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Downsizing + Furnishings Design
Flying
Goat
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Flying Goat began before the move did. Our clients were preparing to sell their home and downsize into a condo, and they brought us in to evaluate what they already owned — furniture, art, accessories, the accumulated evidence of a long life in one place. Which pieces deserved to make the move? Which ones would work in rooms half the size? What was worth letting go?
The condo waiting for them was a different animal entirely: modern, light-floored, with a white, stark kitchen. Beautiful, but cool. Our instinct from the first walkthrough was warmth — layered textures and a palette of warm browns, rusts, and greens that would give the new rooms the depth the old house had earned over decades.
The condo also came with furniture of its own, and none of it could move: a baby grand piano, the dining table, the bed frames, the dressers, the nightstands. Add a television placement that was fixed and a brief with no structural modifications in it, and much of the plan was written before we started. What our clients brought with them — their sofa, their art, their collected objects — had to find its place around all of it.
The great room, open to the three-story stairwell and its exposed brick wall. The television placement was fixed, so the brick became the anchor rather than the obstacle — a textured wool rug, an oak console, and layered pillows do the warming.
With no walls moving and no finishes changing, every degree of warmth in this room had to arrive in something you could carry through the door. That is a harder brief than it sounds. A renovation lets you correct a room's temperature at the source; furnishings have to do it by accumulation.
So we worked in layers. A deep, textured wool rug to soften the light floors and give the seating group a footprint. A glass and bronze coffee table that holds the center of the room without adding visual bulk. Plaid and slubbed-linen pillows in browns and greens against our clients' own cream sofa, one of the few things they brought with them. A leather throw folded over one arm.
The room's best inherited asset is the brick — the great room opens onto a three-story stairwell whose wall is exposed brick top to bottom, and that plane of warm red does more for the space than anything we could have specified. The fixed television placement sits against it. Rather than fight that, we let the brick do what brick does and grounded the wall beneath the screen with a light oak console and a lamp with a black shade, so the television reads as one element in a composed wall rather than the reason the wall exists.
Left: our clients' own sofa, one of the few pieces to make the move, relayered in browns and greens. Right: the new cognac leather swivel chairs — the single largest injection of warmth in the room, and the piece we argued hardest for.
The list of fixed pieces was set before we drew a thing, and unusually, most of it wasn't our clients'. The baby grand piano, the dining table, the bed frames, the dressers, the nightstands all came with the condo and none of them could be moved. Add a television placement that couldn't change, and much of the plan was written for us.
We have come to think of that as an advantage rather than a limitation. A home furnished entirely from scratch can read as a showroom — coherent, but weightless. Working against a set of pieces you didn't choose forces every decision after them to be specific: this chair, in this fabric, because of that table. The piano isn't a design decision. It's a fact, and the room is better for having to accommodate it.
What we controlled was everything around those facts — where the seating group would sit relative to the glass, how the dining zone would read as separate without a wall to help, and which of our clients' own pieces would come forward. Their sofa made the trip, and so did the art and the objects worth keeping. The plan is the condo's bones with our clients' history layered back over the top.
The baby grand was already here and staying. The wall beside it got the project’s largest new piece — a woven fiber work whose fringe and shadow give a flat white wall something to hold.
The dining table came with the condo — a light oak trestle, fixed in place, sitting close to the kitchen and in full view of the living zone. That put all the pressure on the chairs. They had to do double duty: comfortable enough to linger in, quiet enough not to compete with the seating group twelve feet away, and warm enough to pull a pale oak table toward the rest of the palette.
We specified fully upholstered chairs in a warm, nubbly oatmeal-brown with dark wood legs. They are heavier-looking than the table, deliberately — the weight is what keeps the dining zone from dissolving into the open plan. Above the table's short wall, a small antique floral still life in a gilt frame, one of the pieces we pulled forward from the client's own collection.
The dining area — new upholstered chairs in a warm oatmeal-brown around the oak table that came with the condo, with a small collected still life doing the work of a much larger piece.
The kitchen and bar — untouched cabinetry, rewarmed. Wood boards, terracotta, stacked books, and a rust-toned antique runner do what a renovation would otherwise have been asked to do.
The kitchen was the project's clearest test. White slab cabinetry, white dimensional tile, black hardware, pale counters — crisp, modern, and completely uninterested in warmth. Nothing about it was coming out. So the warmth had to be set on top of it.
The oak-lined open niches gave us the one architectural foothold in the room, and we filled them the way you would fill a shelf you actually use: a stack of books, a wooden pepper mill, a fern, a low ceramic bowl. On the counters, hand-thrown pottery in cream and umber, wood boards left standing, utensil crocks in unglazed stoneware. Underfoot, an antique runner in faded rust and ink, which does more for the room's temperature than any single object in it.
The bar area followed the same logic at closer range — a large terracotta vessel with real presence, books shelved rather than styled, a framed sketch in a black frame to break the run of pale tile. None of it is precious. All of it is warm.
The primary bedroom — the bed frame and floating oak nightstands came with the condo. The painting, the plaid coverlet, the leather pillows, and the pair of collected pots are what we brought to it.
The bed frame and the floating oak nightstands came with the condo, which set the room's proportions and its wood tone before we started. What we added was texture and depth: a heavy plaid coverlet in ink and slate, cognac leather pillows against ivory, a woven diamond-stitched cushion, an olive-toned pillow layer behind.
Above the bed, a moody landscape in oil — deep greens over a low horizon — pulls the room toward the greens running through the rest of the plan. Flanking it, a pair of antique pots in umber and iron, one holding olive branches, one holding nothing at all. The pieces that do the most in this room are the ones that look like they have been somewhere.
The first guest room, built on ochre and rust — dark botanical block-print pillows, a fringed throw, and a collected still life in a deep carved frame.
Warm shades of brown and rust, layered against the client's own art — the room reads as collected rather than assembled.
Downsizing tends to compress the guest rooms hardest — they are the spaces most likely to become storage with a bed in it. We gave each of these two a distinct character instead, so that the smaller footprint reads as intention rather than compromise.
The first room runs warm: camel and ochre bedding, a rust fringed throw, dark botanical block-print pillows, an antique runner on the oak floor. Its anchor is a small still life of tulips against a deep red ground, held in a heavy carved frame — a piece from the client's collection that had been living somewhere less generous.
The second runs cool by comparison, and deliberately so. Charcoal linen against ivory, ticking-stripe pillows, a graphic pillow in ochre and slate, white shell sconces, and a live-edge stump as a nightstand. A framed sailboat print and a mustard confit jar keep it from going cold. Across the room, the white oak dresser that came with the condo was restyled with a pair of ceramic lamps and a bouclé chair pulled into the window.
The second guest room — cooler, quieter, and built around the dresser that came with the condo. A live-edge stump nightstand and a mustard confit jar keep the restraint from tipping into chill.
The last ten percent — a lamp with an oxblood glass base against stacked books, rust-striped towels folded on a wood tray. The scale at which a house starts to feel like someone's.
Flying Goat is a smaller home than the one our clients left, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. What it does is carry the part of the old house that mattered — the art, the collected objects, the sofa they weren't willing to part with — into rooms that were already furnished, already fixed, and considerably cooler than they are now.
Working new pieces in with collected heritage ones is slower than starting clean, and it is the only way we know to arrive at a home that tells the story of the people in it. The result reads as though it was gathered over years, because most of it was.