The bedside desk in this New Jersey Shore summer house has bounced from country to country for almost a century and been painted at least half a dozen times — and it couldn't possibly look better."This was a gut renovation of a 30-year-old house," interior designer Brad Ford says, "but we wanted to keep a bit of a cottage feel, so we brought back some of the details, like the plank walls."
When Ford found this piece in a Tribeca antique shop, he loved how — like the house itself — the desk offered the best of modernity and vintage style. "The antiques dealer in New York found this at the Paris flea market," Ford says. "It dates back to the Bauhaus industrial movement, and it looked like it had been painted a hundred times and scraped down. We didn't want to do anything to the finish."
And so, needing a night table in a guest bedroom — and wanting to provide his clients with a useful desk — Ford placed this piece right next to the guest bed on one side, with a more traditional nightstand on the other. "I always like to mix it up," Ford says, who has used chests of drawers or a single, pretty chair as bedside tables in other settings. "I think that gives a room a little bit more character."
Photo by Simon Upton
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