Original release 10 mars 2017
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Number S01E218
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Inside Supermodel Karen Elson’s Nashville Home | Celebrity Homes | Architectural Digest

Architectural Digest presents ten design pieces to steal from British model and musician Karen Elson's rambling Nashville home.

When British model-turned-musician Karen Elson spotted a rambling 1940s house in Nashville two years ago, it was love at first sight: “The exterior looked just like an English cottage,” she remembers. “And all I ever wanted was an English country house in Nashville.”

In no time, she’d tapped her friends Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward for the interior design—Elson had known them for years in Nashville and had always admired the big house Emily had decorated with Louisa. “They just had such good style,” Elson remembers, who was game to bless the duo with one of their first official design projects. “I was working really hard and I couldn’t be at my house all the time so I needed to leave the project in hands that I trusted,” she says. “They have such a creative eye—a real collaboration.”

Pierce and Ward started with the architecture, creating interior archways reminiscent of an English country home or California cottage to soften the layout. They installed built-in bookshelves for Elson’s stacks and lined the living room fireplace with Moroccan-inspired tile.

To inject the place with a healthy dose of Elson’s quirky English charm, Pierce and Ward scoured Tennessee antiques shops. They found a tufted velvet chair and a 1920s drop-leaf table at nearby Gaslamp Antiques and mixed them with pieces dear to Elson, like a dazzling Italian chandelier she snapped up on eBay and the vintage Steinway piano she found on Craigslist.

During the design process, there was one room in the house that Elson was partial to: the kitchen. “I love to cook,” she reveals. But as with the rest of the home, she left it all in the hands of Pierce and Ward, who introduced her to La Cornue (“as close to an AGA stove that I could find Stateside”) and insisted on Sherwin-Williams Underseas green on the cabinetry, which she (after a bit of convincing) eventually adored. “My fear always is to become too shabby chic or too feminine,” she says. “But this evened everything out.”

Like any truly lived-in home, Elson’s is never static. She is constantly updating her surroundings to meet her current needs. The latest decorating project? An elegant boudoir. “I needed that place where I could drink endless cups of tea,” she explains, a pang that urged her—with Pierce and Ward, of course—to turn an underutilized home office into a spot of solitude swathed in an irreverent wallpaper by illustrator Costanza Theodoli-Braschi (“it wasn’t exactly appropriate for the sitting room”).

The dressing room, along with her bedroom and bath, serves as Elson’s sanctuary. “Silence is important for my creative process,” she explains (her second album drops this month). “Once my kids have gone to school, I’ll come home and write in peace and quiet.” Her favorite stationery, songwriting notebooks, and a few flickering Jo Malone London candles (Elson is a brand ambassador for the British fragrance house) are kept at arm’s reach.

“It’s transformed my life,” she says of the new home. “I love my home, I love entertaining, when I come from traveling I’m so happy to get back into my house. I know it’s just stuff but I gotta say, it’s such a luxury to have a beautiful home.”

Read the full story here: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/tour-karen-elsons-elegant-english-inspired-nashville-home

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Inside Supermodel Karen Elson’s Nashville Home | Celebrity Homes | Architectural Digest

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