Marsha Baldinger refers to herself and her husband as “voracious consumers” of art of all kinds.
“We collect art and attend theater, opera and concerts of all kinds, so we bought a house in South Orange Village that is much closer to Manhattan than our previous house in rural New Jersey,” said Baldinger, 65 years, retired creative director of an advertising agency. The move meant a reduction from 6,000 to 5,000 square feet, he said, but they gained “10 times more wall space for art and an upstairs balcony that’s perfect for the concerts we like to host.”
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However, the townhouse, which they purchased for $915,000 in 2016, wasn’t entirely perfect. Baldinger and her husband, Bruce, a 65-year-old attorney, chose to work with James Yarosh, an interior designer and gallerist they met when they bought a painting from him in 2014, to renovate their kitchen, breakfast room, living room and master bathroom. to show your unique style.
“James is a master of scale because of his artistic background,” he said. “When he added floor-to-ceiling shelving in the family room, he had to move an entryway two feet to make sure the shelving lined up perfectly with the coffered ceiling.”
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The Baldingers remodeled their master bathroom by replacing a jetted tub with a freestanding tub and expanding the shower.
“The master bathroom was just an oversized square, but it had a door leading into the toilet at an odd angle,” Baldinger said. “James made that angle look intentional by creating a parallel angled shower door, an angled floor-to-ceiling linen closet, and by sloping the tub.”
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Yarosh, inspired by a recent trip to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, recommended dark gray rugs and slate floors with dark gray painted walls in the lobby to showcase the couple’s vibrant art collection. He added squares of panel molding to the two-story foyer to define the space.
“The walls almost melt, so the paintings jump off the wall,” Baldinger said.
The Baldingers reconfigured the main level floor plan so that the formal dining room became a second seating area in the living room, and the family room includes a sofa and a 10-foot-long dining table. The square breakfast room was converted into a library with built-in shelving that opens to the kitchen.
In 2022, Baldinger and Yarosh traveled to Paris to visit seven museums, where they began planning a dramatic kitchen renovation, then hired kitchen designer Joan Picone and custom cabinet maker James Zdepski to articulate their vision.
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“I finally got the classic mosaic design I wanted for the kitchen backsplash, which has a three-dimensional block pattern that looks like the mosaic floors seen in Europe,” Baldinger said. “I love to cook and I feel like this whole kitchen was set up around me while I was cooking; it’s that perfect.”
The backsplash includes cream and sienna marble and honey onyx, with a quartzite perimeter with orange and raspberry accents, but the rest of the kitchen features neutral colors. The space also includes pull-out cabinets to maximize storage, curved wood cabinets with classic paneled doors, and sliding bi-fold wood doors with inserts cut in a pattern that echoes the backsplash.
Baldinger declined to specify the costs of the two renovation projects, but recent sales of townhomes in his community total about $1.5 million.
“Everything we put into it we’ll get out if we ever sell it,” he said.
Baldinger and Yarosh offered more information about the process:
I would describe my aesthetic as…one that “fuses an artist’s gaze with careful curation,” Yarosh said. “With art collecting clients, it is clear from the beginning whether the correct approach is one of ‘curated maximalism’ or one of more minimalist aesthetics. For this project, clients loved the colors and patterns. My task was to find a way to arrange and represent their goals to create a home that looked like theirs.”
My favorite feature after the renovation is… “This whole house is a lush expression of a very happy and vibrant life that we shared,” Baldinger said. “It fulfills our desire to live in a cozy environment full of details.”
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My advice to others is… “Color blocks can help organize large spaces,” Yarosh said. “Developing a painting program that runs cohesively helps create a unified home. With this project we used Benjamin Moore ‘Skipping Stone’ as a neutral for most of the home’s trim, custom shelving, kitchen, and living room piano space that inserts into the deep gray foyer like a diorama or a light box. ”
The biggest surprise was… “The light-walled insert room mentioned above brought brightness to the house and also turned out to be an incredible theatrical space for the Baldingers, who host nightly jazz performances around the piano,” Yarosh said. “The adjacent lobby is filled with chairs, and the stairs and upper landings become stadium seating, putting all eyes on the entertainment.”
The most dramatic change was…”Changing the light lobby to a deeper, more saturated gray allowed it to become a space that could house the client’s art collection,” Yarosh said. “I knew I needed to reorganize the attention of the space from its false grandeur to turn it into something more historical and reflective. The upper walls and hallways were converted into a circular gallery to view large-scale works, including artists such as Miriam Beerman, Jacob Landau and Sheba Sharrow.”
A favorite material discovered during the renovation was… “The Breccia Capraia marble we used in the master bathroom,” Baldinger said. “We found these large slabs of richly veined marble with purple, burgundy and flecks of green for the shower and floor. “I love tile, but I hate grout and these slabs were big enough that we needed very little grout.”
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