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"ELLE DECOR: When you saw this apartment, was it love at first sight? DEVIN KIRK: No. In fact, my boyfriend, Chad Idol, and I kept looking after we saw it. It&amp;#039;s a three-story building, built in 1917, and while the space in the two-bedroom apartment was good and the bones were there, it was pretty tragic.  ED: How so? DK: The woman we bought it from had been there 15 years. The place was very dated, with lots of wallpaper. She had painted clouds on the ceiling of the dining room\u2014in the middle of the night, possibly after a bottle of wine.  ED: Are the moldings original to the apartment, or did you add them? DK: Almost everything you see came with the place. The building was converted to condo\u00ADminiums in the 1980s, and a lot of the original architectural details were preserved. They were removed in some rooms to accommodate soffits that conceal new heating and electrical systems. ED: So you didn&amp;#039;t do a lot of demolition and reconstruction then? DK: No, mostly stripping away. I added some wainscoting in the kitchen and replaced the linoleum with hardwood to match the rest of the floors. ED: What were you trying to accomplish with the decor? DK: I like great-looking old things, and things that will look great when they get old. But I also like comfort, so most of the upholstered pieces are new, and almost all of them are from Jayson Home, where I&amp;#039;ve worked since 2003. I knew I&amp;#039;d never think the place was &amp;quot;done,&amp;quot; that it was &amp;quot;set.&amp;quot; As it is, I can move things around and replace them whenever I want. ED: Your personal aesthetic is fresh and nostalgic at the same time. How is it different from that of Jayson Home ? DK: They&amp;#039;re similar, which makes sense. The store and the apartment both mix contemporary upholstered furniture with antiques and flea-market finds. The shop has more contemporary case goods than I have at home and is more fashion forward, I would say. Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;A Good Buy.&amp;quot;   ED: You set the tone in the entry. DK: I&amp;#039;m from the South, where front porches have blue ceilings, and the front porches I remember growing up with inspired my foyer. I painted it to highlight the moldings and to recall that Southern tradition. I&amp;#039;ve had the big poster since I was in high school. I found the Lucite console in Chicago and carried it home on the El, at rush hour. The propeller came home in my suitcase from the Netherlands, the stool is Chinese, the lamp belonged to my grandparents, and the rug is a vintage kilim from the store. ED: How do you decide how to hang everything you have on your walls? DK: I agonize over it and then I just dive in with a hammer. I try to do it the way you&amp;#039;re supposed to and lay it out on the floor first, but then I just go for it. ED: When you&amp;#039;re on a buying trip, how do you decide what you love for the store and what you love for your own home? DK: That&amp;#039;s hard sometimes. I do all my shopping for Jayson Home with our creative director, Caroline Scheeler, and we see a lot of beautiful things. I&amp;#039;d say we know that 99 percent of what we like will be great for the store. But once in a while I can&amp;#039;t get something out of my head. If I still love it by the time it actually arrives at the store, I&amp;#039;ll take it home, where there&amp;#039;s only so much room. ED: The barrel-vaulted ceiling in the dining room is amazing. Why paint it dark? DK: It is amazing, and one of our neighbors actually took theirs out! The darker ceiling highlights the beams, and it makes the room intimate and a little moody, especially in candlelight.  ED: How much work did you do in the kitchen? DK: Not much. We thought we were doing a quick, temporary fix when we moved in, but I think it&amp;#039;s permanent now because we like it. The kitchen had 1990s oatmeal-color appliances that I thought were going to be a problem, until I embraced them. I painted the cabinets in Ralph Lauren&amp;#039;s Peony, which is exactly the same color.  ED: What do you like most about your home? DK: That it&amp;#039;s so personal. It looks like us. So many of the things we have come from our families and friends, so people who come over to visit see things they recognize. We framed a napkin from our 10th-anniversary party, and the yardstick under the shelves in the kitchen comes from Chad&amp;#039;s late grandfather&amp;#039;s furniture store, which was founded by his great-grandfather and is still run by his family. It may sound corny, but I wanted it to be a happy place where everyone would feel welcome. What the Pros Know \u2022 Devin Kirk&amp;#039;s palette is a controlled range of neutrals from pale to dark grays and browns. To tie the rooms together and give the home a modern edge, he painted all the moldings in a crisp, high-gloss white by Benjamin Moore. \u2022 His preferred upholstery fabric is linen, despite its tendency to wrinkle. &amp;quot;I like natural fabrics,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Linen is soft and it looks good even as it ages. I find Belgian linen is the best.&amp;quot; \u2022 It&amp;#039;s about the look, not provenance: The office-style dining chairs are from the Edgewater Antique Mall in Chicago. Kirk paid $200 for a set of eight, then had them reupholstered in burlap.  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;A Good Buy.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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