Inside a Darien Home Layered in Shades of Blue

The compact size of the sitting room compelled designer Prudence Bailey to place a quartet of armchairs around an airy coffee table from Mr. Brown London.

Lucite chairs add flair and friction to the mix of modern and traditional elements in the dining room. A subtle animal theme is carried through from the chair upholstery to the horse-head sculpture sourced from Eleish Van Breems Home to the hair-on-hide rug.

A Julie Neill chandelier from Visual Comfort cascades from the entry ceiling. White coral, a nod to the nearby coastline, frames the Made Goods mirror.

In the modern kitchen, the nailhead design on the cornice above the sink echoes the sheen of the metal range hood.

A lacquered Arteriors desk, black Worlds Away coffee table, and an ebony ceiling add masculinity to this office; a blue wool sofa from Hallman Furniture helps ease the transition between the dark flourishes and the light walls.

A high-gloss ceiling enhances the family room’s sense of space, as do the iron-and-glass panels framing the entry to the adjoining eat-in kitchen.

If you want to understand interior designer Prudence Bailey’s particular genius, look up. The sky was the limit when a California couple commissioned Bailey to devise a soothing design to warm up a Darien spec house with a blend of traditional and modern elements. Working with the relocating couple via Zoom, Bailey went room by room to create a calming sanctuary dressed in shades of blue, a theme that carried through from furnishings and draperies to wallpaper on the walls and ceilings—the latter a hallmark of Bailey’s unique aesthetic.

The design touched nearly every space in the house and incorporated furniture hand selected and custom made by Bailey; about the only things the clients moved to the new house were a midcentury bar cart and an original Dalí painting that hangs in the office.

An architecturally interesting mix of colonial and Georgian styles, the house lent itself to the kind of semiformal elements that the clients desired, with ornate chandeliers and vintage sideboards complemented by tall, narrow windows and coffered ceilings.

But Bailey kept things light—both in palette and style—by pairing disparate elements like Lucite chairs and a heavy wood dining room table, one of the few darker pieces in the home. Other hints of modernity sometimes show up in unusual places, such as the wire-and-rice-paper horse-head wall sculpture and hair-on-hide rug that enliven the dining room. “I love that there’s some of that friction in the room,” says Bailey. “This was a young couple who wanted it to feel classic but with a little edge.”

The blues and whites favored by the homeowners fit perfectly with Bailey’s penchant for adding color to ceilings: “I like using blue on the ceiling because it’s reminiscent of the sky,” she says. But other ceiling colors also make appearances to considerable effect. In the husband’s office, for example, the designer boldly chose a black ceiling to enhance the room’s masculine feel, and in the family room a high-gloss green-tinted ceiling reflects both the colors of the furniture and the greenery outside a wall of windows and French doors. A perfectly placed curved sofa permits both window gazing and comfortable conversation over a hexagon-shaped Highland House ottoman that doubles as a small table for drinks and snacks.

Bailey says the long-distance relationship with the clients, who never saw the house in person until the project was complete, gave her an unusual degree of artistic freedom. The end result is a dreamy yet modern space designed to make a West Coast family feel right at home in New England.

Project Team
Interior design: Prudence Home & Design