For interior designer Keren Richter, this project is personal. The 20-year-old Colonial-style three-bedroom isn’t her own home, but it does sit just a few minutes from her family’s weekend place in the pastoral heart of New York’s Westchester County.
Richter, cofounder of AD PRO Directory firm White Arrow, along with her husband, Thomas, would often stop in for site visits on the way to or from her house, her two young kids in tow. After spending two years of the pandemic living in the area full time, “I feel very connected to this commission,” the designer says.
The project proved personal for another reason, too. From the outset, the home’s owners gave Richter “a lot of freedom, which is unusual,” she recalls. An empty-nester couple moving from Westchester’s more suburban stretches, the clients saw this house as their next-chapter forever home, but they also allowed the designer to take the lead.
“We’re often working to marry a disparate array of influences,” Richter says, explaining that here that meant leaning into both the owner’s traditional aesthetic and the early-American influences of their white-clapboard house, designed in 2005 by Crisp Architects. She then wedded that to a collected look that combines some of the color and pattern both of British country houses and of mid-20th-century Swedish interiors.
