Carly Lee just didn't have time to get her home's interior design finished, so she hired Ashley Goforth of Ashley Goforth Design to help her tweak some rooms, refresh others and completely makeover a few.
Kerry Kirk
Carly Lee’s C. Style blog is full of sass, with photos of her in a new favorite dress (a black tank from Splendid), demonstrating how to style a midi skirt with sneakers (roll up the waist until you get the right length) and confessing some embarrassing traits (she thought the “wind-chill factor” was really the “windshield factor”).
In her 7-year-old blog, she takes a practical and lighthearted approach to life and style, and she does the same at home with Jon Lee, her husband of 15 years, sons 10-year-old David and 8-year-old Sloan, and Honey, their goldendoodle.
The couple moved from a home near the Texas Medical Center to a 1940s home in Bunker Hill Village in 2013, and Carly worked to translate her fashionable sense of style into its décor. By then, Carly had already launched her blog, when she was going a little stir crazy as a stay-home mom and friends kept asking her for fashion advice.
She tried layering rugs but was unsure of sizing, and black paint for her kitchen cabinets turned out to be more of a dark blue. She placed furniture in various rooms, but they never felt quite right. She’d already left her pharmaceutical sales job when she had kids, but was busy raising her two sons and navigating her blog and personal styling jobs — she didn’t have time or the skill set to tackle an entire home.
Finally, Jon simply said, “let’s get some help.”
Carly turned to a church friend, Ashley Goforth of Ashley Goforth Design, and the two women spent about a year changing every room in the house, sometimes merely rearranging furniture, other times adding bold paint colors or wallpaper and new furnishings.
“Ashley gave me the confidence to do what I wanted to do. If I wanted to do green and be bold, she gave me the confidence that I could do that,” Carly said. “I knew what I wanted, I just didn’t know if it would look good, and I was extremely afraid of making an expensive mistake.”
The Lees had already painted the home’s interior Sherwin-Williams Snowbound, “borrowing” the color from a neighbor/friend who used Goforth as her interior designer. After learning just how much the Lees wanted to do, Goforth started by sizing up what they had.
“I’m practical to a fault. I want to work with what people have,” Goforth said. “It’s my nature, and it’s good for the environment and good for the world. Carly had furniture with good bones. If it’s good quality, of course I’m going to try to work with it.”
Immediately inside the front door, the formerly white-walled entry has been transformed with apple-green grasscloth wallpaper and a black-and-white geometric carpet runner on the stairs.
Carly said that her family rarely used the living room before Goforth worked her magic. When Carly decorated, she put a large wood console against a back wall and a dark-blue sectional sofa in the middle of the room with a dark leather coffee table and a pair of brown houndstooth chairs.
Goforth removed the console and pushed the sofa back. An acrylic and brass coffee table lightens up the room and helps organize stacks of colorful books. The high-back chairs were reupholstered in blue-and-white-stripe fabric, and another pair of brown leather chairs that had been in the master bedroom was added to the mix, all on a large sisal rug that nearly filled the room and a much smaller pink rug in front of the sofa. The rug, coffee table and decorative pillows were the only new purchases.
“Ashley made (the living room) so much more usable. All of a sudden we started using it all the time. When we have friends over, we sit in here,” Carly said. “She put a runner on the stairs, and all of a sudden my boys and I aren’t afraid to go up and down. I thoroughly appreciate that she allows the room to be used.”
The dining room on the other side of the foyer got a more dramatic transformation, from a plain room to a black, white and green homage to Ralph Lauren, whose style Carly admires.
Goforth used black-and-white-plaid fabric on the walls, paired with wainscot paneling and crown molding painted black. The chairs that once were in this room were shifted to the breakfast nook, and new chairs, white upholstered ones on the side with emerald-green skirted end chairs, took their place. The too-small, shabby-chic chandelier was replaced with a larger, more contemporary fixture with spiky brass rods.
“It was the first purchase my husband and I made when we became adults and lived in a house,” Carly said. “We got this shabby-chic chandelier, and it was so cool. And then it wasn’t.”
Another strong redo: the small powder bathroom. Goforth used her favorite Benjamin Moore Hale Navy on the walls, trim and ceiling, then added new sconces, a mirror and a new stone sink on a brass base. The space is filled with an assortment of art, including an etching that Jon made when he was a kid.
The same dark-blue paint appears in the master bedroom on walls, trim and plantation shutters; the Lees also painted the cabinets dark blue and installed bold blue-and-white wallpaper in their bathroom. They bought a new bed, bedding, chaise and lamps, as well as added a built-in wardrobe in the bedroom to supplement the closet. A LeRoy Neiman painting of the 18th hole at the Pebble Beach golf course, a piece Jon used to keep at work, adds pop.
The Lees hope to someday expand the back of the house to enlarge the master suite and reconfigure the bathroom and closet space. For now, though, they’re enjoying using more of the rooms in their revamped home.
The dining room is where they play lively games of Monopoly as a family or host friends for dinner. The boys use the sunny breakfast room to do homework after school and have friends over to their pool and to play football in the backyard.
That’s where they’re putting in a pergola, and Carly plans to ask Goforth about placing furniture there, too.
“As a visual person and creative person, I’m affected by my space,” Carly said. “I love to sit in all of the rooms in my house.”
diane.cowen@chron.com
