“It’s kind of like a magical little pocket,” says industrial and textile designer Bri Brant of the Winterthur area, the location of the home she shares with her husband and their two boys. “It’s surrounded by open space.” It’s an enviably sylvan area, nestled just south of the Pennsylvania border near several noted country clubs and Brandywine Creek State Park.
The setting is perfect for the family’s 4,000-square-foot Cape Cod, with its handsome dormers and sharply pitched roof. (The exterior also reveals some Craftsman elements—like the façade’s squat, stone pillar supports.) “When you go inside, it really feels like a Cape Cod,” Brant says.
“It’s very heavy on the bottom, and then the upstairs bedrooms are kind of small and cozy, with built-ins and window seats. It’s deceptively large—the house looks tiny from the outside, but [inside] it’s huge.”
The family has owned the home, built in 1956, for around 18 months. Brant put a lot of work into the house to “make it our own,” she says. “We’ve done this before with our other houses.”
The four-bedroom, 3 1/2 bath did not call for a gut renovation; Brant says the home had always been loved by its owners. And like all the houses on the street (“We all have our little 2-acre plots,” she notes), it had been well-tended and modernized, so there was no need to overhaul the exterior or interior architecture. “It’s a perfect balance of old and new,” she says. “It’s really solidly built.”
So Brant, who creates handbags and is drawn to texture (she was educated at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science), focused on painting, gardening and a few personal updates.
“Our previous home was an 1800s farmhouse…so we took all the finishes that we used on that house—a total gut job—and we repeated them here,” she says. “We pared it down. We painted the inside walls in a creamy white with bright white trim, and we just basically brought it back to the style of the home we had before. It’s our recipe for making everything our own. We do the same colors in every house.”
If any room epitomizes the quasi-bohemian way this family lives, it’s the so-called formal living room, which isn’t very formal at all. “We wanted to make sure this was the room we really used, because formal living rooms are sometimes just forgotten,” Brant explains. (Anyone who grew up in a house that contained a “decorated” living room, with sofas you weren’t supposed to sit on, can relate.) Formality was pushed aside in favor of function.
“I decided to put my work bench and my sewing machine in there, and then we put the piano in there so the boys can play their music. And we added the boys’ art table because they’re both into drawing and painting.” A comfortable sofa—where pups Herbie and Lacey sleep—provided the final stroke of hominess.
“It’s our family room—and what our family does all the time is art and music,” Brant says. “It’s a big multipurpose space that’s actually our favorite room in the house.”
Related: This Greenville Home Pairs Modernism With Traditional Touches
