Creating a ‘festive fantasy’

Karen Somers used to have 30 vast storage boxes filled with zero though Christmas decorations for a house. But in a final integrate of years, she’s thrown or given many of those things away.

Somers, 54, a second-grade clergyman during Haley Elementary School in Fort Wayne, hasn’t left and gotten all Scrooge-y as she’s gotten older. But after she and her father Jim, 56, designed and built a new contemporary-style home about 3 years ago, she says, her holiday ambience changed.

Somers still loves decorating for Christmas and interesting friends in her holiday-bedecked home. But she’s taken to a pared-down, neat character some-more matched to her new house.

“You don’t wish to do Santa faces. And we got absolved of all my raffia angels,” she says.

She calls it “festive fantasy” and says it’s “more about glitz and glamour” than her pervious holiday efforts. “It’s sparkly,” she says. “But tasteful.”

Visitors to a stone-fronted plantation during 3227 Meadows Park Way on Fort Wayne’s north side are greeted with a vast spray embellished with china ornaments and bullion filigree badge on a front doorway and white wire lights along a roofline.

Inside, in a good room, a vast tree glitters with decorations that embody heart-shaped ornaments in silver, glittery china angel wings and a red and china topper fit for a Las Vegas showgirl opposite a room’s wall of east-facing, arched windows.

Somers places synthetic or vital floral arrangements in many of a rooms, decorates railings with red bows, puts Christmas balls in potion bowls and adds seasonally suitable candles. Many decorations have clear or ice themes.

“It’s only really pretty,” she says, adding that she thinks she’s achieved a native feel with a contemporary vibe, that is infrequently difficult. “We leave it adult all winter.”

Her wholehearted sacrament of contemporary décor can be seen via a atmospheric home, that hosts a master apartment and dual additional bedrooms on a categorical floor, and a family room, vast media room and dual additional guest bedrooms in a walk-out basement.

The initial floor’s kitchen opens to a good room and has a black granite-topped credentials and eating counter. A sitting room is only off a kitchen and a dining room is only off a front entry. There’s a apart washing room as good as a powder room and second Jack-and-Jill bath.

Somers says she was means to select materials, seat and colors that element one another while a residence was being built, including earth-colored travertine flooring for a entry, kitchen and sitting room and a gray mill approximate for a stovetop.

In a good room, a large, winding sectional with a dove-gray credentials and vast festooned dahlia-like flowers in black velvet sets a tinge for examination a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. A holiday hold is combined with splendid red pillows yarn-embroidered with a singular snowflake.

Bathrooms underline surprising above-counter vessel sinks and contemporary immaculate and clear lighting fixtures. The master bath has a vast walk-in ceramic tile showering with pebbled trim.

She and her father suffer their possess apart offices – hers with a thriving closet for well-organized scrapbooking and training supplies.

Jim also enjoys examination football in a museum room – “We call it only ‘The Room,’ ” Karen says – where he can cocoon on a sectional’s chaise in front of a 106-inch projection TV shade that takes adult many of one wall. He also likes manning a family room soppy bar with art pieces – and bar chair backs – giving loyalty to martinis.

When a integrate designed a place, Karen says, they were looking for something to see them by a second partial of their life together.

Parents of dual grown sons – Mike, 25, of Fort Wayne, and Brant, 27, in a U.S. Army Special Forces and vital with his mother in North Carolina – a dual weren’t so most meddlesome in downsizing as in carrying a home that accommodated their stream life.

“I call it a prerogative house,” she says.

But once she started to streamline, a demeanour grew on her. She gave some of a couple’s former country-style seat to their sons and repurposed other pieces for a guest bedrooms.

“I favourite a lot ‘things’ (around a house), and Jim wanted some-more of a change,” she confesses, adding that she puts out a integrate of Santas for aged times’ sake. “But now we like this.”

rsalter@jg.net