pottery barn where i liveamanda & jeffrey marcus we've been living in san anselmo for about seven years, and our kids were at a point where we needed a little more space, we were driving in the hills and we found this house, and we put a note in the mailbox. immediately we were drawn to it, it reminded us of an east coast type of house, eight or nine months later, we got a call and the said, "we saved your note, "and um, we're gonna move."
it had that old-fashioned look, we love the wrap-around porch, it had a great history. the house was built in 1917 and really did not have a lot done to it. this would have been considered a california craftsman style house. when we did the remodel, one of our concerns was to maintain the integrity of the architecture, we just really felt that if we kept the architecture then we could do anything with the interior as far as style and our furnishings. i have to say the kitchen is my favorite room in the house, it's a gathering place for the family, and friends when they come over, and because i have such a large kitchen and a big island, we all gather around the island. it has a lot of light,
we have views of the outdoors all over the kitchen, we tried to do the original cabinetry that would have been in the kitchen, and how they would have done the hardware back then, and the kind of services that they would use on the counters, the basic look of the house is kind of a empty canvas, all the color that we have has been very neutral and i think that it's a way that, you know, it makes everything work. we like to surround ourselves with things that are beautiful, beautiful to us, things that we find that have an interesting shape or
form or something that's just, it could be really quirky and weird, but it just appeals to us. i think that pottery barn really appeals to a lot of people and i think they appeal to, uh, our style as well which is very eclectic, they have a lot of interesting shapes and forms, we go to flea markets wherever we are, if we're in europe or when we were in china we went to the flea market there, in mexico city we go to the flea market, it's a little bit of everything, along our journey together. does everything have to be mid-century furniture? no.
i mean, the fun is to really mix all that up. i used to think, oh, i don't have a style, everything you know, needs to be a certain way, and then i realized that if you just stick with what you like, uh, that eclectic quality in a home, is actually more interesting because you really look at each piece individually, instead of everything blending and melding into one unified style. i kind of get bored with everything always being exactly in the same place, so i'm always moving things around, sometimes things go up to one of the bedrooms,
or they come down to the living room, i kind of like to change it up. we really enjoy doing that and i think it adds a lot of color and fun. it's kind of who we are. please visit www.potterybarn.com for more ideas and inspiration.