With the ground-floor rooms—living, dining, and kitchen areas—now open to each other, Hoffmann chose a soft sand colour to run through the space and up the stairs. "It feels disjointed to me when a house is cut into different colours," she says. "I like to have a palette that carries through." Hoffmann, who grew up in a 17th-century hunting lodge in Portugal, has an abiding love for charming old houses and believes in accommodating a home's original architecture—but that doesn't extend to the busy, Victorian-era style of decorating that may have been this home's original look. Preferring cottage style's cleaner lines for the farmhouse, she filled it with white cotton slipcovers, wicker and refurbished junk-shop furniture, all set against the backdrop of neutral tones and occasional accents of her favourite hues: blue and yellow. Her look has "a beachy quality, more of a Nantucket feel," she says. Ultimately, its simplicity is what appeals to her: "It's not what you put inside, it's respecting the original house that matters."
Catherine Hoffmann's style by numbers
1. "Things have to be useful. The slipcovers in the dining room aren't just pretty, they're practical."
2. "I have to keep things simple. I don't like frilly curtains, frou-frou, over-decorating. Houses should not be showrooms."
3. "Everything I have is salvaged. I go to auctions, salvage yards. If something doesn't work, I trade it back and get something else."
4. "I carry the same colours through common living areas and corridors. Even if I don't do the walls the same colour, I bring the same colours through in other elements, like trim or accents."
5."I like to use high-gloss white on baseboards and trim. It's easy to clean, it's a lovely contrast to your wall colour, and you see the imperfections. I lıke that; when it's too perfect, something's wrong."
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