This is our house. It was four dilapidated apartments when we bought it in the early 1980s. We kept one apartment and rented the others. Rundown as it was, we used our best styling and decorating skills (early adopters of DIY) and it was published in Metropolitan Home Magazine. After saving some money from the rent that we were collecting, we moved out and renovated the building top to bottom and Met Home published it again.

After the renovation, we lived on three floors and our studio was on the ground floor, but after outgrowing both the studio and our tiny kitchen on the second floor—we raised two kids there—we moved our studio to a loft in South Boston and used the old studio as a kitchen. (After all these years, it’s still a makeshift kitchen, albeit one with lots of space and light.)

It’s hard to think of your own house as a design project especially when you live in it as casually as we do—never daring to bring clients home. But we included it here because it represents a way of decorating that we wholly believe in but can rarely do for others: create vignettes as shrines to our happy family life on Myrtle Street.