The Grand Tour, Revisited

In Boston's Back Bay, Italian-American designer Lisa Tharp renovates a brownstone and finds, somewhere between Rome and Paris, a home.

Lisa Tharp fell in love with a brownstone the way people fall in love in cities — suddenly, while passing through a neighbourhood that already felt like somewhere else. Back Bay has that quality. Its tree-lined boulevards carry vague Napoleonic undertones, its French Academic facades speak more of Haussmann than New England, and the persistent sense of temporal displacement that characterises the district makes it possible, on the right afternoon, to forget which continent you are standing on. When Tharp first walked through the building she and her husband would eventually purchase, at the edge of the Boston Public Garden, her response was immediate: they had been transported from Boston to Rome.

The building was constructed in 1860 and converted into a luxury residence half a century ago. It had extraordinary bones and a series of subsequent interventions that needed undoing — dropped ceilings, almost certainly installed during the 1970s energy crisis, concealing ornamental plasterwork throughout; inelegant cabinetry obscuring the study fireplace. Tharp's first task was reversal. Ceilings came down, revealing the plaster beneath. Cabinetry was replaced with panelled doors and period bronze hardware. The rooms, freed from what had been done to them, breathed again.

To renovate it with Italian and French design was not an aesthetic choice so much as a conversation completed — the building finally furnished in the language it had always been speaking.

What followed was curation rather than renovation: gradual, considered, each element introduced with the patience of a collector who understands that interiors, like collections, should appear to have accumulated rather than been assembled. A Fortuny chandelier presides over the living room. French 1940s André Arbus dining chairs sit alongside a 1962 Goffredo Reggiani lamp and a travertino table. The study's coffered mahogany ceiling — inspired by the colours of Siena — operates in vivid contrast to the silvery neutral that runs through the principal rooms, shifting with the light across the restored ornamental plaster. The bespoke Palazzo bed in the main bedroom, drawn from the proportions of Venetian and Versailles canopied beds, exploits a four-metre ceiling with complete assurance.

Tharp, who holds Italian dual citizenship, identifies connections between Boston and Europe that are architectural rather than decorative. The brownstone's French Academic structure shares its symmetry and ornamental vocabulary with Rome's Parioli and Prati districts, built in the same period under comparable influences. To furnish it with Italian and French design was not, she suggests, an aesthetic choice so much as a conversation completed — the building finally given the language it had always been trying to speak.

She describes the result as a modernist designer's interpretation of her own historic apartment. Beneath the Fortuny chandelier, surrounded by a century of European design assembled with quiet precision, it is difficult to add anything to that.

Key takeaways

• Tharp began the renovation by reversing decades of damage — removing dropped 1970s ceilings to reveal ornamental plasterwork throughout and replacing inelegant cabinetry with panelled doors and period bronze hardware — before any act of curation could begin.
• The interiors were assembled with a collector's patience rather than a decorator's speed: a Fortuny chandelier, André Arbus dining chairs, a 1962 Goffredo Reggiani lamp, a travertino table, and a bespoke Palazzo bed drawn from Venetian and Versailles proportions accumulate across rooms with a silvery neutral palette that shifts with natural light.
• Tharp, who holds Italian dual citizenship, frames the renovation as an architectural conversation completed rather than a stylistic imposition — the brownstone's French Academic structure shares its symmetry and ornamental vocabulary with Rome's Parioli and Prati districts, making Italian and French design the logical, historically grounded furnishing language for the space.