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Cari Giannoulias had been contemplating pausing her design work when a pair of old clients, a couple with three teens from Chicago, called her up and asked her if she’d reimagine their new home in Park City, Utah. “It was a no-brainer, they’re that easy to work with,” says Giannoulias. The brief wasn’t all that different from their last house: they wanted their vacation retreat to feel as warm as their full-time home in the city. It was that simple. Everything else was up to Giannoulias. “I picked the outside stone, the hardware on the doors, the toilets—you name it,” she says.
But even with total creative freedom, Giannoulias’s design process wasn’t without challenges. For starters, she had to figure out how to cozy up a new-build. Right away, she clocked the windows. Many of them needed to be bigger, she noted. “In some areas, they weren’t doing enough to bring the landscape in,” she recalls. In the mornings, a low mist sweeps across the Jordanelle Reservoir below “giving everything an ethereal look,” says the designer. By afternoon, the sharp mountain peaks come into focus.
While Giannoulias worked with the builder Hibbs Homes on fine-tuning the bones of the house, the real transformation came down to the decorative details. In addition to running her studio, Giannoulias is also the creator of One Perfect Find, a shoppable curation of beautifully made objects she’s discovered from all over the world. This project is an assemblage of those pieces. Ahead, the designer gets into the nitty-gritty of cozying-up this Utah spec-house.
Was one of the views you were focused on expanding this one in the dining space?
That window was always big but it needed to be changed because it was too close to the ground, so there was no way to make a bench seating situation. We moved it up toward the ceiling, and then we widened it.
Is that a hidden TV in the living room?
This is not a family that watches a lot of TV to begin with, but they recognized the need for when there’s gatherings. So, we knew there had to be a TV but the idea was always to hide it. We deliberately built the millwork around it so it could completely disappear. There is a deep space behind there and you can pull the TV out and swing it in all directions.
What design elements did you prioritize in the kitchen?
The reason for the paneling in the kitchen was that the ceiling is very tall. In order for the kitchen to not get lost in the rest of the room, your eye needs a visual break from seeing a bunch of plain wall.
The art throughout the house seems to be a cheeky nod to the surrounding area.
All of the art has some kind of a nod to being in a snowy, mountainous place or nature, but it’s not so obvious. In the primary bedroom, the piece over the fireplace is mountains but it’s not so literal.
The British artist Peter Doig influenced some of the design choices you made—how so?
He is one of my favorite artists, which is funny because I am not naturally a deep-saturated-color type of person when it comes to decorating a home. Even though his art wasn’t in the house, as I was searching for inspiration for this project, I kept coming back to him. I kept thinking, what if Peter Doig redid Le Coucou, the hotel in Méribel in the French Alps? That’s what this home ended up being for me. His palettes are very unapologetic.
The bedroom with the deep blue rug feels like a pretty prime example, would you say so?
I call it the blueberry room (it got its name from the carpet, obviously). I felt like cobalt blue in a mountain home is unexpected but yet it doesn’t feel out of place.
This color reminds me, in a way, of snow.
All of the colors (the black linen drapes, the antique chair that I redid in stripes, the House of Hackney frog pillow), it all felt quirky but in a rich, elevated way.
What was your “one perfect find” for this house?
This house contains a lot of “one perfect finds.” I have always loved the Nickey Kehoe Windsor chair. I had been holding on to it for years, and then this house came along. The vintage Daumiller dining chairs. The Servomuto sconces in the powder room that look like birds—I had been holding on to for years.
How did you balance this feeling of fun and fancy in spaces like the ground floor TV room?
Wherever I used pattern, I wanted it to feel like a nod to the past. So, for instance, you can see the back of the custom sofa has an elevated plaid fabric. And the circles around the fireplace is a pattern that I’m sure we’ve seen a bunch of times, but it is in different colored marble.
And there is nothing cheesy about the billiards area.
I’m an obsessive researcher. To be honest, I’m not a pool table person. When a client says to me, “I need a pool table,” I’m like, “Oh my God.” But I thought, “Okay, how are we going to make this room look great?” We’re going to need custom millwork. Every single piece of millwork in this house I designed, from the bar to the record shelves. All of it speaks to each other; they follow a palette and a rhythm.
The primary bathroom also has amazing millwork. Are those hidden medicine cabinets in the walls?
I reworked the window to make room for the dark walnut cabinetry. I’d been drawn to a vintage design of these mirrors that I had seen many years ago. I could not find the mirrors so I made them and reimagined them. The medicine cabinets are built right into the wall to keep everything clean and functional. The big thing was the floor in here: It was a floor that I had seen in Spain and reimagined it for this bathroom.
Any favorite materials you landed on for the other bathrooms?
I could look at slabs of marble for hours. A palette this rich called for stone that could hold its own. I loved using very strong marble on the floors especially. In the yellow bathroom, the stone matches these imperfect ceramic tiles. Combining those materials was a favorite moment for me.
What was your focus in this bunkroom other than fitting as many people as possible?
The challenge with this room was that it’s the smallest in the house, and the beds had to be queen-size. Every inch mattered. I wanted the bunks to feel like they had existed decades ago. The pine wood and this carved detail on the frame gave it a ’70s throwback moment. They feel substantial, like they belong in the rest of the custom house.
What pieces of furniture or lighting were you most excited to bring into this house?
Anything Guillerme Et Chambron, there’s a couple pieces throughout the house. There’s a really great mirror from South Loop Loft in the foyer. The console table in the powder room has hidden storage for soaps and towels and toilet paper rolls.
What was your favorite paint color that you ended up using in this house?
The pantry for me is a favorite: Farrow & Ball Picture Gallery Red. I’m not even really a red person, but it transformed this room. It speaks back to the terracotta floor and feels like a warm hug.