As the founder and CEO of art-and-design gallery LES Collection, Lauren Sands spends her days surrounded by beautiful objects. Which is why it was critical that the top-down overhaul of her family’s sprawling lakeside getaway—the very home where she spent her childhood summers—was not only visually striking but also meaningful. “The stuff that it’s filled with isn’t just stuff,” says Sands. “It’s filled with pieces from my artists, or that I designed, or that were passed down. When you move into a new house, it can feel stark and personality-less, but this one immediately felt like home, filled with pieces that had decades of meaning.”
Fortunately for Sands, her husband, and their two young children, AD100 designer Jeremiah Brent, whose layered interiors abound with personal resonance and unfold like an epic storyline, was among the first people she interviewed for the job. “There were so many memories tethered to the house,” Brent recalls of their first meeting. “So it was a big responsibility to reinterpret it in a way that felt like hers, that energetically honored the past and what it symobolized—and that’s where we connected intrinsically.” What could have easily become a contentious clashing of two surefooted aesthetes instead eased into a warm collaboration of like-minded visionaries.
The resulting design concept for the project, which Brent calls “the harmony of reflection,” unsurprisingly works on many levels. The interior is not only a literal and figurative reflection of the exterior, where the family spends most of their time on the lake and grounds, but its new floor plan was conceived, Brent explains, by looking at the key moments in the family’s day as concentric ripples on water. Working with Hanlon Architects and DVC Incorporated contracting, the team gutted the interiors and moved three exterior walls to breathe new life into the circa-1990s, off-white-shingled edifice. Now, private and serene secondary spaces orbit focal gathering spots. It’s an idea further echoed in the home’s collection of art and objects: from the formal living room’s biomorphic chrome coffee table and the immense dining table, whose travertine top is carved with “waves” under a four-inch resin surface, to a spiral droplet motif lining the coffers and verdigris cabinets with water-like glass fronts.
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Among Sands’s many favorite places in the residence, now more conducive to cozy winter weekend getaways, is the couple’s shared second-floor office overlooking the lake. There, Brent suggested partial warped-wood walls with a reflective sheen—but because faux weathering can quickly veer into the contrived, local millworkers ARBR Studios tumbled the panels and struck them with keys, a hand-hewn addition that continues to make the homeowners smile. Nearby, the primary bedroom is another hideaway that Sands struggles to leave, with its plush creamy surfaces, including suede walls and a canopy bed. Yet the primary bath, where a parade of midcentury Italian and Austrian lighting sparkles against an expanse of dramatic Paonazzo marble, is somehow even dreamier.
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Brent, whose firm is overseeing some 29 ongoing projects worldwide—something he compares to a “massive kaleidoscope”—insists that this assignment had everything he seeks in a new commission: namely, that it had to be one-of-a-kind, tailored to the hilt. “This house is color and vibration and whimsy and feminine and European,” he explains. “It doesn’t fit into any type of design style, but it feels like the perfect representation of the client, which, for me, is a job well done.”
Asked to sum up the 20-month endeavor, Brent’s client happily concurs. “It’s magical being in this house that’s so special to me, that I grew up in, that I now get to live in with my family,” she says. “Jeremiah really got that; he made sure it was going to be a home that oozes our personality—a home that is a reflection of who we are.”
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