Meyer Davis Revives a Historical Home with a Sensitive Renovation, Scandinavian Furnishings, and Artworks by Contemporary Powerhouses
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio principals Will Meyer and Gray Davis seamlessly blend the past and present into a unique design language
Resurrecting a grand historic home brings inherent challenges—celebrating the craftsmanship of the past, searching out period-perfect details, furnishing the interiors with antiques. But the difficulty increases exponentially if you decide to usher the edifice gracefully into this century.
That was the complex task undertaken by Will Meyer and Gray Davis, the duo behind Meyer Davis, the global architecture and interior design firm entrusted with reimagining a 7,000-square-foot Italianate mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Set far back on a corner property, the three-story house is sited to help mask its size and add a sense of privacy. Its pale-gray clapboard façade and slate-colored shutters let it blend discreetly into the neighborhood.
The home has had only a few owners since it was built in 1854 by a Harvard chemistry professor. While the place was structurally intact, a succession of renovations—and some very ornate gold leafing—had left it a hodgepodge of periods and styles. The new residents, a couple with Scandinavian roots and a contemporary art collection, requested a home that reflected their sophisticated sensibility. “We wanted it to feel seamless, as though the original details flowed logically into the present,” Davis says. “More than that, we wanted to quiet it down.”
To that end, the project—which took five years to complete and includes a new, adjoining, glassed-in pavilion with views of the gardens—employs a layered palette that ranges from pale neutrals to smoky blues and greens, tempering the restored details and cloaking the newly created ones in an airy modernity. The influence of Scandinavian design—its codes, colors, and geometry—is evident, with many furnishings from Svenskt Tenn, the 102-year-old Stockholm brand, and pieces by modernist masters. But arguably the architects’ most audacious decision was to place the art—much of it abstract and figurative from an assortment of established talents—in clear juxtaposition to the elaborate period trim, often boldly overlapping it. “We wanted to collage the art into the space,” Davis says.
Such ideas are writ large in the formal living room, a space that takes pride of place in a September monograph by Meyer Davis, The Language of Home (The Images Publishing Group). From the center of the 14-foot-high ceiling dangles a huge multitiered chandelier dripping with long crystals original to the room; the architects had it painstakingly reworked, slightly toning down its Victorian extravagance. “At first we weren’t sure we could save it,” Meyer says, “but we knew that keeping it would speak volumes.”
The room’s intricate millwork—rows of carved scallop shells connected by beaded ropes—was preserved and painted a chalky off-white. But the furnishings gesture toward the mid-20th century, with a pair of T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings slipper chairs situated directly across from two rounded Italian seats from the same period. Above the mantel—in front of which the chemistry professor may have once sipped a postprandial sherry—hangs a moody landscape by the contemporary Swedish painter Mamma Andersson.
The walls of the nearby music room, where a photograph by Carrie Mae Weems is placed over another original mantel, are painted in a rich bluish gray, lending a hushed intimacy. The dining room, with a deeply coffered ceiling returned to its former glory, is swathed in Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green, a lushly murky shade that contrasts with the Nero Marquina marble tabletop and Josef Frank chairs. A huge mixed-media panel in burnt orange hues by Chicago-based abstract artist McArthur Binion overlaps the millwork, a decision that simultaneously amplifies the work’s edgy immediacy and the room’s refined geometry.
The flow of the large property was a priority, both for the clients, who are enthusiastic entertainers, and Meyer Davis, who are masters of how people move through space—as evidenced not only in their residential interiors but also in their hospitality projects, including several for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. The new pavilion features off-white Marmorino plaster walls and limestone tile floors, choices that amplify light while engaging in aesthetic conversation with the historic parts of the house.
Beyond it lies the two-story carriage house, which Meyer Davis reconfigured as a loftlike retreat serving as both a poolhouse and guest quarters. Here, the vast open kitchen is exposed when the giant steel-and-glass double doors are flung open on a summer evening. Furnished with Swedish rattan furniture, the structure exudes a rustic ambience that exists in perfect concert with the glass expanse of the pavilion and the main house’s understated elegance. According to Meyer and Davis, that is precisely the point. The compound, just blocks from the bustle of Harvard Square, Meyer says, “is its own universe.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Fall Issue under the headline “Nordic Light.” Subscribe to the magazine.