Interior designer and DIY Network star Alison Victoria turns her sledgehammer and eye for glamour to a historic Chicago brownstone
From a swanky Trump Tower apartment to the kitchens she crashes on the DIY Network, designer Alison Victoria brings an obsession with beauty, fashion and glamour to every project she touches. But what happens when the perfectionist takes on her own dream home?
It’s complicated.
For as swiftly and seamlessly as she is able to transform bare walls and other people’s blah kitchens into spaces to die for, Victoria says the 1902 Wicker Park brownstone she purchased in May has been more of a slow, meticulous, labor of love.
Before
“This is my passion but it’s also my home,” explains Victoria, an interior designer of lavish residences from Las Vegas to Chicago and the first female star on DIY Network’s “Kitchen Crashers,” (which now also airs on HGTV). “It’s much easier to design for someone else when you’re listening to what they want. I’m a snap-judgment kind of girl, but when it’s my own house, I tend to think about it for too long.”
After
Then again, knowing what she wants and going after it has served the Chicago native well: It’s what drove her to become the youngest designer at the posh award-winning Las Vegas design firm Christopher Homes, then quit that job at age 23 to open Alison Victoria Interiors Inc. and start her own line of modern luxury furniture.
See, once Alison Victoria has a vision, there’s no stopping her.
Take the old walk-in vault she discovered in the Wicker Park brownstone, which was previously owned by a prominent Chicago jeweler. Located on the garden level of the house, initial thoughts had her designer mind fashioning it as a wine cellar.
Then she thought more about the space and how she would use that level of the house. The minute Victoria decided to designate the first floor as her ultimate master suite sanctuary, what to do with that old vault was obvious. “I thought, now I can make it my shoe and handbag closet!”
For a designer who has devoted a section of her website Alisonvictoria.com to covering the most stylish shoes to wear on construction sites, it was a perfect move. And with a little help from her “Kitchen Crashers” crew, she took a discerning eye to the rest of the house.
“I hired the crew from the TV show because, well, they’re used to working fast,” Victoria explains. She was able to move into the first floor 30 days after starting construction, and then start renovating the rest of the house.
Before
After — The living room, one of the biggest projects, involved refinishing and restoring the home’s original floors.
That’s when she got to put on her trendy (and always “girly”) work boots and do what she’s become famous for — crashing a kitchen. “In my show, that’s what I do,” she says. “The kitchen is huge, so I really wanted to do it right, right for me, right for everyone.”
Before
She kept the original look with white Shaker-style cabinets, but took them all the way up to the height of the ceilings for maximum impact. For the countertops, she passed up the more traditional marble for the new Bianco Oro line. “I wanted to make sure mine was a little more durable,” Victoria explains.
After — Victoria made major changes to her kitchen (including replacing a window with more cabinet space), but kept the original white color scheme throughout the room.
While it’s still a work in progress, she’s very pleased with her creation so far. “The backsplash is still not up, and the hood is not up, but I bought some amazing pendant lights. I wanted to make sure I was doing something that nobody else had, so I found these amazing vintage pendants at Store B [in Wicker Park]. I had been looking at them for four months.”
Other projects on the second floor included a total refinish and restoration of the original hardwoods. Victoria also took great care to preserve an original vintage bathtub in the powder room. “You can tell the tub was placed in and the walls were built around it. I completely restored that, with gold leafing on the feet.”
Victoria, who spent her early years growing up in an apartment with three siblings on the 46th floor of the John Hancock building, says what she’s doing with her Wicker Park house is, in some ways, a culmination of everything she’s been dreaming of since childhood. While some like to talk about the time when she was 10 and asked to redecorate the basement of her family’s Lincolnwood home, she likes to tell the story that came a year later, when she “crashed” her best friend’s bedroom. “We were both 11, and all I wanted to do is clean their house up and help them redecorate,” she recalls. “I would start moving things around; I would rip up carpet to get to the hardwood, and then started refinishing the furniture and repainting all the walls.”
That space, and that moment, is one Victoria says she will never forget.
“Granted, we painted everything peach so it didn’t really look pretty,” she laughs, “but that’s when I knew that I really wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”
While she already owns a home in Las Vegas, when the opportunity came to purchase the house in Wicker Park for what she calls “the deal of a lifetime,” Victoria seized her dream, way ahead of schedule.
“I’ve always imagined myself living in that big beautiful home in Lincoln Park or Wicker Park, but to be able to get into a house like this and be able to do what I want, the way I want, is definitely a dream come true,” she says.
Shop like a pro
We asked Alison Victoria to share five of her favorite design sources in Chicago. She says the following shops offer an eclectic mix that inspires her in “different ways for different spaces.” Check them out:
Store B: 1472 N. Milwaukee; Storebvintage.com
Stitch: 1723 N. Damen; Stitchchicago.com
Home Goods: 2731 N. Elston; Homegoods.com
Luminaire: 301 W. Superior; Luminaire.com
Holly Hunt at the Chicago Merchandise Mart: 222 Merch Mart Plaza Suite 1728/1844; Merchandisemart.com
For more about Alison Victoria Interior Design, her blog and exclusive line of furniture, go to Alisonvictoria.com. For more about Kitchen Crashers, go to Diynetwork.com
Story by Sherry Thomas
