces of specimen coral she and her husband have collected on various trips. She reserves rich browns, grays, silvers and deep greens for cooler weather.
“If you stay in the same color family, you can do a lot more.”
Lauren’s fashion background has also given her a strong foundation for playing with color and pattern. Her usual approach is to pick a few of each and stick with them. “If you have a patterned rug and pillows, then don’t go for patterned curtains because that’s too over-the-top,” she says. And, she adds, pointing to her home office as an example, “If you stay in the same color family, you can do a lot more.” The room, with its palette of black and cream geometrics, is balanced by dramatic red walls, which warm up the space. Lauren says she finds the color “soothing;” it’s a stark contrast to the adjacent workspace, a deliberately blank canvas featuring a white table in a white room, to minimize distractions when she’s working on a new clothing design.
Lauren has only been selling her designs under her own label for the past two years, but does a thriving wholesale and retail business with stores including Sage in the Saucon Valley Promenade and Bethlehem’s Popmart. Squint at the framed diploma above the couch in her office, and you may understand why: the Lehigh grad was originally a business major. After an eye-opening internship at a financial firm during her junior year, she decided she needed something “a little more fun” and began attending the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles. She worked in the industry for more than a decade, learning everything she could about the business before launching her LM StyleBar collection two years ago. “I have a strong opinion of what I like,” she says, “And knowing where to look to get what I like makes it easier.”
Eclectic At Least
In a few cases, Lauren didn’t have to look very far. In her decorating exuberance, the previous owner sometimes concealed original features, including wallpapering over an entire window (remember the orange upholstered room?) and the tub in what is now the master bath, which had been covered with a stone slab and used as a seat. When they opened the space up by co-opting a former bedroom closet and added a glass-enclosed stall shower and double sink, Lauren had the tub uncovered and trimmed in the same gray marble. She also designed the custom mosaic pattern for the tile floor in a palette of gray, white and black.
Storage space was added back to the bedroom via a series of custom closets with a raised geometric design that lend the space a very Art Deco feel. Lauren chose a palette of navy, crisp white and chrome to go with the room’s backdrop of cream-colored faux-brick wallpaper. “The mood is relaxing. Whites make it bright and clean, but the blues warm it up,” she says. A pair of Philippe Starck-designed Louis Ghost chairs add modern flair at the end of the bed.
The home is largely furnished with pieces Lauren and Ray collected over the years, many family heirlooms like the mirror in the foyer, which belonged to a great-aunt of Lauren’s and dates to the 1800s, or a set of antique wooden chairs passed down from her grandmother that she split between a guest room and an upstairs bath. The prize jewels, though, are two framed prints signed by Jacqueline Kennedy. “My husband’s father worked for the White House in the 1950s and ’60s, and back then employees got a larger print of the Christmas card that was given to the staff every year,” Lauren explains. White House carpenters even built the frames they are mounted and displayed in.
“Whites make it bright and clean, but the blues warm it up.”
The only missed opportunity with the house, Lauren feels, stems from a piece of history closer to home. She and her husband love the fact that they are only the third owners of the 1927 dwelling, so they were ecstatic when, during their initial walk-through, they spotted documents related to its history. Lauren holds her hands about two or three feet apart and recalls, “It was a stack this high of papers, blueprints and every single receipt from the last 100 years. We took a brief look at them and right on top was the original deed for the land in the amount of $4,000.”
But at the closing, the papers were gone. The owners said they gave them away to Frank Childs, the son of the architect who had originally designed the house. Undeterred, Lauren tracked him down and convinced Childs to pay a visit to the house his father had built. He did, and spent a lovely, sentimental afternoon recounting stories of playing there as a boy while the house was under construction, and recalling details about the German carpenters his father brought in to craft the stair bannisters. But he hadn’t seen the paperwork Lauren was looking for.
Not one to give up easily, Lauren has called every local museum she can think of, to no avail. She’s still hoping that someday, the paperwork will turn up so she can make a copy. But even without the original deed or other documents, her light touch with remodeling has acted as a kind of personal preservation project, ensuring that a piece or two of the house’s history will always live on.
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