Designer Paige Kontrafouris Layers Her 100-Year-Old Home with Collected Treasures

Text by Bethany Adams

With formal interior design training and a lifelong love of French style, Paige Kontrafouris and her husband started life in their New Jersey home with plenty of plans—and not much else. “Basically, we had a mattress, and that was it,” Paige says. “I started looking at furniture online and thinking, ‘There has to be a better way to furnish a home that isn’t as expensive.’”

She soon discovered the world of secondhand shopping, and their home is now almost entirely furnished with found pieces—and with her expertise at mixing and matching every find, the result is a classically curated space that pays homage to her favorite influences. “I think my own personal style is a bit of French design [and] a little bit of English, but I just love that overly collected, curated, layered space that looks lived in and comfortable,” Paige says.

Upon moving in, the Kontrafourises performed the updates necessary to make their 100-year-old home livable for the current day—while undoing a few updates from the previous owners, who had erased aspects of the historic charm. “I wanted to bring back the original character that the home had but then also add my own spin on it and bring in elements of things that I liked, whether that was antiques or architectural elements that I was inspired by,” says Paige.

The result of that desire is evident in spaces like the sitting room, which was converted from a bedroom in order to open up the layout and now serves as a popular family-hangout spot. Panels of decorative paper required a creative touch to become wall coverings—meaning Paige stapled them to the wall and finished the look with trim—and the closet doors were secondhand finds that Paige painted and gilded.

From the basket chandeliers and island to the fabric backing the French doors, the kitchen boasts just as many beautiful found treasures as the rest of the home. While the space needed extensive updates, Paige kept things affordable by doing most of the work herself, opting for stock cabinets that she dressed up by sourcing vintage hardware and building her own shelves. She created the look of cremone bolts on the doors by using salvaged hardware, and a soft linen color sets them off from the glossy white subway tile. “One of my favorite things to collect and accessorize the kitchen with is copper and white ironstone pieces,” she says.

Despite the collected look of the primary bedroom, Paige only recently pulled the space together following the discovery of a discontinued Colefax and Fowler wallpaper on Facebook Marketplace—the same place she found the custom rug. Curtain panels she’d been holding on to found new life as a bed canopy, and finishing touches like ceiling embellishments and a painted armoire pulled everything together. “Within a two-month period, all of these pieces . . . kind of fell into place,” Paige says.

In filling her forever home, Paige learned that patience is the key to finding pieces she loves in the long run. Whether she’s scouring rummage sales, social media, or flea markets in France, she’s learned to only buy things that add to the spirit of her home. “Every room is filled to the brim with antiques and vintage pieces, but it’s not stuffy,” she says. “We live in our home; we use all the pieces.”

For more information, visit @paigekontrafouris on Instagram.