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When you approach Bo and Alison Jia’s Georgetown row house, its federal architecture is nearly identical to its neighbors. But walk through the vestibule and into the entry hall, and you’re entering an entirely different world. The flowering colors of wares from their company, Middle Kingdom Porcelain, punctuate every room, along with Bo’s own artwork and his masterful color scheme across the walls and ceilings.
A multitude of hues comes from every direction, yet the cumulative effect is one of utter calm. “I have a picture in my mind” of what colors should be there, Bo explains. Not one to use paint chips or sample quarts of paint, Bo says, “I test colors in my mind, like I do my painting.”
There are no fewer than six paint colors covering the walls, ceiling, moldings, and mantel in the living room alone, in addition to a pickling stain overlaid on the moldings framing the entries into the room. One of the colors – “Bo’s Beige” – was custom mixed to fit the shade he had in mind. “I’m very good with color, so I just wanted to use all the colors together,” Bo says. “I can’t do all white.”
Perhaps that intuitive knowledge is what makes Middle Kingdom so successful. The Jias’ porcelain can be found in the Mandarin Oriental and Ritz-Carlton hotels in DC and Pentagon City. They also populate the Ralph Lauren stores in Paris and Dubai. They have graced multiple set designs for “The Apprentice” TV show with both Donald Trump and Martha Stewart.
A Complete Transformation
When the Jias purchased the home in 2006, it had been split into two apartments, with what are now the living and dining rooms closed off by doors from the entry hall, and folding accordion doors separating the spaces in between. Bo and his carpenters widened all the openings and installed elaborate molding around the entries. They also created much more decorative moldings at the ceilings, baseboards, and mantelpiece than had existed originally.
In the dining room, they added a transom over the window and beefed up the moldings there, too, in addition to creating a built-in case for an ever-changing display of their porcelain.
While the architecture of the rooms is heavily Western in style, Bo and Alison infused the spaces with Eastern accents. The most distinctive elements of these connecting spaces are the Chinese birdcages, which Bo wired and turned into chandeliers.
Across a large wall in the living room hangs a series of 19th-century portraits of Japanese kabuki actors that Alison purchased from a dealer in Gloucester, VA. Across from them hang woodblock prints created by one of Bo’s university professors depicting a Chinese novel titled Diary of a Madman.
An Inspired Kitchen
The Jias’ new kitchen was once the home’s dining room, with the original kitchen being the tiny space that is now a powder room. During the renovation, they installed a radiant-heat floor with granite from quarries in the mountainous region of southeastern China where the Middle Kingdom kilns are located.
There is no less color in the kitchen than the other rooms. They installed both natural knotty cherry and celadon-green Wood-Mode cabinetry, and matched the celadon on the mantel, doors, and crown moldings. A colorful sampler stitched by Alison’s mother hangs over the fireplace. And Bo purchased the shiny hammered copper farm sink online. “He wanted rough-hewn, honest materials” like the granite, Alison says.
All the work they did in this house is a reflection of who they are, she adds. “We both really love old houses – that’s a mutual interest – and we wanted to do something with integrity with regard to the house and also with regard to the design.” Looks like they passed with flying colors.
