Designer Rachel Alcorn knows Oak Park. Now based in Glen Ellyn, she began her career during the decade that she lived in Oak Park, and she has deep ties to the community. Through her firm, Two Hands Interiors, she has worked with many homeowners of historic homes.
Her work on an Oak Park home on Forest Avenue stands as a good representation of why clients call Two Hands Interiors: they love the charm and history of their historic homes but want to bring a sense of modern design into their spaces.
Alcorn’s clients on this project called her when they purchased their home just down the street from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio roughly 10 years ago. At that time, the young family was looking to put their own spin on the home, which Alcorn says probably began life as a Victorian but was remodeled with a Tudor spin early in its lifespan.
Like a lot of her clients who have purchased a new-to-them home, Alcorn says these clients wanted to live in the home before making major changes.
“We cleaned up the Tuscan red walls and put a Band-Aid on the kitchen. Then, we did a lot of decorating for a few years before jumping into renovations,” Alcorn said.
When they jumped in, they did so feet first. Working with Jacknow Construction, the couple embarked on a renovation to create a new kitchen, mudroom, powder room, keeping room and primary suite. During the process, they removed the back stairs, reconfigured the kids’ bathrooms and renovated the basement too.
Alcorn noted that their earlier work decorating the home paid off. They established a design vernacular with the clients that guided the renovation, and many of the elements they’d used to decorate the home during the first phase remained and inspired the rooms’ directions.
One overarching theme? Color.
“As a firm, we love color,” Alcorn said. “Sometimes, what people don’t have a reference point for is that historic homes did use a lot of color. Victorian and Arts and Crafts homes used saturated color.”
In the kitchen, the husband wanted function. He was interested in a space that would work well for the family of five. Alcorn says the wife was focused on fun and color. Alcorn knew they didn’t like how dark their old kitchen was, so she used mostly white cabinets but punched up the color with fabric in the window shades and counter stool cushions. A wall of walnut-stained cabinets reads as a furniture in the room.
A key part of the space is what Alcorn calls the keeping room. Next to the kitchen, it allows family and friends to be in the heart of the home but in a more comfortable chair.
Another important piece for the family and their kids is the adjacent mudroom. Alcorn chose Schumacher’s Citrus Garden wallpaper for the room.
“It’s an historic print revitalized for modern production. We started with that and pulled the cabinet color from there.”
In the primary suite, Alcorn ran with the directive to create a bathroom that felt like a high-end hotel. The room has plenty of modern amenities like a steam shower and a separate toilet room, but the marble, subway tile and trim profiles were inspired by the era the home was built.
The entire process took roughly a year and a half to complete and wasn’t without its share of surprises. Some surprises, like a buried cistern in the yard, were confusing, and others, like a prohibition-era license plate and an old black and white photo of the home, were treasures.
Alcorn says that it’s always much harder to renovate a historic home than it is to build new. “Like any old home renovation, we pull the threads of the sweater very carefully to not unravel the rooms and items we didn’t want to touch.”
The goal was to give the family modern function in a bespoke way that also respected the home. Alcorn concludes, “It makes us happy as a firm to see these historic homes get a lot of love and carry on for the next generation.”