Decorating A Country Home For Christmas

Roger Davies

LIKE MANY girls, Caroline Scheeler loved horses as a child. But unlike most, she never completely outgrew her pony phase. Even as a graduate student at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, Scheeler would rise before dawn and drive 40 miles west to the Illinois town of Wayne, a center of horse breeding in the 19th century that still boasts picturesque equestrian paths. Sometimes the interior architecture major brought her then-boyfriend (now husband), artist Joe Vajarsky. On one such trip in 1996, Scheeler asked him to stop the car so she could admire a small Colonial Cape Cod. "Look," she sighed. "That's the kind of house no one ever moves out of."

So imagine the couple's surprise the next weekend when the place wore a FOR SALE sign. Scheeler called the real-estate agent and announced, "We have to buy this house." And they did, fulfilling a longtime dream of owning a country cottage like that in one of Scheeler's favorite movies, Mrs. Miniver. She'd seen the 1942 film a dozen times, and during each viewing had the same thought: "I want to live there." Now, in a way, she does.

Scheeler modeled the decor of her own 1940s house to summon the fictional home's coziness, with "paneling, Dutch doors, and rich textiles." Add in the surrounding acre of prairie land, and you have a rural family idyll. The couple's children, Owen, 10, and Stella, 7, share their mother's passion for horses, and weekends are filled with group rides that make them feel as if "the city were light-years away."

Actually, it's an hour, and Mondays find Scheeler commuting to the job that gratifies her "city mouse" side. She's worked at the Chicago design emporium Jayson Home & Garden for 16 years, rising up the ranks. As head buyer for this celebrated shop, Scheeler travels the globe in search of vintage and contemporary furnishings—but she laughs at the notion that such trips are glamorous. More often, she's in a slushy Belgian flea market at 4:30 A.M., pawing through bins with a flashlight. But then she spots, say, a rare piece of silver or a magnificent rack of elk antlers on a dusty shelf.

"I use my imagination to remove the item from its context," says Scheeler, "and I ask myself, 'Would anyone else see what I see in it?'" If the answer's yes, it's purchased for the store…usually. Those aforementioned elk antlers are one of the rare articles Scheeler's allowed herself to buy for her own house. "If I took home everything I loved," she says, "I'd take home everything."

The pieces she does take home have a unifying theme: visually captivating but not too fussy. "We're not coaster people," she says. "Nothing we have is that precious, and there's mud in our mudroom."

Nonetheless, this mudroom provides a charming introduction to the house. Scheeler designed the space to evoke an old English tack room, with brick floors and dark-gray walls. Riding boots stand under a display of polo balls, a photo of Scheeler's grandfather's high school football team, boot pulls from a Paris flea market, and a deer jawbone found on a hike. The scene invites guests to lean in and admire the antique keys or examine the silky equestrian ribbons. "It feels good to have stuff around that you grew up with, got on special trips, or made," Scheeler says.

WHAT SHE grew up with has certainly influenced Scheeler's own eclectic style. Her architect father worked on both Chicago's Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, and favored white walls and modern furniture. Meanwhile, her mother possesses what Scheeler calls a "gypsy aesthetic," layering history-rich antiques, vivid textiles, and ethnic artifacts. Though her parents' design personalities seem more than a little contradictory, they've served Scheeler well in creating spaces that are elegant but not chilly, intimate yet far from cluttered.

Take the kitchen, with its steely-gray walls and clean-white hutch—evidence, perhaps, of her father's aesthetic. But he wouldn't have added the warm wooden table, or paired its exuberant curves with an elaborately carved sofa that lures Stella and Owen "to hang out and do homework while I cook," says Scheeler.

In the master bedroom, cool blue walls lend a serene, spa-like feel, but Scheeler added visual punch with an ornate Italian headboard, a zebra-stenciled cowhide rug, an angora throw from Turkey, and a wooden Buddha statue. "I might lack a sense of adventure in terms of color," she muses of her style, "but I make up for it by using contrasting materials."

THE BEDROOM was added in 2006, after Owen and Stella arrived and the couple discovered their "1,500-square-foot cottage didn't feel so huge anymore." They also created an open family room that felt like a "big box" until Scheeler identified the very high, very white ceiling as the problem. She remembered seeing weathered wood on ceilings in France, so she asked her husband to install wood salvaged from a nearby Amish barn.

"It took a little begging," she says, "but Joe is a good sport about my passions." The barn wood adds warmth, texture, and a nod to the area's equestrian history. The light-filled space also offers an airy counterpoint to the living room's dark-brown walls and oversize bird art. This is where adults gather at parties, mixing drinks at a bar that was once Scheeler's great-grandmother's secretary. "I love the secretary because it was hers," Scheeler says, "but since people rarely write letters, I repurposed it, instead of preserving the piece as an anachronism."

It's a practical viewpoint that inspires her design philosophy: Bring your venerable passions—a love of horses, a favorite movie, cherished heirlooms— into the present. After all, a home rich with the things that made us who we are will be full of comfort far into the future.

The author of several poetry books, including Unmentionables (W.W. Norton), Illinois native

Beth Ann Fennelly

teaches English at the University of Mississippi.

Take a look around her home.

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