Howard started by defining the areas through seating and rugs, keeping the room from seeming overwhelming. To make the room feel (and look) better, he took out the flat ceiling. Now the ceiling line follows the roofline, going from 8 feet to 12 feet high. The ceiling also got a new look through tongue-and-groove paneling and beams. “If you have a larger room, it helps to have high ceilings,” Howard says. “The ceiling details add a lot of architectural interest in a room that really lacked that.”The really bright idea is the fireplace treatment. Before, it was a flat surface composed of the weathered brick that was everyone’s favorite back in the late 1970s, when John Travolta was dancing across movie screens in Saturday Night Fever. For many people, taking it out would be a given. Howard had a different view.“I understand the impulse to tear it out,” he says. “But I wanted to keep some of the character of the old house.” He notes that taking out the brick would have been hard on the bottom line and construction logistics.Instead, he hired a decorative painter to paint the bricks. His inspiration was images of encaustic tile. “I didn’t want it to appear shiny and new, so I had the painter whitewash the pattern to weather it a bit,” he says. When asked about the difficulty of painting a pattern on brick, he says that “a lot of tape was involved.”
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