where i livesara anderson hi i'm sara anderson and if i have an antique shop in sonomacalifornia and i was very drawn to this home it's my favorite home in all of sonoma. it's one of oldest homes in sonoma, i think one of the first five that was ever built here from eighteen seventy five we knew we wanted to maintain the integrityof the house and not make too many the changes because it's an old victorian home and i wanted to keep it as it was originally.well the overall focus in setting up the
home was to make it very warm and invitinglike a farm house and just creating an environment that thatpeople felt comfortable that they walked in and sort of felt like they were getting a bear hug when they walked into the house, just cozy. so the entertaining space that i find very interesting is the diningroom because we have a long trestle table in there and it's very narrow and when i used to come and visit my friend who was the previous owner she would have all of her neighbors sitting around the tableand it was just a very fun gathering and i tried to replicate that here in this house
but of course the kitchen everybody's alwaysin the kitchen so i try to find other areas in the house where i can you know, have cocktails and appetizers and things but everybody alwayswants to follow me back into the kitchen and it's a nice space because it's pretty largeand there's a big island in the middle also i i don't mind well everybody who walks through this house says you needto change everything now that you have a child and i keep thinking well i, that's going to be very complicated becausei like the space that i live in right now where my husband and i spend our time nowin the television room has a nice cushy carpet
there really isn't anything that needs to be baby-proofed in that room and i feel that we'll spend a lot of our time in there. i had lunch with a friendand she had a dream about the baby's room, and it included black and white photographsthe famous baseball players and great thinkers of the day so my husband's just so happy to havea collection of black and white photographs of famousballplayers and a few great thinkers of the day likewinston churchill and jfk my husband thought it would be a great ideato put it chalk boards above each of the photographsand put different words that were inspirational fora child like
courage and strength so that was very fun when pottery barn was here they would just recreate spacesand after seeing the photos behind the camera it was just amazing the transformationthat they could put this house through and it was an enjoyable experience all the way around the one thing that really sticks out inmy mind when they were working upstairs and one of the bedrooms that i had finished but
when they took all the furniture out and put it into another bedroom and put the pottery barn furniturein they had a wonderful bed and a desk and i looked at way the room was situated and i thought that's how this room should be situated so i was just about to leave town and i talkedto one of the stylists and i said when you put the room back together becausethey always put it exactly as you had it before i said when you put the room back together will you just be creative and put it back however you thinkthat it should be and so i came back home from my vacation
and i was so pleasantly surprised because the room wasperfect i just love the way they would layer all these interesting objects from a throw to plants andthings on the table that sort of brought all of the whole scene of the interior together and it was very interesting to me becausethat's the way i like to approach my own home and have layers of interesting things that mean somethingto me and just make feel like it's been lived in forever pottery barn