Room of the Day: Once a Dining Area, Now a Glam Bedroom

Shannon John Mery of Denizen Design is all about making homes that fit his clients’ lifestyles. For a single woman who travels often and entertains infrequently, he reconfigured her loft on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to make the formal dining room the master bedroom and opened up the kitchen to allow dining opportunities. And the client got to keep a great display space for her many collections.

The old dining room had green wall-to-wall carpeting.


AFTER: For the new bedroom, Mery modified the shelves by painting them white and adjusting them to accommodate his client’s collections of clocks, vintage card accessories, pottery and boxes.

“Creating well-curated collection displays like this generally takes a long time, but we were fortunate that she had a lot of great things,” he says. Many of her collectibles are diminutive, so the designer made small boxes to create tiers in some shelves. “When you have a lot of little things, they can really get lost on shelves,” he says. “This makes sure everything can be seen.”

The hallway at the left, which leads to a bathroom, is now lined with closets and acts as a dressing area.


The library ladder was there before the remodel, and it remains so his client can access her books. The bed sits a bit away from the shelves so the ladder can pass behind it, and is intentionally low. “You can see it from the living room, which is through the opening at the right,” Mery says. “We wanted to create the illusion you are just looking into another room, not necessarily a bedroom.”

There’s no concern about items falling off the shelves onto the bed here. “If this home was in an area where earthquakes were common, you would obviously want to secure everything to the walls or shelves,” Mery says.

Mery and the client found the statute of Athena (at right) in an antiques store. “If you showed this to 900 out of 1,000 clients, they would not buy it,” he says. “This client is a different story, and she loves a unique piece. I think the tale of Athena appeals to her.”


Although the custom platform bed doesn’t have a headboard, it is not without decoration. Nailhead trim surrounds the bed’s base, and footstools covered in leopard-print fabric hold court at its foot, but the fur throw steals the show. “She had a vintage fur coat in her closet that hadn’t been used in a long time,” Mery says. “I had it made into a throw. It’s a great use for old furs that no one wants anymore.”

URL: Room of the Day: Once a Dining Area, Now a Glam Bedroom http://www.decor-ideas.org/cases-view-id-22718.html