When she was a teenager, Abby Kasonik lamented the "nasty white walls" in her boarding school dormitory. Later, during art studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, she rented an apartment with walls she wasn't permitted to paint. 
photography: Carlos Emilio
When Abby first saw her 1933 bungalow, it was in bad shape, but "no in-between owners had modernized it in ways I couldn't undo," she says. |
After graduation, she finally had the chance to break out her paintbrushes and began faux-finishing interiors in her hometown of Charlottesville. Faux was fine for clients, but she wanted to live among walls that were solid-colored and bold: "I had to have rooms painted rich, bright, intense colors that take up lots of visual space." That's why–at 23 years old–she started looking for a place to make her own.
Like any good artist, Abby chose her canvas carefully: She bought a cottage with walls that could carry her colors. "I needed plaster–not drywall, which you can't easily hang things on, and patching is awful." Along with plaster walls, she insisted on solid, pre-World War II construction with wood floors, a fireplace, and a bedroom on the second floor. Her search began in the country outside Charlottesville and immediately turned up a house so awful that she walked away from it the first time she peered through its broken windows.
photography: Carlos Emilio
“Color becomes what the room is about and lets me keep my rooms less fussy,” Abby says about the living room’s side-by-side reds and greens. |
"I left without going in, but my mother talked me into coming back for another look," Abby says. She discovered "a hole in the ceiling from a leaking toilet, an orange fridge and plastic cabinets in the kitchen, and ducks stenciled across the walls of one room." Seeing past the obvious repairs, Abby realized she liked its "squatty" proportions with oversize dormers popping out under wide eaves. Triple windows, interior glass-paned doors, and a precast concrete foundation delighted her. "It was built in 1933 by a man who only paid $100 for all of its brick, but there was no skimping in construction. Luckily, no in-between owners had modernized it in ways I couldn't undo."
photography: Carlos Emilio
The celadon-painted sideboard in the dining room inspired Abby's complementary choice of Cayenne Red. She purchased the painted metal chandelier from a junk shop
in Lynchburg: "I like its lilies-of-the-valley" floral motif. |
photography: Carlos Emilio
Model planes—made from kits Abby finds in toy stores—fly the friendly skies of her stairwell. Her relief map depicts APULI, an island she invented, complete with towns and coastal inlets. |
photography: Carlos Emilio
Let renovations be motivation for change. Replacing a rotted wooden floor gave Abby Kasonik the opportunity to paint oversize diamonds on the new floorboards and add a matching curtain of thick red canvas. |
Abby's first instinct was to paint. "I absolutely couldn't wait for color. I camped out and painted 12 hours a day. I remember showing my mother a swatch of the Cayenne Red I wanted in the dining room. 'You'll hate it once it's up,' she said. People said that about all my colors." Abby intrepidly applied six coats of the red. The hard work paid off. "It's luscious, like candy," she says. She eventually hatched a scheme of 11 different room colors linked by her Chinese Gold central hall. "The hall color had to get along with all the others," she says. "I tried a tarnished gold but it was too subdued, and then I tried pumpkin, but it was odd. Green was my last mistake, but I finally came back to yellow. It's similar to the kitchen's Rind, only a shade darker."
photography: Carlos Emilio
Abby used her favorite color combination, warm green for the walls and red for the furniture, in her bedroom, where she loves lounging with her cat, Oliver. |
While she was playing with color, Abby searched for old fixtures to return the house to a semblance of its 1930s appearance. "I don't like out-of-place changes in old houses. Furniture can come from different eras, but fixtures should be appropriate to its construction." She gutted the kitchen and two baths and then spent time at her favorite salvage depot, Caravati's, in Richmond, looking for sink and tub replacements. "I get inspiration walking through salvage depots. In one visit I spot stuff and get some direction." Furniture was Abby's final contribution in the cottage. Her love of strong color and authentically aged paint surfaces drew her to distinctive finds. Their presentation against her bold walls was important to her. "I like taking pieces out of their context and making them stand out." She pulled together kitchen furnishings painted in at least four different reds, including one industrial paint color called Safety. Mismatched reds are also in the bedroom, bath, and living room as punctuation on pillows, mirror frames, and bedsteads. Abby's off-the-cuff style embraces pieces that "don't go together–if I love them, that's enough." But one surefire technique she uses to unify disparate pieces of furniture is to keep all her upholstery white. That way, the textures and room color take center stage.
photography: Carlos Emilio
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With her most recent exhibition of paintings in Charlottesville a success, her career is flourishing. There will be no more white walls for this artist, only the colorful cottage where she developed her style. |
