Jenny Callison
Cincinnati Enquirer

Getting married can involve far more than blending two lives or even two families; it involves remaking a household. When Silvia Tavera and Michael Leal got married last summer, and he moved into her Wyoming mid-century home, they embarked upon an adventure: creating a unified home interior that would reflect their individual tastes and new family identity.

When she purchased the home in 2005, Mexican-born Tavera-Leal did some renovations, focusing on opening up the kitchen and adjoining space.

“This was a series of small, claustrophobic rooms,” she explains, gesturing from the now-open plan kitchen across a spacious family room that looks out onto a generous-size deck. “But once I remodeled, I wasn’t sure what to do about the color, so I left this room white for three years.”

The kitchen and family room wasn’t the only area isolated by its color scheme. Other rooms were painted strong primary colors such as deep blue and yellow, but there was no overall vision to connect them. So the newlyweds sought professional advice from Tracy Dean, owner of Peppercorn Interiors in Wyoming.

“Tracy started working with us in early October,” Leal says. “What we asked her to do was to find unifying themes throughout the house. It was time to put our collected minds with Tracy to make this our house.”

“Silvia gave me the name of a Mexican architect whose work she admires (Luis Barragan),” adds Dean. “I looked up his designs and saw that he uses strong, bold colors with a flash of accent color. Michael and Silvia love strong colors and are not afraid of using them.

“In addition, the house has many wonderful architectural features and lots of natural light; we wanted to highlight the architecture.”

Leal explains, “Tracy took everything away and then asked us, ‘What makes this house beautiful and unique?’ She also brought in an Anthropologie magazine, which had pictures of dark gray concrete walls with bright splashes of color.”

Dean proposed an overall combination of orange and a muted, neutral green for the walls throughout the living area. Leal admits that he was a bit taken aback when the first orange wall was completed, but changed his mind when he saw the finished effect in the high-ceilinged living room, as green balanced orange, and the exterior light played on the wall surfaces.

Now, with its off-white and natural wood furnishings returned to the room, and the two-tone green area rug echoing the wall color, the living room is a balanced whole. Unusual pieces of art work provide design accents, just as they do in adjacent rooms.

For example, an orange wall in the entrance hall provides just the right dramatic backdrop for Tavera-Leal’s Sergio Bustamante ceramic sculptures of sun and moon. In the dining room, a built-in sideboard that Leal painted a warm gray provides the perfect spot for her collection of Calaveras “Day of the Dead” statues. Above, a horizontal wood beam received a coat of yellow paint.

“We wanted yellow to be a highlight color in the house,” explains Leal.

Painting the kitchen and family room the same orange and green solved the “unity” problem, tying this space into the rest of the living and dining areas. Tavera-Leal had chosen light maple cabinets for the kitchen and the same blond wood for the flooring in the family room. The kitchen tile echoes the gray of the dining room sideboard. And the counter top granite is patterned in yellow and black.

By painting the interior “boxes” of all three skylights a strong yellow, the daylight is augmented by a cheery glow even on gloomy days. Visible from the family room down a hallway is a bright yellow end wall, on which hangs a colorful painting, created as a wedding gift by family friend Allison Youklis.

Dean, who says it was “such a pleasure” to work with the new color scheme, found several pieces of artwork for the family room that helped tie the colors together. A family painting hangs over the curved brick fireplace in another corner of the room. The couple is now in the process of winnowing their combined furnishings to suit the room’s new mood.

“It is so much fun to have people here now,” Tavera-Leal says. “The work we have done inspired us to fix up the other rooms.

“When Michael moved in, it was difficult for him to bring in his things, his pictures. It was hard for me to give up space. But through this renovation process, this stopped being my house and started being our house.”