An 18th-century house in Charleston drenched in rich color

HOUSE TOUR | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

Clients who arrived requesting neutrality left with a red-lacquered study and a green dining room in this 1749 Charleston house. Interior designer Angie Hranowsky’s response to their evolving taste and the demands of a multigenerational household proves that even small spaces can be efficient and characterful. Emma Becque takes a tour.

BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 28 JANUARY 2026 

Pictured above, the parlour, once a shop front for craft workers, has resumed its role as a social room for a New York City couple © Julia Lynn.

A house inevitably accumulates the marks of successive lives, sometimes through centuries of use, sometimes through a shorter period of concentrated attention.

In the case of Novogrod House, built on King Street in 1749, the two are intertwined, with the weight of its early history now coexisting with domestic life shaped carefully around it. Its inclusion in last year’s Charleston by Design tours, organised by the Historic Charleston Foundation, confirmed what regular passers-by already suspected: this modest single house, narrow in plan and reserved in appearance, has become one of the most persuasive examples of how Charleston’s older buildings can be inhabited today.

A merchant built the house at a time when Charleston was still a compact pre-revolutionary city, with fewer than seventy comparable houses standing. Ownership of this scale was largely in the hands of tradesmen rather than the plantation-owning elite, who would later reshape the city’s architectural character with palatial-esque buildings.

“The original ground floor would have operated as a shopfront, while domestic life unfolded above,” explains the interior designer Angie Hranowsky, who led the recent rethinking of the house. The building evolved gradually through the nineteenth century, including the construction of a brick garden wall with an arched opening during a 1930s restoration, documented as a setting for outdoor entertaining, with a bartender stationed behind the arch to serve guests. “The structure remains visible from the street today, and neighbours still pause at the gate to look through”, says the designer.

The clients, Nancy and John Novogrod, encountered the house without long-term intent. Instead, “they were visiting friends and fell in love with Charleston. Over the weekend, they found the house and bought it!” Angie recalls. Their lives had previously been divided between Manhattan and Connecticut, and both arrived with decorative experience.

Nancy, a former design Editor-in-Chief, brought a forensic eye and a significant collection of furnishings, much of it accumulated over decades. John, an attorney, shared her attentiveness to detail. “They liked clean lines and a modern aesthetic. Too much colour was to be avoided,” Angie explains.

The avocado green dining room, wrapped in Philip Jeffries grasscloth is the perfect stage for Nancy's Milton Avery (1885 - 1965) painting © Julia Lynn.

Preservation easements prevented alterations to the original eighteenth-century structure, which Angie welcomed. “You cannot go in and change the architecture. It becomes a lesson in working alongside history,” she says.

Intervention was permitted was in the later additions, however, most notably the 19th-century kitchen house, expanded again in the 1930s and therefore exempt from the original protection. That portion was gutted and rebuilt by Beau Clowney to form the present kitchen, with steel-framed doors opening directly onto the bluestone terrace, lap pool and landscaped garden, creating a space that anchors the house.

Elsewhere, the work was more incremental but no less deliberate, with a new bathroom added on the second floor, and concealed behind a door integrated into the red study's bookshelves. The third floor was stripped back and rebuilt to provide two guest rooms and a compact bathroom, allowing adult children and grandchildren to stay without the house ever feeling chaotic or overburdened. “The brief was clear - the house had to host the entire family,” Angie explains.

The bunk room, designed for younger visitors, features four 1970s-inspired beds set into the eaves to create cosy bed nooks, each with individual vintage lamps and ticking stripe privacy curtains. In contrast, the dormer bedroom accommodates adult guests. Here, a maritime shade of blue shiplap covers the intricate space, cleverly complemented by Le Gracieux textile upholstery that fringes the bed and alcove storage. 

The decoration emerged through conversation rather than prescription, with “doses of intuitive decorating required,” says Angie. “You get to know how your client wants to live”. Early proposals for the dining room involved patterned wallpapers, including a palm design, but the clients hesitated. “When I started showing them solids with texture, that was when they lit up,” she recalls. Today, the room is illuminated, encased in Phillip Jeffries grasscloth, its green tone derived from the garden beyond.

Colour appears elsewhere with greater conviction, such as the lacquer red study, an unexpected and daring design decision. Lined with a bespoke floor-to-ceiling library of bookshelves, with one such shelf concealing a secret room. Decorating the space is a series of chairs: twin Billy Baldwin slipper chairs upholstered in a roaring Jane Shelton tiger print, alongside a club chair recovered in Arjumand’s World and a custom pull-out sofa. 

Noticeably, “curtains are conspicuously absent in many rooms as I wanted the architecture to lead,” Angie explains. Café shutters, Roman blinds and restrained floor coverings were used, allowing the proportions and surfaces of the 18th-century structure to remain legible. The approach is evident in the primary bedroom and bathroom, where panelled walls, organic materials, natural colors, concealed storage, and a unified plan for dressing and bathing create rooms that feel connected yet a refuge from the sprightly colors below.

What ultimately distinguishes Novogrod House is the intelligent ways in which a small 18th-century structure has been adapted to accommodate contemporary life. Spanning three generations without sacrificing its character, Angie remarks that “planning did the heavy lifting”. It could however be argued that the experienced designer's persuasion to craft with colour did the rest. The result is neither period recreation nor contemporary insertion. Still, a house that feels inhabited, which in a city so practised at surface charm remains the most compelling achievement of all.