Colonial Revival Bedrooms with an Old World Look

These Colonial Revival bedrooms are right out of the French stylebooks that informed high-style interiors in the colonies. Rooms are sophisticated yet homey with fabric and antiques.

The master bedroom veers away from American colonial starkness and toward the Baroque style of late 17th-century and early 18th-century Europe.

Gridley + Graves

Bedrooms in this 7,500-square-foot Colonial Revival house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, provide a glimpse into Old World influences on American colonial design.

Furniture and antique decorative elements in the reproduction house have come from England, France, and Eastern Europe; they mix with carefully curated pieces from this side of the Atlantic.

Its late 19th-century cottage pine twin beds patriotically painted with scenes of Mount Vernon, this guest room is an homage to old Virginia.

Gridley + Graves

These spaces illustrate the richness of the contemporary Colonial Revival bedrooms. They also catalog the style evolution of a homeowner whose knowledge has grown along with her collection. “When I began collecting,” she explains, “I sought out American colonial. I prefer a more formal look now.

“Europe informed high-style fashions in the Mid-Atlantic states, more so than in other American colonies,” she continues. “Today, I find a purely ‘early American’ interior almost too sterile.”

The master bedroom is anything but—its American tester bed hung with crewel-embroidered drapery layered over linen inner curtains. A lavishly polychromed, early 19th-century Eastern European trunk sits at the foot of the bed; the owners climb into the bed itself via a curvaceous mahogany stepstool that came from an English library.

Guest rooms in the eaves.

Gridley + Graves

An early 19th-century French daybed placed along the wall in the French style makes an asset of the sloping ceiling. The blue and white toile is shirred on the low walls, and also applied to the steep walls and ceiling. The treasure of the room beyond is the antique French fabric that dresses the bed and its high-style pelmet.


Tags: bedrooms colonial revival Gridley+Graves OHI January/February 2013 Old-House Interiors Regina Cole

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