A Costume Designer Transformed This “Plain White Box” into a Fun, Moody Space
Adrienne Breaux
·9 min read
"In an open floor plan there is only dining and lounging," describes costume designerSue Makkoo of her living room she refers to as a lounge. "I felt like we had room to be funky. This is, after all, California. I took a break from neutrals and leaned into pattern and vintage finds." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"The sofa was my creation with @hilobrooklyn. And the teak live-edge coffee table is a '70s piece I found while antiquing in upstate NY. The rug doesn’t seem like it should go, but I knew we needed to ground it with a pinkish red. The color is reflected in the flowers of the sofa. I find I actually miss this room when I am gone. It has so much soul," she says. Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"The leather chair is a favorite spot to sit and one of my few new purchases. The mirror and small floral oil painting are thrift finds along the way. The gentleman’s dresser is the salvation of the apartment. It holds all my linens and anything you need when going out for the day. If it doesn’t fit in the dresser then I don’t keep it. That keeps things to a minimum," Sue admits. Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"The kitchen is well appointed and fun to cook in because you are right in the action. I was hunting for a bar cart that could also hold my overflow of cookbooks and I found this one at a charity shop for $20. It speaks the same language as some of the other furniture and had just been dropped there by a high-end home store in the design district," Sue begins. "My heart began to beat harder when I knew I found the perfect thing and unearthed if from the piles of stuff it was holding in some back corner of the shop. Sometimes you just see the magic in something. I purchased the barstools on Amazon. It's important to measure the island or bar they will be against, as the wrong scale stool throws everything off. The set was inexpensive, as I know this is a temporary home and did not want to invest in something I may not need in the future. But for now I love them." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"The bedroom is layers of peace," Sue explains. "I can never wait to crawl in at night. The pale blue linen duvet is from Etsy and the needlework pillow has been in every house I have lived in since 1996. I found the perfect stained glass lamp at a secondhand store that was carrying lots of different glass. When I asked, the owner said a local glassmaker who had been producing them decided he didn’t want to make shades anymore and offloaded them to thrift stores around town." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"I was looking for a lamp but never considered stained glass. I think it finished the room," Sue continues. "I used the same peel-and-stick wallpaper in the bedroom as the lounge because I had some left and they are really right next to one another so it made sense. The curtains are vintage finds from a trip to Kentucky years ago. That wall has an air conditioner unit and the curtains disguise it. If the evening is hot I slide the curtain over and cool things down. The rod is the most important thing to that setup. I measured the distance the air conditioner stuck out from the wall and found a double rod that would clear that. It stops the room from feeling like a rental and makes it really feel like a restful space all my own." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"The most valuable thing here though is my flag we received at my father's funeral. He was a Navy man and I was blown away at the respect and ceremony shown this man when he passed. I keep it near and remember the respect and care we should always show each other," Sue writes. Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
Thank you for sharing your home with us, Sue! Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
Costume designerSue Makkoo calls her home “Lemonade,” and it’s a 700-square-foot rental apartment located in Southern California she moved into “after a trauma left our home on the East Coast unsafe to stay in. The family agreed that selling my little dream cottage was the best thing to do, so I moved to Lemonade,” Sue explains, who shares her home with her two dogs, Hudson and Huey.
“As a costume designer I loved taking on the challenge of creating a moody, fun space out of a plain white box with two windows. This was a far cry from the neutral cottage I owned on the East Coast, with views staring lovingly into a creek and the woods beyond,” Sue explains. “My daughter challenged me to use color; I challenged myself to use pattern. How much pattern does it take to return a room to peace? After closing the door to my East Coast home and all its furnishings I began again using primarily vintage finds. Turns out this space makes me genuinely happy. I love Lemonade.”
"I was recently in London and had realized more than any palace I wanted to see the House of Hackney," Sue explains. "A wonderful cab driver and I spent time trying to find the place as it had moved to an old church in a park. He was so invested in my seeing exactly what I wanted to see. When I walked in I cried. Literally. It was such a fun space and I felt home there." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
"I brought back two pillows, one called 'Zeus' and one 'Love letters.' If you look closely at the fabric, pansies are handing love letters to their lovers. How can you resist? They were worth the creative packing for the return home where they now live proudly on my custom sofa. Somehow they finish the room and I am obsessed." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
“As a 58-year-old woman I feel the winds of change blowing. I have always done the ‘right thing’ and I think this apartment is a little rebellious. That is what I do now: challenge myself to be more rebellious and use the time we have here in exciting ways. Layering so much pattern was new and uncomfortable, but I loved the challenge. When the kids were young the only request they had was no ‘flower pictures.’ Now I indulge my love of little floral oil paintings, including one that was a movie prop from the 1940s. Green, blue, and lilac are my favorite color combinations. It always feels a bit like a rainstorm. So when I designed my sofa and also my bedroom, I remembered that this was really just for me and leaned all the way in.”
"I used a peel and stick wallpaper in the living room and the bedroom," Sue begins. "During the pandemic I taught myself how to wallpaper, but much to my son's dismay, as he was living with me at the time, it takes two. I was able to hang this paper alone. I love the idea that if I get bored I can change the paper and change the room at very little cost. I chose to paper a small space with a darker paper because there is an ugly heating unit at eye level in the wall and I wanted to make it recede. Now you just don't notice it. I don't think I will ever go back to traditional wallpaper again." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
Sue says she loves how her living room came together, and that thanks to layout it’s essentially a “great room that includes the kitchen, but the lounge space feels like it beckons you to come sit, have a bourbon, and talk the night away.” The star of the living room is the sofa, which is made up of three pieces of a Milo Baughman pit sofa that she says was in “terrible” shape. So she worked with @hilobrooklyn to recreate the sofa. “The best part of the day was when the latest stack of fabric samples would arrive and I could play. With Laura’s guidance and magic we created this sofa, and I am obsessed!
"There needs to be a place for everything. If it is going to sit in a closet or a stack of things don’t buy it. I really do only have what makes me happy," Sue advises. "Your home is a reflection of your heart." Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
Other secondhand gems in the home are the 1970s-era teak live-edge coffee table Sue “bartered for in Hudson, NY. I kept texting the vendor at The Antique’s Warehouse that I was busy doing all kinds of crazy things to earn enough to buy the table. Eventually he wrote back that he thought I was so funny I just had to it. He asked what I could pay and we struck a deal.”
"Over the years I have cleaned out the packed homes of my family as they moved to nursing homes and I vowed never to leave all that for another person to handle. I regularly purge items that no longer serve me to keep clutter at bay. I am a maximalist. I wanted to be a minimalist but that just didn’t work out so I vowed to keep things true to my spirit and nothing else," Sue admits. Credit: Sue MakkooCredit: Sue Makkoo
She reports that the gentleman’s dresser is a “Kaiyo purchase and I had to drive to New Jersey to pick it up … only to immediately load it into a pod for the move. I guess some of these things could have been done once I got to California, but when you find a piece that moves you then you just go for it and figure the rest out later. The room feels like a collage of things that should not work together, but ultimately they do and they make each other better for it. If only we all did that.”
Multi-partner relationships are becoming more culturally accepted, but they're still considered legally illegitimate nearly everywhere in the United States.
If you’re searching for today’s best savings interest rates, we’ve narrowed down some of the top offers. Learn more about savings interest rates today.
Vanguard has long had a reputation for eschewing the random fees asset managers are known for. But as our contributing columnist Allan Sloan notes, the company has started charging what he calls chintzy fees.
Kansas City Chiefs players Wayna Morris and Chukwuebuka Godrick were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession, according to a Johnson County Sheriff.
After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta -- an app 10 years in the making -- hit the top of the App Store's charts. Delta's game emulator was built by developer Riley Testut, who had begun his experiments in this space by figuring out how to load games onto graphing calculators, before turning to iOS.
