Italian Rustic House

Hello dears, hope you are having a nice weekend. To make it even nicer let's tour this rustic Italian house. You may find it hard to believe but this house is not located in Tuscany but in Houston, Texas! The house -decorated by Eleanor Cummings- is brand new but all the materials used are old. There was no need to import them from Italy, the stone and wood were acquired at Chateau Domingue, a huge warehouse and gardens full of reclaimed architectural materials.


Designer Eleanor Cummings used reclaimed wood, stone, and brick from Houston antiquities dealer Chateau Domingue to give the interiors an authentic old-farmhouse look. The front doors are 1850s Italian oak.


In the study, Cummings had 10-foot-tall French shutters retro­fitted to the windows and put on a metal track so they would slide open and close, like curtains.


Cummings started with the Oushak rug in the living room: "All the colors in the room came out of that rug. I didn't want to perfectly match all of them, so I threw in one or two off-kilter colors, like the caramel on the settee. That makes a room look less contrived and controlled."


The hallway between the entry and the living room.


An antique French chair is framed by curtains in Rogers & Goffigon's Pirouette silk.


The dining room wall color was inspired by a terra-cotta hotel room in Provence. A graceful rusted-iron chandelier is a perfect match for the very narrow 18th-century Italian table. The settee is one of the few painted-wood pieces in the house — "and it's the prettiest painted wood you've ever seen," Cummings says.


The only new wood in the house is the cedar planking on the porch ceiling, which resists damage from Houston's high humidity.


She turned an Italian window grille into a hanging pot rack. "But when we put the pots on it, it seemed gimmicky. So we've kept it as kind of an art installation."


A bar is part of the family room.


The warm tones of reclaimed wood and stone give the kitchen a cozy, inviting feeling. "The poplar cabinets have the most lustrous chamois color, and great grain," Cummings says. To make the Viking refrigerators look more in sync with the rustic elements, Cummings had them covered with zinc.


The powder room mirror is behind an antique Italian window grille: "Not what you'd expect, but everybody loves it. And I love all those dings and splotches on the old stone sink. Makes it even more beautiful."


"The blue shutters in the master bath are one of the few painted surfaces in this entire house," Cummings says. "But it's the original paint."


The stairway railing is hand-forged iron


Wood beams and antique Parefeuille tile are juxtaposed on the ceiling in the master bedroom. "This ceiling is so powerful, I had to scale everything back and keep it simple," says designer Eleanor Cummings. "We tried a painting over the bed, but it felt like an intruder."

All images and information from here.