Elaine Santos Design
/Elaine Santos Design
New York
Photography by Joshua McHugh
With studios in New York City and Chatham, NY, Elaine Santos Design has provided the East Coast these last three years with brilliant, high-end interior designs. Clients come to them for their rich aesthetics that are both modern and timeless, as well as for the firm’s self-proclaimed design intent: “Our mission and greatest achievement will always be to create comfortable, meaningful homes filled with artistic integrity, beauty, and inspiration.”
The owner and principal designer of this firm is Elaine Santos, a talented interior designer with an impressive resume of experience at prestigious Manhattan interior design firms. For nearly ten years before founding Elaine Santos Design, she even lead the interior design department at BarlisWedlick, an Architectural Digest Top 100 firm. Elaine’s eye for style is paired with an appreciation for sustainability, a quality which is increasingly being valued in the design industry.
Relocating from Brooklyn, a young couple were in search of a new place to call home when they happened upon an old carriage house and immediately fell in love with the quirky structure. The space was dated and in need of a refresh, so the couple asked Elaine and her team to turn their new house into a home. The idea of a Cotswolds cottage quickly became a piece of the project’s inspiration, and this expanded into a vision of contrasting black and white accents as they discussed it with the project’s architect, David Spence of Windigo Architecture.
At the beginning of the remodel, Elaine’s team saved one of the original sliding barn doors and set it aside. Later, the door was painted in a matte black milk paint and installed in the living room. The traditional lines of the barn door contrasted with the new concrete fireplace, creating an artistic architectural focal point. This juxtaposition of traditional and modern design was creatively threaded throughout the entire carriage house. At the project’s completion, Elaine Santos Design had transformed every corner into an enjoyable space that would remain relevant to the couple’s lifestyle for years to come.
