The Redesign of This Chicago Home Merges the Spirit of Travel, Handmade Craft, and Wonderfully Practical Ideas to Give It a Fresh New Life

Renovation stories often begin with subtraction: walls taken down, furniture discarded, a home reduced to its bones before being built back up again. But how often does a renovation read more like an act of preservation? In this 5,000-square-foot, six-bedroom Chicago home, designed by Jennifer Kranitz of Set Setting Studio, the impulse was not to erase what existed, but to listen to it.

Rather than overwrite the home’s history, Kranitz honored its soulful details, layering in beautiful craft pieces collected on her travels through Mexico. The result is a modern home that feels at once deeply personal and richly storied.

The house belongs to one of Jennifer Kranitz’s close friends, who lives here with her husband, their two children, and two dogs. The family was keen to refresh a space that had begun to feel a little staid, but without losing the warmth and familiarity that made it feel like home in the first place.

“While on a trip to Mexico, a country I’ve been traveling to for the past 20 years, I was visiting several towns and discovering beautiful pieces made by local craftspeople,” shares Kranitz. “I was telling my friend about everything I was witnessing and her immediate responses were, ‘I want that!’ And that was really how the Mexican element and the initial inspiration for the home’s redesign came about.”

What followed was a renovation guided less by reinvention than by reverence, where memory, material, and collected craft now sit beautifully side by side.

For the modern living room, the designer chose a warm beige-and-salmon scene, its palette taking its cue from the large jacquard drapes on the right, already in place. At the heart of the arrangement are long, flowing tassels made of nylon cord and sourced from Mexico.

“In Paseo de Montejo in Mérida, I visited a jewelry maker, Daniela Bustos Maya’s store, and saw these hanging tassels in her shop as decor, and I inquired if she was willing to make some for my project in custom colors and lengths, and her team said yes,” says the designer. “These were then translated into the living room, adding an earthy touch.”

To break up the brown-and-beige living room color scheme, Jennifer painted the walls a warm white and reupholstered the armchairs, the 20-year-old pieces, in a terracotta-salmon corduroy, finished with a small piping detail in patent leather. The vintage living room rug also belongs to the client, a true investment.

Perhaps the most attention-grabbing moment is the rug draped over the coffee table, an unexpected and quietly theatrical gesture. “The Lucite coffee table, which my friend had purchased when she bought the home, was all glass and constantly showed dust and fingerprints,” shares Jennifer.

“The piece felt a little too polished, and she wanted something with a more earthy energy. So we found a rug that seamlessly merged with the one on the floor and draped it over the table as a subtle gesture. For the part of the coffee table that remains visible, we added vintage books she had in her family — some old encyclopaedias and others that add a bit of interest to the set-up.”

The accent chair, a new purchase, is the Etcetera Lounge Chair by Jan Ekselius, chosen to add a moody, sculptural quality to the room. It creates the perfect contrast between old and new, while bringing a small but striking note of depth to the space.

Adjacent to the living room is the dining room, the two spaces separated by the thick drapes that fall from a double-height, two-storey ceiling. The console was an interesting purchase from Noir Furniture; it arrived in four parts, which Jennifer reassembled in a new configuration to give the room a more sculptural presence.

The client already owned a vintage candlelit chandelier, originally finished in rustic brown wood and wrapped in rope. There was some debate about whether it should be replaced, but instead, Jennifer painted it black to give the piece and the dining room lighting an edge. “I think this brought the piece more into focus; before, its color was getting a little lost against the drape. Now, there’s a stronger element of contrast. My friend also had an old dining table that was quite beaten up, so we covered it. We kept the vintage chairs she already had, although some were broken. To balance this, we mixed in two new chairs from B&B Italia. Overall, the room follows the story of mixing the old and the new.”

Finally, there was the question of what to do with the vast wall, which Jennifer had painted in Benjamin Moore’s China White. Art seemed like the obvious answer, but anything placed there, even at a large scale, risked making the expanse feel emptier. “I came up with the idea of creating an elevation for the wall using interesting geometric shapes,” says Jennifer. “We cut them out of three-quarter-inch-thick MDF panels and painted them the same color as the wall, so they almost read like moldings.”

In the banquette seating area, the clients already had the furniture, but it had all been pushed up against the wall. There was no overhead lighting either. “We wanted to introduce a light without having to rip open the ceiling,” shares Jennifer. “That’s where I came up with the idea for a custom fixture, which begins at the half-wall behind the banquette and is attached to the ceiling at the top for stability. It pivots, allowing for directional lighting across the entire area.”

The piece was fabricated by Archistoric, a local studio in Chicago. The seating, meanwhile, is upholstered in a Knoll fabric designed by David Adjaye, adding a subtle layer of texture while also working beautifully for the rhythms of family life.

The client wanted a modern kitchen without redoing the space completely. A clever renovation became the solution. “Previously, the space had a stainless steel hood, plus a couple of stainless steel open shelves, with just drywall behind. I took down the hood and the shelves and instead made the new hood wider to have a more significant presence, and one that could be shrouded and hidden within the zellige tiles.” The tiles, another wonderful and coincidental call-back to Mexico.

The existing kitchen cabinets had T-bar handles, the kind that were ubiquitous in the 2000s but now feel quite dated. “I found a retailer on Etsy who makes leather cabinet hardware, and we asked him to customise some pieces for us with a loop at the bottom,” says Jennifer. The island top was always granite, but with the surrounding updates, it suddenly looked fresh and modern.

In the basement, the family gathers for quiet moments and long, meandering conversations. The family room's fireplace wall was originally brown, with worn cabinets flanking the hearth, gold porcelain tile around the surround, and drywall elsewhere. It simply wasn’t working. “The question was: how could we renovate it without ripping out the entire wall?” says Jennifer. “We skim-coated it, then brought in a local plaster specialist to apply plaster across the entire elevation.” The treatment softened and neutralized the wall, transforming the fireplace into a quiet stage for beautiful objects.

The room also needed to be practical and hard-wearing, especially with two dogs in the house. “We purchased two rugs from Loloi and had them stitched together locally to create one large rug,” Jennifer says. “Because of their darker color, they hide almost everything.” The sofas were sourced from Archiesto in Chicago and upholstered in Perennials outdoor fabric with a stain-resistant finish.

The powder room on the first floor, used by both guests and family, has one of the home’s more whimsical moments: a vanity filled with books, all uniformly covered. The idea came from the client’s abundance of reading material, which Jennifer decided to wrap in the same cover.

“This means you never quite know which one you’re picking up to read while in the bathroom, which adds an element of surprise,” she says. “The rest of the bathroom is finished in Venetian plaster, and we color-drenched the space in green.”

On the second floor, the primary modern bedroom is anchored by a bed the client had purchased when she first moved in. “I have to die in this bed,” she told Jennifer, having invested quite a bit in the piece. But the four-poster, with its dark brown leather headboard, felt heavy and weighty, especially against the brick wall behind it and the dark brown drapes the client did not want to remove.

“So the idea was to recreate the backdrop,” shares Jennifer. “On one of my trips to Mexico, I came across Caralarga, a textile design studio in Querétaro. I had seen these large wall hangings in the store and loved them. So we gave them the drawings and dimensions, and they custom-made this ceiling-mounted installation for us. Each tassel was numbered, and we hung them locally.”

The installation softens the room’s architecture. The pillowcases are by Daniela Bustos Maya, creating a quiet continuation of the textile language introduced downstairs through the tassels. “Since the room is so large, we used these dressers from Crate & Barrel to work as side tables.”

In the daughter’s room on the second floor, the ceiling wallpaper is by a local Chicago designer. The pattern, named Frida, was inspired by a trip the designer took to Mexico and features braids with snake heads woven into the design — a delightful coincidence, given how Mexico had once again found its way into the home. “I had a contractor make this headboard in wood, and we painted it. Plus, the swing with this fringe design added a darling touch,” says Jennifer, very much in tune with the earthy, tassel-filled home's aesthetic.

All in all, the home now breathes fresh air, wonderfully emerging as a space that feels neither newly made nor frozen in time, but gently reawakened.

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