Metropolitan Home / October 2004

“This isn’t just our home,” says interior designer Katie Eastridge about the house she shares with her husband, Nick, and their two teenage sons in Princeton, New Jersey.” It’s also a laboratory. This is where I get to experiment with all kinds of new design ideas. When you’re working for clients,” she explains, “you have to get everything right on the first try. You have to honor your clients’ money and their time. In your own home, though, you can take a risk and fail and live with it and change it later.”

But there’s not even the slightest hint of a design blunder in this house, designed in 1954 and completed two years later by noted Princeton architect Francis Comstock and purchased just five years ago from the original owners (“In original condition, for better or worse,” Eastridge says). Thanks to Katie Eastridge’s well-considered color choices and expert placement of furniture, the 2,800-square-foot, one-and-a-half-story home feels luxuriously spacious. And while the furniture is all exactly the same vintage as the house itself, the designer has avoided the usual retro-chic cliches.