Hudson Valley Hues: At Home with an Inventive Textile Designer - Remodelista
Dunja Von Stoddard describes the remodel of her 1880s farmhouse in Rhinebeck, New York, as “an epic journey of demolition, construction, and reconstruction involving a squirrel-infested wall, jackhammers, and the complete removal of one end of the house.” Photography by Jim Franco, courtesy of Dunja Von Stoddard. Dunja relocated from Maine to upstate New York with her son, Lars, now six. Her online textile shop, Doonyaya—”a phonetic pronunciation of my name with some fun thrown in”—has just launched. The turn-of-century house received new siding and windows (made by Marvin), plus a 20-foot addition. A Scandinavian woodstove—”it sat in my mother’s garage for 20 years”—warms the music room (where there’s also a piano). The room required a lot of structural work: “Sometime during the Reagan administration, the owners decided to build a chimney and fireplace smack in the middle of the space,” she says. The room’s centerpiece, the butterfly painting is by Leslie Parke, Dunja’s former stepmother: “Every design decision followed the question ‘Does it go with the painting? Dunja countered the potential coldness of the chrome and leather with a pair of Danish armchairs found on Etsy. The pillow is one of her own designs in a pattern called Brick. A long-ago kitchen fire led Dunja to gut what was there. Dunja herself is also a ceramist, and she and Wallner are in the process of collaborating on some tiles. Dunja loves displaying collections—she contemplated hanging antique dentures over her bed and silver faux antlers in the dining room, ideas that Whitman nixed. The “disco dining room”—Dunja’s favorite room in the house—is anchored by a Tom Dixon Mirror Ball Pendant Light over a doctored Restoration Hardware table: “When it arrived, I hated it; the finish was terrible. So I sanded the top and waxed it about 20 times. Then I painted the bottom part.” Another pink Bertoia chair appears in the master bedroom. A Leslie Parke painting of water hangs over a collection of vintage lights. Dunja and Whitman designed the stained plywood bed frame and had the side tables stained to match. The painting is by Dunja—she has an MFA in photography from Bard, which is how she got to know the Rhinebeck area. The subtle pattern behind the bed is Walnut Wallpaper’s Dune in Silver Beach. Dunja went for “risky blue walls”—Benjamin Moore Twilight—in her home office. The desk is an Arne Jacobsen from eBay: “Most desks are big and imposing. I wanted something with understated personality—like a party guest who speaks only when moved to add something intelligent and thoughtful to the conversation.” The orange Swing Lamp is from OneFortyThree of Brooklyn. “The idea was to put color in unexpected places,” says Dunja of the bathroom. Located on the third floor, Lars’s bedroom is the only room in the house that didn’t require extensive reworking. The giraffe came from A.L. Stickle, a beloved old variety store in Rhinebeck. The sink is a Duravit Vero Washbasin. Dunja’s workshop is in a garage/barn that was built in the 1970s. A grid of mounted clipboards display pattern samples and test runs. A screen with a design called Arch is part of Dunja’s Pool pattern. Dunja’s patterns begin as drawings. Screen printing Gem, the design used on her dining room chairs. Dunja does all her printing and makes her prototypes in her studio. A homemade thread holder. Some just-finished prints.