Suzanne Tucker’s clients wanted to update the kitchen of their weekend cottage in Napa Valley, which they’d owned for more than 30 years. It was a relatively small job for Tucker, an experienced designer who’s usually tasked with transforming entire residences. Yet the clients were longtime friends, and so the kitchen renovation began. It didn’t take very long for new ideas to arise. Tucker soon found herself redecorating the living room, then the library, followed by a bedroom, a bathroom, and eventually the pool pavilion and all of the home’s outdoor terraces, which overlook a picturesque garden filled with rose bushes, climbing vines, and intricately pruned boxwoods. “There was a domino effect,” says the designer, whose firm, Tucker & Marks Inc., has been in business since 1986. “It became one of those wonderful projects that had a lovely lifespan.”
The garden, designed by the late Jack Chandler and included in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens, drove many of Tucker’s aesthetic choices for the interiors. In the aforementioned kitchen, which was opened into the family room to create one large gathering space, she painted the cabinets a soft wheat color and picked a pale green glazed ceramic tile for the backsplash, allowing the brightness of the foliage behind the windows to really stand out. “We lightened everything up to take advantage of this incredible garden,” Tucker says. “It’s a focal point of mine to have a fluid context, with colors that flow into what’s outside.”
Keeping that principle in mind, she picked a series of floral fabrics that resemble the assortment of roses and peonies seen on the eight acres of land surrounding the property. In the living room, windows were dressed in Robert Kime’s Opium Poppy linen printed with large-scale blooms, and a set of custom club chairs were upholstered in Kime’s Cory Minor, a classic motif inspired by the British countryside. Flowers also adorn a set of famille rose antique porcelain vases (rare pieces found in Paris’s Galerie Steinitz), and a mauve-tinged Persian rug from the early 1900s.
