Favorite Piece in the Room – Amie Steir

MY FAVORITE PIECE: I have many favorite pieces, but if I have to pick one that’s a big part of my life, my favorite piece is our dining room table. My husband and I purchased it in Mexico City about four years ago when we were there for a weekend. We love Mexico. We got married in Oaxaca and we’ve been to Mexico City several times. We just love the culture, the country, and the people. I love the design, I love the more traditional handy crafts and textiles and rugs.

We discovered this really cool design collective called Pirwi that’s made up of Mexican designers and housed in a gorgeous old mansion. We bought a bunch of stuff from them. It was actually more expensive to ship the table than to buy it, but that just tells you the good deal I got, totally worth it. What I loved about the table was that it was a combination of very modern and traditional with hundreds of teak pieces that were basically scraps and glued together in a waterfall pattern on the legs. It reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright and kind of art deco.

VISUAL STYLE:  I would call my visual style eclectic dinge. My husband always teases me Can we do something that’s not dingy? I love dingy! I love vintage furniture and often modern furniture that has a vintage feel. I like ethnic dinge. I guess grunge was the 90’s version of it, but dingy. It’s more loved.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER: The size of the table fit perfectly and we had the chandelier, which was a wedding gift from my mother-in-law from a vintage store in Long Beach. I still love it. You have to take every single glass piece out to move it so we’re never moving.

I think the rug was one of our first big purchases. I love rugs and we bought this one for our old house, and when we moved it just fit perfectly in the dining room – the reds and the browns were a nice counter point.

The chairs are a mix of original Breuer and Thonet chairs that I shipped from the apartment in New York City where I grew up. They were my parents which is really cool. My mom had this incredible collection of chairs which is funny because we had a tiny apartment. My parents used to hang the chairs on the ceiling like the shakers do. My friends would come over and be like Can we sit up there?

USING THE SPACE: If we ever have more than four people sitting down, we use the dining space to eat and do crafts and homework. And I sometimes work at that table because it has the best view – I can see into the kitchen, the side garden, the front garden and I feel like I’m the queen of the house.

COLORS: When we originally moved in the house was dark. We didn’t want to change the footprint but we wanted to make it brighter. We painted the moldings, beams and wainscoting. Every surface has its own slightly different color, but generally it’s very light and very dark—I like contrast.