After her first trip to Italy, Lisa Tureson, decorative artist and owner of Faux Creations Inc., couldn’t leave it behind. “My husband and I had just moved into a new home, a blank canvas for a decorative artist,” Tureson says. “This provided a great opportunity to bring a piece of Italy home.” After touring all over the country, Tureson’s interest in Italy’s art, history, and culture became a passion and inspired the dining room design. “It had to be the dining room, as the passion for Italian cuisine is a family affair,” she adds.
For Patrick Dempsey and Troy Englert, owners of Patrick’s Fine Linens & Home Décor, their Old Town Alexandria rowhouse-turned-shop serves as an ideal setting to display their collection of Versace place settings, vintage candlesticks, and mismatched flatware. Take a tour of two fine dining rooms readied for the holidays.
Experiencing the Renaissance
Inspired by the frescoes of 15th century artists and scenes depicted in one of Tureson’s favorite art books, Steffi Roettgen’s Italian Frescoes: The Flowering of the Renaissance, Tureson and fellow artist Richard Schaad spent more than a year, squeezing in time between projects for clients, recreating scenes of Venetian, Roman, and Florentine life of the pre-Renaissance period in Tureson’s dining room.
“What I love most about the artwork, countryside, and architecture of Italy are the colors – the softened ochres, earth greens, and siennas,” Tureson says. “Most of the country is a spectrum of color – it’s warm, timeless, and sun-baked.”
Along with the soothing earth tones in the dining room, the artwork showcases developing art forms of the period as well as initiates lively discussions among family and dinner guests. “The dining room design was built around the specific concept of experiencing, instead of viewing, the art as well as the food and guests,” Tureson says. During Thanksgiving dinner last year, she and her guests named the people in the paintings and made up stories about what they were doing, such as what songs the minstrels were playing or why the naked man was jumping off the bridge. “Then, of course, we got out the book and looked up the real information,” Tureson adds.
Tureson and Schaad tag teamed much of the work because often they weren’t in the room at the same time. “For instance, I created the rough surface and taped the images to the wall that I wanted to string together,” she says. “Richard came by and blocked out the shapes. I came through and blocked in color. He painted most of the people and I created most of the faux bois – each working toward our strengths.”
The hues in the dining room are consistent with the rest of the home and blend perfectly with the foyer and formal rooms on one side of the house. Tureson has a consistent bend toward European/Italian design with an Old World flair in her home. “My real love is traditional, Italian, Tuscan, and antique reproductions,” she adds, along with wood inlays and worn patinas. “I want things to look like they’ve been around for a while and are part of the family,” Tureson says. “I like a little history in the furnishings,” adds the artist, who mixes pieces and textures while keeping the colors very close. “I prefer accent colors to come from the artwork.”
Old Town Influence
Although this dining room happens to be in Patrick Dempsey and Troy Englert’s new store in Old Town Alexandria, the table decor is set exactly how they would design it in their own Alexandria home. Different flatware flanks each five-piece place setting, while Waterford crystal votives top the vintage hand-carved Italian candlesticks, also from their own personal stock.
This dining room exudes “simple elegance,” Dempsey says. It also offers a formal atmosphere, one that Englert says could work for a wedding rehearsal dinner.
For Dempsey, it’s all about the preparation. For Englert, it’s more about the socializing – a team approach to entertaining and design. They started in interior decorating by redoing their own spaces and then began helping friends and family, including renovating Dempsey’s parents’ living room while they were away, sort of their own version of TLC’s “While You Were Out.”
Whether dining at home or away this holiday, make the experience memorable and your own.
