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D Home | Arcady
DATE
March-April 2021
LOCATION
USA
Interior Designer Joshua Rice Filled This Highland Park Home with One-Of-A-Kind Pieces
Written by Rhonda Reinhart
The way Joshua Rice sees it, an empty room offers a chance to create something spectacular. So why would you fill it with predictable pieces? “I want to give everybody the most unique interior that I can,” says the designer.
“I don’t want someone to come into one of my projects and go, ‘Oh, I have that same sofa.’ That’s something I’m always trying to avoid.” To be sure his interiors are unexpected, Rice seeks out rare vintage furnishings and new works by up-and-coming artisans. And when he can’t find exactly what he’s looking for, well, he’ll design it himself.
For a recent project in Highland Park, a transitional-style spec house that Rice describes as lacking “a distinct architectural character,” he was on a mission to make every space as interesting as possible. Plus, the home needed a personality adjustment. “Our tastes run more modern,” says the homeowner, who shares the house with her husband and two young kids. And some of the home’s formal features—like the grand cast stone staircase in the foyer—leaned more traditional than they would have liked.
“We had a vision that if we had a more modern interior, we could use the good bones and pretty clean lines of the house and make it look more to our aesthetic,” she says. To do that, the couple needed the right interior designer, and after perusing Rice’s portfolio, they knew they’d found their ideal design match. “We felt like his aesthetic was very clean and very modern, but it was timeless. And we felt like he had enough of an edge in his aesthetic that it could work well to counterbalance the more traditional elements of the house.”
To take some of the formality out of the interiors but still keep them sophisticated, Rice changed out all of the traditional-style light fixtures, streamlined one of the fireplaces, and helped the homeowners expand their collection of contemporary artwork. He also populated the home with what he calls “an obscurely curated group of designs.” In the living room, a custom metal coffee table by Brooklyn-based Douglas Fanning shares space with two midcentury lounge chairs by legendary Danish designer Ib Kofod-Larsen that Rice sourced through a gallery in the Netherlands. And in the dining room, an attention-grabbing brass-and-alabaster chandelier that Rice designed himself illuminates a walnut-and-bronze table built by Canadian craftsman Jeff Martin. “That’s the first table of that series ever made,” Rice says. “Now it’s a major part of his line, but this is the first.”
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Photography: Nathan Schroder
