Studio Wren kept the living room almost empty: a low sofa, a stone table and a 20-foot window onto the woods. Walk in on a winter morning and the first thing you notice is not the furniture but the silence, and then the trees, bare and silver beyond the glass. It is a room that seems to be holding its breath, and it is one of the most persuasive arguments for restraint we have seen in a long time.
Interior design Studio Wren · Location Hudson Valley, NY · Year 2026
The house belongs to a couple who moved up from Brooklyn after two decades in apartments with views of other apartments. They had a clear brief for Hannah Wren and her small team: make the forest the main event. Everything else, they said, could be negotiated. The result is a living room that feels generous without being big and finished without being full.
Starting with the window
The window came first. The architects who built the house had already set a single sheet of glass, 20 feet wide and nearly 10 feet tall, into the north wall of the living room. North light keeps the room soft all day, and the glass frames a stand of oaks, maples and white pines that slopes down toward a creek.
Wren spent her first two visits doing almost nothing but sitting in the empty room at different times of day. She took notes on where the light fell, where the eye went, and where a person would naturally want to sit. The sofa position came out of those notes: low and long, set a few feet back from the glass and parallel to it, so that anyone sitting there sees the full width of the woods.
Everything else in the room was arranged to support that line of sight. The bluestone table sits low enough that it never interrupts the view, and the rug stops short of the glass so a strip of pale oak floor runs along the window like a threshold. Wren also asked the builders to recess the window frame into the wall and paint it the same gray, so that from the sofa the glass seems to have no edge at all. It is a small move, but it makes the forest feel as though it begins inside the room.
She resisted the temptation to add window treatments. There are no curtains and no blinds. The house sits far enough from the road, and the trees are dense enough, that privacy was never a concern. On the few summer afternoons when the light grows too strong, the deep overhang outside does the shading on its own.
Fewer, better pieces
Every object is made by hand, from the plaster lamp to the oak shelving. There are fewer than a dozen pieces in the room, and each one was chosen, or commissioned, for a reason. The sofa is upholstered in undyed wool. The table is a single block of bluestone quarried a few miles away. The shelving, built into the east wall, is white oak finished with oil rather than lacquer so it will darken slowly over the years.
If the view is this good, the room should step back.
Hannah Wren, Studio Wren
Stepping back, in Wren’s hands, does not mean coldness. Each piece has some quality that rewards a closer look: the slightly irregular edge of the stone, the visible chisel marks on the shelf brackets, the faint fingerprints pressed into the plaster lamp by its maker. The room is quiet at a distance and rich up close.
For readers who want to borrow the approach, Wren offers a simple editing process she uses with every client:
- Clear the room entirely and live with it empty for a few days.
- Bring back only the pieces you actually reached for or missed.
- Replace mass-produced items with handmade ones slowly, one at a time, as budget allows.
- Choose materials that age well: wood, stone, wool, linen, plaster.
- Leave at least one wall or surface completely bare.
She is careful to note that handmade does not have to mean expensive. Some of the most beautiful pieces in the room, she says, came from a local potter and a woodworker who sells at a weekend market in Kingston.
Color from outside
The gray walls change with the seasons as the light shifts through the trees. Wren tested more than twenty grays before choosing a warm, mineral shade with a hint of green. On the wall it reads differently in every season. In summer, light filtered through leaves gives it a soft green cast. In autumn it warms toward gold. In winter, with snow on the ground, it turns pale and almost blue.
That shifting quality was the reason for choosing gray at all. A white room would have glared on snowy days, Wren says, and a darker one would have fought the view. A gray with a little warmth in it acts like a neutral backdrop that borrows its color from whatever is happening outside.
The paint is a lime-based finish applied by hand in several thin coats. It has a slightly mottled, velvety surface that catches the light differently from flat latex paint. Lime finishes take more skill to apply, and Wren recommends hiring an experienced plasterer or painter for the job.
Living in an almost empty room
Minimal rooms often look wonderful in photographs and feel awkward in daily life. The owners say this one is different, partly because Wren planned for real use. There is a deep closet hidden in the oak wall that holds blankets, board games and a record player. A small side table on casters can roll out when guests arrive. The rug is thick enough to sit on.
Clutter is the real enemy of a room like this, and the owners admit it took them a few months to adjust. Mail and keys now go to a small entry bench by the kitchen door. Books are allowed on the oak shelves but are edited every season. Phones charge in another room.
Key takeaway: a calm room is less about owning fewer things than about giving every thing a clear home, so the main space can stay open.
Evenings by the glass
At night, a large window can turn into a black mirror, and Wren worked hard to avoid that. Light sources in the room are kept low and warm: the plaster lamp, a pair of small sconces on the oak wall, and candles on the stone table. There are no overhead fixtures at all. With the interior dim, the eye can still read the shapes of trees against the sky, especially on moonlit nights.
Exterior lighting was kept to a minimum too. A few shielded fixtures light the path to the door, and the woods themselves stay dark. The owners say they now watch weather the way other people watch television. Snow arriving over the creek, fog lifting off the pines, a family of deer crossing at dusk.
A room that will age well
What Wren is proudest of, she says, is that the room is designed to get better rather than worse with time. The oak will darken. The wool will soften. The stone will collect small marks from use. None of it will look dated in ten years, because none of it was chosen to look current.
“Trends are about adding things,” she says. “This room is about what we left out.” For anyone with a good window and the patience to wait, it is a lesson worth taking home.