Recover, Refurbish, and Repaint are the three R’s to decorating on a budget. Like most designers, we’re constantly reinventing our favorite furniture pieces. Suzanne has recovered the sofa she bought in London in her early twenties (it now sits in the living room) more times than she can count. And Lauren has painted a pair of Salvation Army-found campaign dressers three different colors in the past two years. When we’re out shopping, we’re always looking for well made, budget friendly pieces that we can either paint or recover to suit our style. Below is an image from our new book of the Salvation Army campaign dressers in their third iteration so far, a high lacquer peacock blue. 
We recently re-painted our treasured dressers (we bought the pair for $60) a fresh, minty green.
Which color do you prefer? The mint is a little more neutral and seems to go with more around the house, but the blue really did make a statement.
Another one of our recent reinventions is this pair of slipper chairs, below. We found them in a dusty corner at Braswell in Norwalk, CT. We’re slipper chair freaks and are both waiting for the day that we uncover a pair of original Billy Baldwin’s at one of our local haunts (a girl can dream!). After turning the chairs over, we found out that they were custom and made by the very reputable work room, De Angelis. They were a steal but needed to be recovered. Not ready to recover these guys right away, they sat in our basement for a few months. Can you believe how miniature they are?!
Our basement in Rye basically looks like a furniture store. We’ve accumulated SO much stuff in the past few years we can’t keep up with all of the pieces we want to recover, repaint, or refurbish. A few months ago we got the excuse we were waiting for when we had to design a set for the segment we did with Martha Stewart. In need of a pair of small chairs, we recovered our slipper chairs in a pale blue cotton linen.
Here they are in front of the campaign dressers in the house…
We made the pillows on the love seat out of this fantastic Raoul fabric (right). The blue and white chevron from Brunschwig & Fils was used for the mini pillows on the slipper chairs. 
What have you all revamped lately? We’d love to see!
