Calm and Collected
Then designer Betsy Deiseroth walked into her Fox Chapel home 24 years ago, she faced a daunting challenge. Though situated on a quiet road surrounded by a leafy lot, the house itself cried out for renovation. An 1870s cottage married to a 1950s ranch, it was charmless at best.
“I walked in, saw the living room and said, ‘We’ll take it,’” laughs Deiseroth.
A pair of early 19th century oval portraits flank the antique mantel in the dining room. An antique Baccarat crystal chandelier from Mark Evers Antiques hangs above the leather chairs, with a Ralph Lauren fabric on the backs. The table skirt is in Lee Jofa fabric. Faux Bois painting on walls and trim by Jim Harris.
And so began a five-year project that initially centered around the living room, a soaring space with a beamed shiplap ceiling. Deiseroth re-oriented the house, turning the former kitchen into the primary bedroom and the former dining room into a dressing room. The loft that once overlooked the living room was replaced by a tall tray ceiling in the new entry hall. French doors there, and three more sets in the living room, open onto a stone terrace and the gardens that were non-existent but are now mature.
Then came the addition — a substantial new wing designed to provide bedrooms upstairs and the heart of the home downstairs. Husband Lee is the owner of The Fluted Mushroom Catering Company and an accomplished cook, and much of the family’s life revolves around good food and entertaining. The kitchen is his domain, but instead of a large space designed for show, he wanted a compact, efficient room. A professional Garland range and a cook’s sink where foods can be steamed or boiled are the focal point, along with an island made from a two-inch-thick slab of white marble generous enough to seat six.
Good design is like good bones. It forms the foundation of something lasting and transcends the passage of time. And that’s very much the case with the Deiseroth home. Very little has changed since they first moved in — the wallpaper and fabrics have been updated, certainly. “But I didn’t rearrange the furniture because it works so well as it is,” she says.
One major improvement made six years ago has turned out to be lifestyle-changing. A large, screened porch off the kitchen with stone floors and a fireplace was converted into what the family calls “the big room.”
“We needed a new TV and we wanted to put it above the mantel and I thought if it’s going to be attached up there, we better close the porch in. We replaced the screens with windows, added trim, covered the tray ceiling with grass cloth and designed the built-in. All of the books out here are my design books — collecting them is an obsession of mine!”
The bookcases fabricated by XYZ Custom are a delight for the eye, filled with not only a reference library of design tomes but also some of the Deiseroth’s blue and white porcelain collection. A gold gilt mirror at the center reflects the trees outside, bringing the gardens that surround the room inside.
“We live in there now,” says Deiseroth. “It’s sadly made our living room a little obsolete. We entertain there, watch TV there and I do my work out there. It’s really comfortable.”
Deiseroth has been designing for 20 years, 16 of them with Janet Hellberg as her partner in Wellie Interiors. When Hellberg began spending more time away from Pittsburgh, Deiseroth launched EMD Design. She’s highly sought-after, and it is a lucky client who lands her, in part because she works alone and is completely hands-on. “I mainly work with people I know and like,” she says. “I don’t advertise and I have no social media presence. My business is purely word of mouth.”
As evidenced in her own home, Deiseroth is known for creating rich, traditional interiors layered with color, texture and character. Her fondness for the comfort and ease of English interiors is translated into the practicality of a table for a drink by a chair, with a lamp to read a good book nearby. Blue and white ticking stripe takes the formality out of the living room and encourages use.
“I like color. What’s important to me is that the rooms flow and are in the same tone. I don’t like rooms that are a vibrantly different color next to each other. That’s what makes a house calm, when the colors flow.”
For example, the wallpaper in the kitchen has a blue-green background but contains the same brown as the burlap in the hall. The dining room walls have a faux bois finish but in the same color as the kitchen cabinets. And the green fabrics in the front hall blend into the green in the living room and are carried into the bedroom.
Throughout the home there is the warmth of antiques and a lifetime of collecting. Between them the couple enjoy Chinese export paintings of ships, tortoise tea caddies, portraiture, Chinese porcelains, white Staffordshire, old silver, antique prints and the books, of course, which are even piled by the bed for late-night reading.
Though designing came naturally to Deiseroth (“I know what I like!”), she gives all the credit for her training to her mentor, the late designer Peggy Casey, with inspiration from her mother.
“I would see all the magazines my mother would get and I wanted to have a house like I saw in the magazines. There weren’t any stores in Pittsburgh to buy the designer fabrics; it was only to the trade then. So we hired Peggy and she just opened up a whole world to me and taught me everything I know about design and antiques. My mother was very creative, too, and we always had a beautiful house.”
The garden is Lee’s domain, and its abundance reinforces the feeling of the English countryside. Wisteria and pink roses climb the pergola, flowers are planted in masses, assorted hydrangeas anchor smaller plants, boxwood and peonies and something for every season thrive. Under the circumstances, outdoor dining is a summer favorite.
Though there will always be additions to the collections, a fabulous new wallpaper she can’t resist (most recently, the Iksel in the powder room) and something to replace or recover, the home will continue to remain as it was first designed.
“I love it more than I did originally. I have no intention of ever moving,” Deiseroth says.
Marylynn Uricchio is the former film critic and SEEN/society editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She now writes fiction in addition to articles about architecture and design.
