Just minutes before she was to join a girlfriend for dinner the other night, Jackie Smythe joked that the sole purpose for giving birth to two daughters was just so they'd one day decorate her newest home.
"That's why I went through all that pain to have them," she said with a twinkle in her eye and a hearty laugh. "Thank goodness I didn't stop with one."
At 82, Smythe, a resident of Sunrise at Ivey Ridge, a senior living facility just off Old Alabama Road in Johns Creek, is among a growing number of seniors who find themselves with large homes but no longer have children at home to fill up the rooms. And so they find themselves tackling the rather huge job of downsizing their living spaces.
Smythe's daughters recently turned her new one-bedroom, one-bath suite into home using a mix of personal treasures and recently purchased items that were at once pretty and functional, a tip they gleaned from HGTV designer and host Emily Henderson.
Through a partnership Sunrise Senior Living has with Henderson, who is celebrated for her ability to make spaces feel like home, residents and their families can get help making the transition from a large home to apartment-style living without sacrificing their personal style and interests.
"A Sunrise principle of service is to celebrate the individuality of every resident, and that is exactly what I try to do as a designer," Henderson said. "When someone walks into your room, it should feel like you."
Henderson, founder of StylebyEmilyHenderson.com, a daily style blog, said that creating spaces to match a client's personality is her forte.
As part of the Sunrise partnership, she provided a Comforts of Home Design Guide that the family or their loved one can use as a reference. That includes everything from general safety ideas to specific products that they can buy.
"I would imagine it's really hard knowing what to keep and what to throw or give away when you're downsizing after decades of accumulating things," she said.
Her main rule for getting it done?
Make sure an object or piece is beautiful, functional or sentimental.
"If you have a lot of stuff, then try and have an object meet at least two of those criteria," Henderson said. "Obviously a piece that meets all three of those criteria -- a beautiful, comfortable chair that you purchased on your Parisian honeymoon, for instance -- then you hold on to that chair for dear life. Pieces have to mean something to you or be really functional and attractive; otherwise, hand it down or donate it. "
To date, only a few of Ivey Ridge's residents have taken advantage of the service since it was launched about six months ago, said Yolanda Hunter, executive director.
"We wanted the individual suites to be as lovely and inviting as our common areas," Hunter said. "Plus we realized it's really hard to downsize from a home to an apartment and retain that personal feel. This is a way to help make that happen."
In most cases, Hunter said, it's residents' children who request the help either through an interior designer or using Henderson's Design Guide available on Sunrise's website: www.sunriseseniorliving.com/designguide/.
That's what Smythe's daughters did.
Prior to her move into Ivey Ridge on March 14, Smythe had shared a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath condo with her husband, Bill, who died on Valentine's Day.
Because the couple first downsized in 2000, the condo wasn't extremely full of furniture and other belongings, but it was still more than Smythe needed.
"They really did the big clean-out when they moved from our childhood home in DeKalb to the townhouse in Norcross," said daughter Nancy Thompson, one of Smythe's four children. "That was the biggest purge."
When she began her search for a smaller place for her mother, Thompson said Sunrise rose to the top. She was on the assisted living facility's website when she found the decorating guide.
"I was looking for ideas to decorate a room like this," Thompson said.
The turret room, as it is called, is asymmetrical with five windows.
In addition to tips, she said, the guide showed sample layouts of rooms. Using the tips as their guide, she and sister Brenda Torri bounced ideas off each other before coming up with a final design: a mix of old and new that provided plenty of seating to accommodate Smythe's entertaining appetite.
They tossed the sofa for love seat and more chairs; they kept several lamps, end tables, family photos, paintings by Bill's best friend and her favorite knickknacks, including statues of a boy playing a recorder and a girl covering her ears.
"I love what they did," Smythe said.
Her favorite part of the design? The shelving Torri created on one bank of walls.
"I was really excited when I saw the television and the computer on the wall," she said. "I wanted to tell everybody and here you are."
Design advice
HGTV designer and host Emily Henderson's top design tips:
- Buy multifunctional pieces -- such as cocktail tables that can be stools, and ottomans that can hold storage.
- Don't have too many contrasting colors, because it makes the room busier and smaller.
- Keep the clutter down -- nothing makes a space look smaller than a bunch of random knickknacks on surfaces.
- Use your wall space. If you don't have a ton of other areas for accessories, don't forget that you can hang objects that you love in shadow boxes as art on the walls.
- Consider round or oval furniture to keep the flow more open and airy.
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