ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Home Sewn

With a quilter’s eye for detail, Denyse Schmidt has created a home that is a diverse collection of influences seamlessly pieced together.

by Amber Bravo

Photos by Laura Moss

Like many manufacturing towns in the northeastern U.S., Bridgeport, Connecticut, is a city of remnants; a patchwork of houses and factory buildings that come together to form a community. For professional quilt maker Denyse Schmidt, it’s home—and an apt place to live and work. “I think because I grew up in New England, where there are a lot of old, blighted industrial towns, it’s kind of in my blood,” she explains. In 1996, Schmidt started her company out of her then apartment. Four years later, she moved the business into a historic textile factory, where she now produces three quilt collections per year and receives an endless stream of accolades for her timelessly offbeat designs, unexpected color combinations, and expert craftsmanship.

The detached single and double-story homes and businesses situated throughout Black Rock, the neighborhood where Schmidt purchased her house five years ago, create a strange mash-up that seems very much in line with her taste for the combined and the imperfect. Stepping inside her turn-of-the-century bungalow only heightens this sense. The decor is clean and spare, with punches of color throughout and a mixing of contemporary and antique elements.

“Everyone always walks in and says, ‘it’s so you,’” she says with a laugh. Which is perhaps just another way of saying her approach to decorating—like her approach to design—is largely intuitive.

“It’s an old factory worker house so it’s nothing fancy, but it’s so smartly laid out,” she explains, as she walks us through the modest, two-bedroom floor plan. “There’s a private and a public side.” The private side consists of two bedrooms, one being a small guest bedroom that houses a twin bed—swathed in one of her Works Special Edition quilts—and a large storage unit. Schmidt had the unit dismantled and taken out of her studio, painted, and reinstalled here because there was no closet space. The other room is hers and it, too, is minimally appointed with just a double bed (also cloaked in one of Schmidt’s own creations) and a series of mismatched bureaus, stacked floor to ceiling. There are a few pieces of artwork on the walls—most notably a graphic portrait of Schmidt that her sister painted and silk-screened. High and to the right of the portrait is a block of floral wallpaper, which Schmidt left as a remnant of the last tenant’s decor.

For the most part, Schmidt’s renovations were minimal and cosmetic. “When I first saw the house, it looked crappy from the outside. Then they lowered the price. I realized that the bones were great, and it just needed stuff ripped out and painted.”

The most costly and time-consuming renovation was the bathroom, which Schmidt jokingly says, “took it out of me—both financially and emotionally!” The new room is a wash of whites and grays with a new Duravit “Happy D” washbasin and toilet and inexpensive subway tiling. Amazingly, even in this serene, almost colorless space, Schmidt finds ways to insert chromatic disruption: an illuminated swatch of floral fabric set in glass serves as a night-light, and a stack of bright antique tins store knickknacks and jewelry.

Another major endeavor was the flooring, which had been covered in wall-to-wall carpeting with tiling beneath. Ripping up both undesirable layers revealed a light, softwood floor, which Schmidt had refinished. The previous owners had removed the metal floor grates before laying carpet, leaving voids in almost every room. Instead of reflooring the entire house, Schmidt opted to repair the holes—going against the grain instead of with it. The result: interesting geometric patchwork punches throughout.

Since the living room, dining, and kitchen spaces are small and run along a single axis, Schmidt had to be clever with furnishings. To accommodate (and not obscure) the living room’s low, wide windows, Schmidt found petite sofas at Pottery Barn and at a vintage shop in Nyack, New York. Each is covered in a neutral hemp slipcover, made by Schmidt. The kitchen and dining areas have a shotgun feel, which Schmidt offset by painting the back kitchen wall chartreuse. The dining table was pilfered from her studio and altered slightly. Schmidt sanded and oiled the top, painted the bottom, and trimmed the legs. Above the table hangs a brightly colored paper lantern. “I was going to buy a real grown-up light fixture,” she says, “but I kept thinking that I’d have to move the conduit so that it would actually hang over the dining room table. I finally got so fed up that I resorted to the swag cord. Then I thought, ‘What is so bad about the swag?’”

“It’s like what I do with my quilts,” she continues. “It’s a combination of things you’ve learned, coupled with your natural inclination. I love weird juxtapositions—I’m not a purist in any way. And,” she pauses, “I’m cheap!”

Of course, there is a certain breadth of knowledge in intuition, and whatever Schmidt feels she might lack in studied connoisseurship and purist aestheticism, she makes up for tenfold in a style and approach that is all her own.

Images, from top: Schmidt’s light-filled living room is simply furnished with two petite sofas; A quilt sample from a work in progress titled “Hills ’n’ Hollers” (pattern available at dsquilts.com), in which Schmidt’s new fabric collection “Hope Valley” features heavily; Schmidt’s bedroom is filled with more personal art pieces; Schmidt’s cat Boo lounges on a quilt turned table runner in Schmidt’s dining room.