Another Uptown Kingston Home featured on Design Sponge

Kingston has had a great year!  Today we're proud to be posting another great post from Design Sponge.  The home happens to be the second Kingston NY home to be featured this year on the popular blog site.  

Read Maxwell's article below from Design Sponge: 

"My neighbor John McKinney is an optometrist with a serious eye for design (pun absolutely, shamelessly intended). Although his days are filled with eye charts, optical exams, and glasses fittings, his evenings and weekends are packed with trips to local auctions, estate sales, and flea markets—all part of his tireless and passion-driven journey to renovate and furnish his 1723 house in the heart of uptown Kingston, New York. John’s home, an absolutely stunning stone construction, is a a gem amongst gems—one of the neighborhood’s oldest and longest-standing structures, dating back to Kingston’s pre-Revolution days when it originally functioned as the town’s Elmendorf Tavern. It has survived not just the Revolutionary War and the infamous 1777 burning of Kingston, but centuries of change. Nineteenth century Italianate and Victorian homes have sprung up around it, but this quaint colonial construction has remained one of the area’s most beautiful homes.

Throughout my first months as a Kingston resident, I had always admired John’s home when walking past it on trips to the city’s center, but I was absolutely floored when I was first welcomed inside for afternoon cocktails. After purchasing the home from a former medical practice five years ago, John has been painstakingly renovating it to its former glory—right down to period-appropriate antique furnishings and woodwork. John’s loving commitment to his home is clear in every detail—and the story of how he purchased the home and ultimately furnished it in its colonial and colonial revival style is downright fascinating. John’s previous home—a split-level ranch filled exclusively with midcentury modern furnishings—was a far cry from the pre-Revolution styles he currently surrounds himself with. When he put his former home on the market five years ago, though, the purchaser chose to buy with one proviso: that the home come with all of its furnishings. Despite having obsessively culled all of the home’s authentic Modernist pieces over the years, John split with them willfully and amicably, relishing the opportunity to start fresh. Although John seems to have broken up with his midcentury obsession when he broke up with his former home, the colonial style, with its hallmark simplicity, has proven to be an unexpected compliment to his eye for the clean, modern line. “As long as you keep it simple,” he notes, “it’s all ‘modern’ for that time period. If you pick the right pieces from each time period, you can see the clean lines in it.” John’s house might have a 1723 date on it, but its classic styling and timeless beauty makes it right at home in the twenty-first century. —Max"

 

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