Press

A Rethought Space

by Diane Goldsmith
Inquirer Staff Writer

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In a spacious condo overlooking Rittenhouse square, a modern kitchen might seem worlds apart from a living room of refined Edwardian elegance.  But bridging the stylistic gap are three kilims awash in vibrant earth tones that trace a path between them.  One- in pale turquoise, muted green, ocher and gold- makes it hard not to keep proceeding in its direction, wherever that might lead.

“The rugs offered major clues for this design job,” said Caroline Millett, who collaborated with Jefferson Clark on the renovation and décor of this home in the historic Barclay.  “They really helped create the color scheme” of warm earth tones and neutrals. 

The job required not only melding old with new, but rethinking what became an unorthodox space when condo owners Philip Senechal and Diane Deely more than doubled their living area by purchasing an adjoining 2,500 square feet on their floor, including a large gallery and their rooms around it.

“We wanted to help in laying out the space to make it all functional,” Senechal said.  And what did the couple hope to make of it all?

“We wanted a big kitchen,” Senechal began.  “We have lots of relatives who visit and we both like to cook.”  Indeed, the mahogany and stainless kitchen they got stirs the culinary impulse with features such as a generous center island, Sub-Zero refrigerator, two ovens and warming drawers. 

“Diane and I are athletic,” Senechal went on, referring to the gym across the hall.  “We both do inline skating and have a skate racing team that travels all over the world.”  Along with a room where the couple can work out, Clark and Millett included a double marble Jacuzzi with a tree-top view of South Philadelphia. 

Then there were home offices to consider.  Senechal, who has an investment firm in King of Prussia and enjoys playing sax when he can find the time, ended up with a home office that it part music room.  Photographs he has taken of local jazz figures adorn the walls not far from a grand piano.  In the home office of Deely, who is an attending physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, stands a reproduction Windsor writing chair that lends an American sense of style to the room.  Hanging framed in the kitchen is a recent cover from U.S. Roller skating, showing her intently competing in an inline skating event. 

A tour of the couple’s home last month was part of a fundraising event for the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, during which Clark and Millett were honored for innovative interior design in historic settings such as this.  “Most people see a grand condo in the Barclay and expect it to be meticulously laid out and immaculately organized,” Millett said.  “This is not what we saw.  We saw it as a home for these two people.”

Millett teaches an interior design course on expressing personal style at the University of Pennsylvania’s continuing education program, and has been a developer and has been a developer of historic properties both here and in Washington.  For two decades, Clark taught a course on the Barclay at Drexel’s Nesbitt college of Design Arts, and has been the interior designer on eight Barclay condos.  Both protégés of architect Louis Kahn, they are principals in CDM Enterprises, design consultants based in Philadelphia and Bucks County.

“We give people the conviction that they don’t need to copy a picture from Architectural Digest,” Millett said.  “We concentrate on what they love, on what makes them happy, using objects that give them joy.”  For this couple, that included their beautiful kilims and collection of vivid seascapes by Senechal’s brother, David.

Clark was intimately aware of what he had to work with at the Barclay, having led students through its high-ceilinged rooms for so many years as an object lesson in design.  “It’s a superb building,” he said of the 1928 Edwardian landmark, which evokes the straight lines, simplicity and understated elegance of the American Federal period.  “There’s a most civilized way it leads from public spaces to private spaces,” Clark noted, referring to the system of anterooms and foyers……

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