Tim Simon can appreciate the beauty and grandeur of a historic home, but he doesn’t want to live in one. The reason? “Anything I try to fix, I make worse,” he says, laughing. Although Westfield is full of beautiful older houses, “I knew these gorgeous homes would need some attention, and even minor repairs would be disastrous,” he says. So when it came time to move to Westfield from Philadelphia for work, he and his wife Erika decided to build something new. “That way we wouldn’t have to make adjusts and do the upkeep,” he explains.
The Simons hired Kingsley Belcher Knauss of KBK Interior Design in Westfield to design the home, and she worked closely with the builder to customize and enhance the four-bedroom, four-bathroom home’s initial plans. “We did everything from helping them pick siding to designing decorative built-ins,” says Knauss. The Simons had moved frequently over the years for work and had always bought “disposable” furniture that they wouldn’t mind leaving behind. But this time they planned to stay, so Knauss was charged with buying all new furnishings to make the house feel like a home. “I said ‘clean,’ but otherwise, I gave her free rein,” says Simon. “She had carte blanche, from the doorknobs to the drapes.”
Knauss selected a color palette of smoky blues, ivories and black, and then built upon those neutrals with textures and patterns such as plaids and geometric prints. And because the homeowners were due to move in just before Christmas, Knauss decorated the home for the holiday, using black-and-red buffalo plaid to play off the black already prominent in the home’s design. “The more you repeat the color scheme within spaces, the less chaotic and cluttered it looks, especially in tight spaces,” says Knauss. Black stockings hang from white nutcrackers on the fireplace mantel, while simple wooden snowflakes decorating the family room windows are a nod to a more handcrafted style and don’t block the view or the light.
“I asked Kingsley to push me out of my comfort zone, and it all came together perfectly,” says Simon. “Every house I’ve lived in looked like a hotel room—very minimalist. In this house, she filled all the spaces, but it doesn’t look cluttered. It still looks clean, and that’s what I love about it.”
Text by Marisa Sandora Carr
Design by Kingsley Belcher Knauss
Photography by Wing Wong