Inside a French Provincial–Style Seattle Home That Was Restored to Its Classic Glory

It’s often said that the third time’s the charm. But for Seattle-based interior designer Kylee Shintaffer, a trio of remodels on her family’s home in the city’s quiet Montlake neighborhood left her feeling unfulfilled. “We’d lived there for a number of years and gotten to the point where we had done everything we could with that house,” Shintaffer recalls. “We were ready for a new project.”

By 2018, Shintaffer and her husband—who have a teenage daughter and a goldendoodle named Tucker—were officially on the hunt for a new house. The family loved Montlake’s central location, but their home sat in the woodsy shadow of nearby Capitol Hill, which limited the amount of natural light reaching the interiors—a perpetual struggle for Pacific Northwesterners.

After a search that included multiple neighborhoods around Seattle, the family found a nearly 100-year-old French Provincial–style home less than a mile away from Lake Washington. Built in 1926, the house was designed by local architect J. Lister Holmes, who is best known for his work on the residence at the Bloedel Reserve, a 150-acre nature preserve on Bainbridge Island, Washington. According to Shintaffer, who references classical styles in much of her work, the history and architecture of the house had her hooked from the first viewing—but the interiors left much to be desired.

“The house was in good condition,” she explains, “but it had gone through a series of remodels throughout the years and didn’t feel cohesive or in keeping with its historic nature.” The renovations had left the house with a broken-up floor plan and interiors that included inconsistent molding, wrought-iron stair railings, elaborate light fixtures, and dated flooring. A second stairwell adjacent to the main one in the entryway felt redundant and took up valuable space, while an attempt to connect the house and a detached garage with a glass atrium felt disjointed and out of place.

To help her achieve her classic meets contemporary vision, Shintaffer brought on local architect Duncan McRoberts, who is known as a leading practitioner of traditional and classical architecture. “Duncan understood what to do with this building,” she says. Looking to start with a blank slate—and best utilize the house’s square footage—the design team opted to fully gut the structure, expanding the footprint slightly and reorganizing the rooms to increase connectivity and flow. The main floor—home to public spaces including the kitchen, dining rooms, living room, and a less formal breakfast area—is ordered as an enfilade, a move that increases natural light and creates a long, united sight line running the length of the house. “We used wide openings that feel contemporary, but that sense of symmetry taps into classic roots,” Shintaffer explains.

Anchored with a neutral color palette, the interiors embrace meticulous craftsmanship and elevated details—oak flooring laid out in different patterns in each room, for example, or a succession of moldings based on French and Roman archival drawings—that showcase McRoberts’ studied approach. Vintage French furniture from the 1920s to the 1940s mixes with contemporary pieces for a gorgeous mélange from the likes of Royère, Maison Leleu, Jean Michele Frank, and Gunnar Nylund. Imported marble, hand-layered plaster walls, and high-end, textured textiles—cashmere, mohair, wool, silk, and linen—bring a refined sense of depth. “This project gave me the opportunity to play with materiality in a way that I hadn’t before,” Shintaffer notes.

On the second floor, private spaces continue in the same aesthetic, with the two guest rooms introducing color through wall treatments: In one, a custom-printed woodland-themed wallpaper from Zuber brings in a dusty gray-blue tone, while the other utilizes a sage green Jim Thompson silk fabric that was paper-backed and applied to the wall. A sitting room leading into the primary suite was a suggestion by McRoberts that Shintaffer was hesitant about at first, but now “it’s one of my favorite spots in the home,” she gushes.

The extensive renovation—which includes an office for Shintaffer’s design firm in the basement, a family TV and game room in the former attic, and a rethought yard and pool area—took four years to complete, but Shintaffer feels that she owed it to the house to take the time to honor what stood while also looking towards the future. “I believe that good design holds up as time passes,” she says. “I hope this house lasts at least another hundred years.”