Well, Stephanie Peters did when she invited Linda Marx, an independent-minded bargain-hunting maven, to have at it.

“I wanted the challenge to do it as inexpensively as I could,” said Marx, who loves nothing better than finding a cast-off sofa here or discarded end table there. “They’re little orphans. I like giving them a home.”

Peters, a Sunnyvale marketing consultant, wanted a home makeover that “shows my personality,” emphasizes comfort and reflects her penchant for all things Asian.

She lives in an Eichler, the 1950s-era, one-story homes with open floor plans, atriums and courtyards. Mid-century modern furnishings are experiencing a resurgence of popularity these days, but Marx was reluctant to shop in that direction: “I lived through that” era of design, Marx said, “and I didn’t particularly like it then.”

And with popularity often comes a big price tag, and that simply is not Marx’s style. Marx promised she could completely swap the decor of the living, dining and family rooms for a grand total of $4,000, which included everything from furniture delivery to moving lighting fixtures. (That would buy mid-century purists one Eames lounge chair and ottoman, thank you very much.)

The last time the house had a makeover was in the early 1990s, a few years after Peters bought it. As was the style at the time, she decorated with a palette of black, white and chrome, including white marble flooring in the living and dining rooms. But over the years, the space had grown tired and cold. And Peters had little time to pay attention to it. She made brief attempts at repainting the interior, but when her artwork came down, including her collection of Asian masks, she never put it back up. In her entry hall, all she had was a plant.

“All right, enough,” Peters told herself. “I entertain a lot. I’m sick and tired of people coming over and I’m embarrassed.”

She called Marx, who calls her fledgling redecorating business “Shoestring Design.” The women became friends through Marx’s son, who worked with Peters years ago. Peters had been to parties at Marx’s house and while there, couldn’t help but admire her home. She asked for help on hers.

“I said I wanted modern and Asian,” Peters said.

“I wanted the house to feel warm and nice,” Marx said.

“I wanted chrome bar stools,” Peters said.

“I didn’t bother with it,” Marx said.

“Never mind,” Peters conceded. “Do it.”

With that, Peters cleared out the entire living, dining and family rooms of furniture, handed Marx the key to the front door, and took off for three weeks.

“I had never done Asian before,” Marx confessed.

She began her thrift store circuit up and down the Peninsula, stopping in the Salvation Army on Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, where she found a dining room table and chairs for $149; to the Consignment Store in Westgate Mall in Saratoga, where she landed a living room sofa, and the Goodwill on Almaden Expressway in San Jose for the Asian bar for $89. She bought a bamboo wall hanging at Cost Plus World Market for $49, Asian coin wall hooks for $3 from Savers in Redwood City for the entryway, a coffee table from Not Too Shabby in San Jose for $49. A large Persian rug ($120) that covers the cold marble floor came from D.G.W. Auctioneers and Appraisers in Sunnyvale.

Marx mined Peters’ garage for lost treasures, pulling out her old trunk and a collection of masks. She hung Peters’ prints and some Chinese silk panels she had bought at auction and arranged everything just so. For finishing touches, she displayed martini glasses on the bar and filled a glass vase in the kitchen with fortune cookies.

Then she waited. “I was sweating bullets when she came home,” Marx said.

“I stood in awe in the entryway for 30 seconds,” Peters said. She barely recognized the place. “I walked back in three or four times. There was so much and it had changed so drastically.”

Peters loves her new decor and “everyone who comes to my house is flabbergasted. I’ve had wonderful feedback.”

Now on to the bedrooms! As soon as Peters leaves town, Marx will be ready.

If you like bargains and didn’t see the story Desiree and I wrote about the Asian fretwork chairs we bought for a bargain price at Not Too Shabby, read this:

Smackdown:Lookiloos-style

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Lately, I’ve become enamored with houses that are unassuming from the front,  but have a major ‘wow’ factor on the inside.

From the front of this white-washed Willow Glen cottage, you might expect a chopped-up floorplan.  The only feature on the facade that gives you a sense of what’s to come is the bright yellow front door. Walk inside and you’re flooded with openness and light. And you can see right through to the charming backyard.

Homeowner Stephanie Angeli, an  ”empty nester” who moved from San Francisco,  first saw the house with her sister. “We did an ‘Oh my God,’ when we went through it,” she said. “Every room was perfect.”

The house had been remodeled by the previous owner who added space and lots of windows on the back of the house, looking out to the courtyard. The sisters got in their car, did a U-turn, she said, and went to the realtor’s office to put down a deposit. The house was featured on the Willow Glen Home Tour earlier this month.

The kitchen is also a gem, with white Carrarra marble counter tops and a sink in the corner looking into the family room.

And the interior decor is lovely, from the the little vignette of green stemware in front of al painting on the kitchen counter, to a nicely-appointed front guest room and office. Carmen Grande of Willow Glen Home & Garden on Lincoln Avenue helped Stephanie with the furnishings and Steve Gilbert added charm to the courtyard.

Take a look at the slideshow and tell us what space you like the best.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

She was born in 1970 with a name that means “earth” in Czech on a commune in Palo Alto called “The Land.”
Zem Joaquin was a dark-haired pixie with patchwork pants who played with chickens, danced in the central longhouse and sang with Joan Baez in the squatters camp off Page Mill Road.
The darling of the draft resisters back then, she became the subject of their illustrated fairy tale about  “Zem, the little queen” who unites a strife-torn world. Even Baez, who founded the commune and lived there for a time, included “Zem Zem” in her 1975 song, “Children and All That Jazz.”
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that she was destined to make a name for herself in the environmental movement. Unlike her parents’ generation that reveled in the counterculture fringe, though, she is helping create a modern movement in the mainstream.
And she’s doing so with her own sense of rebellion: She’s making green glamorous.
Founder of Ecofabulous, she created a Web site that gives readers eco-friendly lifestyle options, from modular furniture made from recycled paper to chic throws made of hemp and flax. Going green needs to be less about sacrifice, she realized, and more about motivation. (The site’s motto: “sexy.sustainable.style.”) After all, she muses, “People weren’t too interested when organic cotton looked like oatmeal and felt like a burlap sack.”
Step inside the 1960s-era home in Marin County that she remodeled for her family and you’ll see what she means.
At 39 years old and just 5 feet tall, she opens the front door with bare feet and a big smile. Behind her, vintage black-and-white curtains she found at the Alameda Point Antiques Faire frame a pair of chairs she recovered in remnant lime green silk. Sleek kitchen counters are made from newspaper wood pulp and fly ash. Her vintage Laszlo dining room chairs are refilled with natural rubber.
“Being fabulous is feeling like you’re getting what you really want,” she says. “At the same time, you’re not taking more than you need and you’re giving back.”
So how did this commune kid become such a design diva?
She may have been raised on granola, but she came of age living in London for two-and-a-half years in her early 20s with her godmother – a stylish critic for the Evening Standard who took her to theaters, boutiques and Paris for weekends and “taught me everything I know about design.” Joaquin (then Spire, her maiden name) finished her degree in organizational communications at Pepperdine, where she started a recycling program. And after a stint managing male models in Italy (she followed a boyfriend there), she returned to San Francisco in the late 1990s to help her best friend, Gina Pell, start Pell’s fledgling fashion and beauty Web site, Splendora.
“She was my VP of business development because she’s so good with people. She has a way of developing and nurturing connections,” Pell says. “I always told her that if she was a superhero, that would be her superpower – the ultimate connector.”
It was Pell, though, who connected Zem with her husband, tech entrepreneur James Joaquin.
They met at a cocktail party in 1999 in San Francisco, married and had two children. She was volunteering for homeless causes and political campaigns when her children were diagnosed with severe asthma. The family was living in an old Craftsman in San Francisco at the time, spending many a night in the emergency room when she decided she had to “save my children and create a healthy home.”
The Marin County house, tucked among blackberry bushes and towering trees, became her eco-incubator. Old painted beams were stripped with beeswax, wall-to-wall carpeting was replaced with recycled wine-cork flooring and solar panels were added to the roof.
But finding sustainable products, and stylish ones at that, wasn’t easy. “I realized there was this enormous gap,” she says. “There were no resources for eco-design and people interested in design.”
It was her husband who handed her a copy of “Cradle to Cradle,” the environmental manifesto of architect William McDonough, whom James Joaquin had heard speak at the 2004 TED conference for technology, entertainment and design in Monterey.
“This is what you’ve been talking about,” he said at the time to his wife, “what you’ve been spiraling in towards.”
She was so enthralled by the book, which professes ecologically intelligent design, that she invited McDonough to lunch with “some of my friends that I think can change the world.”
The guest list included her husband’s good friend, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Segway inventor Dean Kamen, whom she had met at a dinner party; and inventor, entrepreneur and Disney “imagineer” Danny Hillis.
This time, it was McDonough’s turn to be impressed. He invited her to attend his annual eco-summit in Iceland the following year with some 20 “thought leaders” and activists.
Unlike some in the environmental movement who preach doom and gloom, he says, Joaquin takes a positive approach.
“It’s a big dark world out there, and we need brightness,” he says in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi where he was talking to real estate developers about green design. “Zem is a sparkle.”
And she knows how to throw a party. Over the past several years, she has raised nearly $1 million dollars for Global Green, an L.A.-based nonprofit that activates its Hollywood base to bring attention to green issues, including the sustainable rebuilding of New Orleans and Haiti. At her first party she threw at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco several years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio showed up. Salma Hayek and Orlando Bloom came to the second.
“She actually seduces people into doing the right thing,” Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post said when she presented Joaquin with Global Green’s Founder’s Award last year. “She always makes people feel that the right thing is the fun thing.”
Plus, she added, “she’s adorable.”
While Joaquin founded Ecofabulous in 2006 to chronicle her environmentally friendly remodeling resources, she has since expanded it to include organic beauty, fashion and lifestyle choices. She consults with such companies as eBay and Safeway and has been a frequent “green” guest on radio and TV shows. She raises chickens in her side yard, grows tomatoes and herbs, and even has her 6-year-old daughter weighing in with her opinion about kids’ green products. And over the past few years, she’s convinced every one of her closest friends to drive a hybrid.
So what’s next?
“I never thought in a million years I would want to have a commune,” she says.
But lately, she’s thinking about it, maybe bringing her closest friends together, living sustainably off the grid. She doesn’t have the details worked out yet, but one thing is certain: Unlike the A-frames and outhouses she grew up with, she says, “this commune would be stylized.”

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Charmaine Warmenhoven was in high school in 1964 when news of the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese on the streets of New York spread across the country, a shocking story because even though many heard her screams, apparently no one did a thing to help.
Charmaine was fascinated, though, less about the bystanders who did nothing and more about the idea of those who “try to do something.”
With a strong foundation as a woman of faith and a psychology degree from Princeton, reaching out to others in need has become a guiding principle of her life as a philanthropist and educator of special needs children.
“It’s part of our value system,” she says. “You are meant to provide service to others. I’ve been doing so ever since I can remember.”
From the graceful Monte Sereno home surrounded by acres of gardens that she shares with her husband, Network Appliance board chairman Dan Warmenhoven, the couple open their doors to fundraisers benefiting causes ranging from cancer research to local arts groups to Catholic charities. In June, she is hosting the Silicon Valley Heart Gala for 250 to raise money for the American Heart Association. With Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz chairing the event, the nonprofit is expecting the guest list to include some of the valley’s tech luminaries. If all goes well, the charity hopes to raise more than half a million dollars (maybe a million, dare they hope) at this single event.
“Dan and I feel we’ve been given a lot, and we need to give and to share,” she says. “It’s more than a habit. It’s a lifestyle.”
And Keri  Janssen, CEO of the Silicon Valley American Heart Association, couldn’t be more grateful.
“They are very down to earth and very dedicated to making a difference in the community,” Janssen says. “Opening your home to an event is totally different than giving money. They are dedicated to the mission and the cause and have been for over 10 years.”
Hosting the fundraiser at a home rather than a hotel is much more intimate, she says. Besides, “who wouldn’t want to see the Warmenhoven home?”
A winding driveway leads you past oak trees and a sunken Japanese tea garden to the grand estate atop a hill. A 17th-century wishing well and a stone gazebo adorn the front garden that overlooks the lights of the valley below.
The back yard, with terraces surrounding a pool and cabana house, will be the setting for the June party. A saxophonist will play during cocktail hour from the balcony, and tables will be set up around the pool. Each guest will be given a candle to light, representing heart disease survivors, and float them in the pool.
“It will be the feel of a romantic, starry night,” Janssen says.
The causes Warmenhoven supports are close to her heart. As a child, her mother was a concert pianist, and she was a dancer. As an adult, she has served on the boards of Ballet San Jose and the Montalvo Arts Center.
With her father in the military, her family moved around a lot, she says, and going to Catholic church on Sundays wherever they happened to live “felt like family and it gave me a sense of stability and belonging.”
After teaching disabled children for a number of years, she went on to work for  the Catholic Diocese in Santa Clara County, helping people with disabilities feel included in church life. Just last year, the Warmenhovens hosted a garden party for the Knights of St. John, an organization ounded to take care of wounded soldiers but that now donates frequently to children’s hospitals.
Charmaine’s father died of cancer when she was 13, and the Warmenhovens have been supporters of the American Cancer Society’s Cattle Barons’ Ball each year.
“I do a variety of different things,” she says, “but they all make sense to me.”
She and her husband met sitting next to each other on a plane on their way back to Princeton from the West Coast when she was a junior and he was a senior.
“He asked me to dinner,” she says, “and we were married two years later.”
After moving around the East Coast with his jobs for IBM and HP and hers in teaching, they arrived in Santa Clara Valley in the early 1980s. In the mid-1990s, Dan Warmenhoven became president and CEO of Network Appliance, employing 45 people at the time. It has since grown to 8,000 employees worldwide.
The Warmenhovens moved from their house in Saratoga, which their son and daughter-in-law now own, to the Monte Sereno estate three years ago. Even though the house is grand, the rooms feel intimate. And she loves the indoor/outdoor flow of the house, which is perfect for entertaining.
She enjoys planning gatherings for her family and close friends, but she leaves the big parties to the pros. She has her list of favorite local party planners, florists and caterers.
“I just sit back and applaud,” she says, “and open the door.”

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Hillary Fox and Matt Jacobs had lived in their 1920s Prairie-style home in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood for eight years before they remodeled. They loved the bones of the house, but they had to walk through a warren of rooms to get to the dark, galley kitchen.

“We wanted to open it up with more light,” Hillary said. And she wanted it to be more modern, “but consistent with the principles of the house.”

Two years ago, they started the remodel. With two living rooms, they turned one into a dining room.

In the kitchen, they opened walls and added a new family room that stepped up their hillside lot. That gave them more space for their growing family.

The couple love clean lines and neutral colors. In the kitchen, they installed white Caesarstone countertops with translucent, white glass subway tiles, then added red-topped stools for a splash of color. They opened their home to the Rockridge Kitchen Tour last fall.

The family decorated with Matt’s original paintings, inspired by Modigliani.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Lisa Murray logged onto Craigslist for the first time looking for a small stained glass window for the master bathroom part of her renovation. As with all things about the remodel of her Los Gatos home, she wasn’t looking for something ordinary. She was looking for something “that makes my heart beat faster.”

Then she saw it, an eight foot angel with golden wings, a long white robe and bursts of cobalt blue. Translucent. Brilliant. Mesmerizing. Once the adornment for a San Francisco mortuary, it was now stored in a Richmond warehouse. Lisa quickly realized it was too big for the bathroom, and, quite frankly, almost too beautiful for it.

Despite its mortuary provenance, “it’s not creepy to me,” Lisa said. “The angel represents a hope of something.”

But where could she put it and could she get it home in one piece? What followed would become a lesson in flexiblity, creativity, and nail-biting drama for Lisa and her husband, Craig Hinkley. The couple, along with their two children and dog Millie are living in the tiny backyard cottage they just restored as well as the newly built garage while undergoing a full renovation of their circa-1940 Los Gatos home. Lookiloos and the Mercury News are chronicling their design decisions and family adventures in the “This Darned House” series.

After 15 years of marriage, Craig has learned to trust the fantastical vision of his artist wife. As usual, however, the vision would come with a price. The new home for the angel would be the south-facing bay window in the great room — and that would not only mean a new design concept for the room, but a major re-engineering of the bay window to hold its weight.
“I’m sure Vinnie can make it all work,” Craig told his wife of their contractor, Vinnie Tran, who had already completed the garage under budget.

But first, could they get the angel home safely?

After renting a U-Haul and wrapping the stained glass in blankets, the precious cargo bumped and lurched in the back of a truck all the way from Richmond to Los Gatos. When Craig rolled up the back door of the truck to inspect it, his heart skipped a beat. The window had dropped out of its wooden frame. But he couldn’t tell whether it landed intact or had shattered.

“Lisa, go inside,” he said. “You don’t want to see this.”

When he peeled back the blankets, he was amazed to see it had survived, thanks to the extra cushioning they had put down first. The window had been mounted in three sections. They stored each under their iron bedframe in the cottage until the house was ready for it.

In the meantime, though, Lisa went back to the drawing board — again. She had already undergone a major redesign when she and Craig realized they wanted less interior square footage and more outdoor living. This couple had lived through the hot buggie summers of North Carolina and the rainy winters of Seattle following Craig’s finance jobs and had spent most of their time inside. Only after living in California for six months did they realize that for nearly every beautiful weekend, another one followed. The first major change was to swap out the formal dining room for a vast outdoor terrace off the great room.

But Lisa had originally designed the great room that opens to the kitchen to have a retro David Hicks style with a geometric circle motif. And that would no longer work with the leaded glass window. So she has ditched the idea of using Kraftmaid kitchen cabinets that had a circular overlay as well as the splashes of hot pink she was planning in the family room furnishings.

Instead, to complement the dramatic angel, she is opening up to a new style, with “a tinge of Gothic.”

And that means tufted, deep blue velvet sofas in the living room, for instance, and finding new seeded glass pendant lamps over the kitchen island she plans to paint herself. She is also reconsidering making her backsplash more linear and adding blue glass inserts.

She’s looking forward to the colored light that will splay across her great room. Now she’s just crossing her fingers that the installation of the giant window will go smoothly.

As Lisa puts it, “the drama is half the fun.”

“

When my husband’s old Lionel train set arrived by UPS from his brother in Michigan, it was as though Santa himself appeared in a big brown truck. It was five years ago, Christmas Eve. I was standing in the driveway with our two children, who were 5 and 7 at the time, when the driver headed our way with a large cardboard box.

Carefully packed inside was the electric model train set that my husband, Chris, and his three brothers used to play with each winter in the basement of their home outside Detroit. It had been his father’s before that. And now, on the most magical night of all, it had arrived in San Jose for the next generation, just in time. I choked back tears as I wished the driver a Merry Christmas.

Sounds like the end of a heartwarming story, doesn’t it? This was the part when the parents are supposed to embrace and the children open the box with eyes filled with wonder. Can’t cha hear the whistle blowing?

Funny how nostalgia can turn to exasperation and a midnight argument last week that almost woke up the kids. Where in the world can we set up this thing?
Unlike my husband’s boyhood home in the 1960s and ’70s, our home doesn’t have a giant basement rec room with a snooker table big enough for two full sheets of plywood on top to serve as a platform for this Michigan-made train set.

Without it, the track never really found a home in our house. That first Christmas, the engine that had been boxed up for 30 years was too worn out to pull cars behind it. The next two years, when the track was laid on the living-room floor, the kids kept tripping over it, knocking down the cars and disconnecting the track. In 2007, Chris placed a piece of plywood on top of the dining table on the screened porch. But it was chilly, few ventured outside to play with it and the track started to rust. Last year, it didn’t even make it out of the boxes.

This year, though, Chris insisted the train and the plywood come back in the house and into the living room. And it had to be elevated, he said. That’s when the discord began.
I’m sorry, but am I out of line to protest when my husband wants to squeeze in the equivalent of a table set for 12 in the middle of our cramped living room that is barely big enough for a Christmas tree? Must this be a shrine to Lionel?

I already had holiday decorating insecurities. As much as I envision our house as an enchanted space filled with our hand-carved nativity scene, nutcrackers, Christmas candelabras and poinsettias, it more often than not feels like a mismatched montage.
To make matters worse, we were planning a Christmas cocktail party, plus Christmas dinner for 18. We needed more room, not less, for entertaining.

“Hmm, an 8-foot-by-4-foot sheet of plywood in your living room,” mused my friend Carolyn. “Sounds like a dance floor.”
One friend suggested that if we really wanted to show off the train set, we should deconstruct it and arrange the engine and cars artfully on the mantel. Another suggested building a catwalk around the ceiling like they do at pizza parlors. All we needed was sawdust and peanut shells on the floor. Great.

But the tradition of this train set was important to Chris and I understood why. The train set was sent a few years after Chris’ father died. It wasn’t an elaborate model with mountains and tunnels, but it included some special vintage pieces: a 1940s O gauge track with a pressed-tin signal house and a man with a swinging lantern who pops through the door when the train passes; a foot-tall light tower; three pieces of die-cast rolling stock; a 1975 Illinois Central GP9 engine that blows smoke and a matching caboose that lights up. It came with a bag of miniature pedestrians, benches and trees. Inside the GP9 engine box was the original handwritten note the boys found that Christmas morning when they unwrapped it for the first time: “Merry Christmas, Joey, Chris, Paul and Ed.” It was signed S. Claus.

Still, did it have to be mounted full scale, table height, smack in the middle of the living room? Couldn’t it be, maybe, half the size, in a corner somewhere? Midnight is the wrong time to have a conversation like this. When I imagined Chris pulling out the sheet of dirty white felt he used under the track to look like snow two years ago, I marched upstairs.

As we got ready for bed, though, Chris said one more thing: “I want the kids to have memories of this train.”
“I do, too,” I said.

The next morning, Chris said that the train didn’t have to be table height. It could sit on milk crates just a foot off the floor. But something would still have to be moved out for it to fit in. I volunteered that my writing desk be moved to the shed.
We could still sit a 6-foot Christmas tree on top of the platform in the middle of the track. I would replace the white felt with chocolate brown burlap.
And to convince myself that I could salvage some sense of style, I would sew a string of silky brown pom-poms to finish the bottom edge. (Chris objected at first, worried they would distract from the track, but relented.)

Last weekend, Daniel, who is 10 now, helped his father assemble the track. Claire, 12, set up a station vignette around the signal house. It was a rainy afternoon and I took in the scene as Chris plugged in the twinkling tree lights and turned on the Christmas music. Daniel blew the whistle.
As the train came around the bend, I approached the platform, knelt down before it, and fluffed the pompom skirt.

Thanksgiving Table

The French-inspired San Jose home has an “antique chic” sensibility with a textured, neutral palette. And that’s all Jose Ibarra needed for inspiration when he decorated the home for Thanksgiving.  You’ll find no bright orange here.

“They’re going to have turkey for dinner and that’s as traditional as they get,” said Jose, a San Jose floral designer.

He started with the things the homeowner loves: a burlap tablecloth topped with mirrored glass. The combination of rustic and glamorous provided the perfect foundation for Jose’s tabletop design.  He  strips of heavy, woven vintage ticking as napkin rings.  The homeowner planned to top each coarse napkin ring with a rhinestone broche – adding star quality to peasant stock.

To complement the homeowner’s love of simplicity, Jose adorned the mirrored table with roses — not in the traditional fall colors, of course. Instead, he cascaded cream-colored roses — Sahara and Quicksand — down the center of the table, dripping pedals and “skeleton leaves” he picked up at the San Francisco Flower Market.

Since the living room was converted to the dining room for Thanksgiving — and the long narrow table positioned in front of the fireplace — Jose also was charged with rearranging the living room furniture throughout the house and adding simple, elegant touches throughout.

Wave of Roses

The home was built by the Gallagher family, who owned Gallagher Fruit Co. when the area was known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” One of Carol’s favorite pieces is a tile serving tray she keeps in the kitchen that shows the Gallagher’s pear packing label with their company name on it — a gift from her daughter-in-law, Rita.

It has become a favorite game room for all three of their grandchildren and a place for Tom to read since retiring as vice president of Argo Systems.

You might also enjoy these stories:

Julia’s Screened Porch Video

From French Country to Modern Neutral

Here’s the complete slideshow:

She had wondered for years if this particular house was as beautiful on the inside as out. And when she first stepped inside, “I knew this was the one,” Mary said. “It was more stunning that I expected.”

Saltilo tile floors greeted her in the entryway with a sweeping staircase with curved wrought-iron railings. Two steps down took her to the grand formal living room with plenty of space for the baby grand piano and their whimsical orange and black “Halloween tree” that adorns the front window for the autumn Rose Garden Homes Tour in mid-October.

A rear addition had been added at one point to the 1938 home, opening up the kitchen to a new family room, with a master suite on top. The Martins have just completed a kitchen update.

Michael Martin is in the broadcast industry and has adorned his study and stairwell with his collection of electric guitars with signatures of major bands, including The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith.

One of Mary’s favorite spots for a little solitude is the lovely balcony off the master bedroom where she often reads or enjoys a cup of coffee while overlooking the lush backyard and swimming pool.

To read about the courtyard makeover, click here:

Here’s the complete slideshow: