With a creative eye and a passion for salvaged antique treasures from Europe, an entrepreneur proves that country style can be right at home in any setting — even an elegant city house.
Anyone still believing that country style must be limited to farmhouses need only behold the home of Annie Brahler for compelling proof to the contrary. Located in Jacksonville, Ill., the stately, six-bedroom house is a landmark of that city's historic district. On the outside, it is pure architectural sophistication; on the inside, it's country through and through.
Beneath a crystal chandelier, a small table off the kitchen provides an intimate dining nook.
Vintage silver gets repurposed as bud vases
Pictured: Eight-year-old daughter Isabel's bedroom has a bedstead that belonged to Princess Lillian of Belgium.
Dividing the living room from the sitting room is an archway rimmed in tooled leather and guarded by carved indian heads
Dressed Up & Dressed Down
Tasseled, buttoned "ball-gown slipcovers" dress up gilded dining chairs. Their opulence is underscored by the bare oak floor, outlined in walnut parquet, which gives the room the youthful look of "wearing an evening gown without shoes," Annie says. The Drexel claw-foot table was dark brown until Annie coated it with Sherwin-Williams "Pulmonaria" semigloss paint, deliberately avoiding a precise match with the slipcovers. "I don't like things to be matchy," she adds.
Annie in the Garden The daughter of Dutch immigrants, Annie lives with her husband, Richard, three children, and three dogs in an imaginative re-creation of the interiors inhabited by her ancestors, with antique "farmhouse castoffs" she unearths at barn sales throughout Europe. These she imports through her business, Euro Trash, a thriving enterprise that employs a carpenter and two seamstresses full-time. Like a tableau by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, these rooms combine opulence with an irresistible lack of pretense: Elaborate crystal chandeliers and chairs covered in simple linen look as lovely together as a 17th-century servant girl with a pearl earring. Here, all members of the Brahler clan make themselves at home as they please: "My kids and dogs are welcome anywhere," Annie says. "This is definitely not a museum!"
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