house proud, Dee Elms
and Doug Brown stand
before their new front door
(right). The view on
entering the house (left)
reveals how a dividing wall
came down to create one
big all-purpose space on
the first floor. Elms’s fine
interior design hand is seen
in the furniture choices,
window treatments, and
neutral palette, which she
enlivened with pattern and
color in the accessories.
Written and produced by ESTELLE BOND GURALNICK
Photography by GREG PREMRU
Doug brown majored in american history and works as a software
product manager, but he seems to hum his happiest tunes when wielding a hammer. He was about halfway through his do-it-yourself renovation of an l898 Victorian worker’s cottage in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
when, in 2004, he met Dee Elms, the woman who would become his
fiancee. “He thought the scene might scare me,” she says, “but the first
time I walked through the house, interiors back to the studs, no drywall, and Doug camping
in a little wallpapered bedroom, it wasn’t a shock at all, because progress sites are the norm
in my own work as an interior designer.”
Elms, a principal at Terrat Elms Interior Design in Boston, moved in with Brown in
2006, when the house was more habitable. Brown now gives Elms top billing as “a great
cheerleader” for his heroic accomplishment: turning a wreck of a house into a charming
home for the two of them.
Brown had been living with five friends from Princeton University, his alma mater,
in a seven-bedroom house in Cambridge’s Central Square in 2002 when he began to feel
the urge to move on. “I wanted a project,” he says. “There are a lot of nice old houses in
Cambridge that just aren’t surviving, and I went on a hunt for one that I could restore
the 1898 worker’s cottage
is now an eye-catcher,
painted “Molten Bronze,”
a Glidden color. Though the
siding is original, hand-cut
scalloped shingles were
added to accentuate the
gable. Chain-link fencing
gave way to handsome new
landscaping by Gregory
Lombardi Design, a
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
landscape architecture firm.
