cherry bomb
vignettes. The custom hood was faux finished
Interior designer Jo Howell of Big Sky Design removed
walls inside a Landfall Charleston-style home to open
the ground floors rooms for entertaining. She created
dramatic focal points within the oversized kitchen to
ground the space.
53
It takes a smart man to invite an interior designer
to shop for his new home. That’s what Pramod Raju,
at the time a chief executive for PPD, did when he
purchased his 3,600-square-foot Charlestonesque
Landfall home. Though he fell in love with the style
of the house, it was not a match made in heaven for
this worldly bachelor.
Jo Howell of Big Sky Design says the original
layout was very confined and very dated. It just wasn’t
functional; it was choppy and didn’t open up for
entertaining or even conversation.
She and Pramod worked with Mark Schmidt of
Schmidt Custom Builders to repattern the space.
“When you walk into the foyer, you’ve got the
formal living room, the formal dining room, then the
kitchen. We blew out the wall between the dining
room and the existing kitchen,” Jo says.
She designed a ginormous island that now opens
into the dining room. The kitchen became the
focal point beyond which an enclosed porch, now a
sunroom, frames views of the golf course.
While the kitchen itself is now the focal point of
the ground floor living areas, Jo grounded with the
cherrywood island finished in dark java that brings
out the rich chocolate tones echoed in Brazilian
cherry floors.
Because the island is so substantial, creating the
four corner details supported with table-style legs
welcomes everyone to sit around the central conversa-tion
piece. A Visconti white granite was leathered —
a trend that forgoes the traditional high-gloss polish.
The result adds gorgeous depth and texture to the
stone, Jo says. The details are more evident under the
gaze of Visual Comfort’s hand-rubbed antique brass
Turenne Dynamic chandelier from Big Sky Design.
Surrounding the centerpiece, she arranged high-contrast
with silver leaf to resemble Venetian plaster banded
with bronze accent crowns, another focal point above
the Thermador induction cooktop, paired with the
black herringbone tiled backsplash. The presentation
achieves an eclectic mix of modern with traditionally
classic patterns that is entirely intentional.
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