The Granger Project- Chapter 3: The Threads
Before I picked a single finish for this house, my husband Jared and I went through everything the family left behind. Cleaning out a home like this one is slow work, and most of it ends up in a dumpster. But every so often you find something that stops you, and you set it aside without quite knowing why.
That's how I ended up with a small pile of things in my office. A brass doorknocker engraved Carl M. Smith. Silver serving pieces with an "S" monogram. A vintage Emily Post Etiquette. A small onyx elephant. A stack of floral handkerchiefs, all of them embroidered in blue. And a painting.
The found objects, styled with the finishes they inspired. Flat lay by Jessi Agee.
The painting was a bridal portrait dated 1952. Mary Lou Smith, Carl and Mildred's second daughter, in a lace gown against a deep blue background. According to what I could find online, she passed away in 2014. I found her here, in a house she grew up in, seventy years after she left it. I couldn’t bear the thought of getting rid of her portrait because it felt like she should still have a place in the house, and because the blue behind her turned out to be the whole story. Once I laid it all out together, I saw it. The blue in the handkerchiefs. The blue behind Mary Lou. And then I started noticing it everywhere the family had already put it, long before I showed up.
The original house was full of blue, and none of it was an accident. Blue countertops in the kitchen. A blue-and-white check linoleum on the floor. Blue tile in the upstairs bathroom. Blue floral wallpaper in the dining room. Jerome Pillow drew this house, and the family who lived in it chose these things on purpose, back when a color like that was a decision you committed to for good. It wasn't a trend they were chasing. It was simply the palette of the home.
I could have started from scratch. Picked something current, something that would have photographed beautifully for a few years and then dated the whole house. But that has never been how I work, and it would have been the wrong thing to do here in particular. This house already knew what it was. My job wasn't to hand it a new personality; it was to listen to the one it had and carry it forward.
So I let the house lead. I pulled two threads out of everything I'd found, the blue and the check, and I decided that some of the new selections would honor them. Not by copying what was there. The old linoleum wasn't coming back, and neither were the blue laminate countertops. But the idea of them, the color and the pattern the family loved, would run through the new design.
The blue shows up now in ways the original owners might not have predicted but would recognize. It's in a hand-painted tile backsplash in the kitchen. It's in a diamond-lattice floor tile that runs through the side entry into the new addition. It's in the blue cabinetry I chose for the laundry and mudroom, in a botanical wallpaper full of birds, and in a deep blue chrysanthemum paper waiting in a powder room. The check inspired new patterns found in the backsplash and the lattice tile, both nodding back to the linoleum without ever pretending to be it.
I'll walk you through each of those rooms in the chapters ahead, so I won't get into the weeds on any single one here. What matters for now is the thinking behind all of them. Every blue, every pattern, every finish I chose was already sitting on my worktable in some form, in a stack of things a family left behind. The doorknocker with Carl's name on it. The handkerchiefs. Mary Lou, in her wedding dress, in 1952.
This is the part of my work I love most, and it's the part that doesn't photograph. A house will tell you what it wants if you slow down enough to hear it. This one told me in blue.
Next, we go into the kitchen, where all of this stopped being a theory and started being a room. Chapter 4 will post on Tuesday, August 4, 2026.
Author's note: I'm sharing the Granger Project one area of the house at a time, not in strict order. The real work spanned three years, and the exterior, interior, and addition all overlapped, so the photos won't always line up with a single moment in time. The facts don't change, just the way I've grouped them.
Finished photos by Kayleigh Gossett.
