A $15 Plank and Backyard Stones Resolved This Pittsburgh Row House’s Most Difficult Corner

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The listing images for this 1880 row house in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville district hardly invited longing. The rental’s kitchen cabinetry read a vivid blue, the bathrooms a candy pink, while faux-glass hardware and steampunk-inspired fixtures surfaced throughout. YetNoel Knostman, who spent years refining her craft under celebrated designerLeanne Ford, recognized the solid architecture beneath—she and her husband embraced the opportunity and signed the lease.

Original fireplaces, weathered brick, creaking oak floors, oversized windows, and the ultimate enticement: a claw-foot tub. The 1,800-square-foot residence also offered a backyard, two off-street parking spaces, and a front stoop—a milestone for the couple after years of apartment life in New York City and Salt Lake City. “I’ve always believed that old houses tell you what they want to be if you’re willing to listen,” says Knostman. “This one wasn’t asking to become a modern house. It simply wanted to be an old house again.”

Knostman refused to treat the rental as a placeholder, even though a work relocation remained a possibility the couple anticipated (and ultimately pursued). With her landlords’ blessing, she painted, wallpapered, swapped hardware and lighting, and even commissioned furnishings for its most challenging room. “Owning a home and making it feel like home aren’t the same thing,” she says. Here are five of the most inspired ideas she applied to help the house settle back into itself.

The existing cool white only heightened the contrast between the home’s historic architecture and its later updates. Knostman wrapped the walls, ceilings, and trim in Sherwin-Williams’sShoji White, a warmer shade carrying subtle pink undertones that flattered the brick and aged oak floors. Rather than defaulting to a modern matte finish, she selected light-reflecting semigloss. Because the structure shares one wall with its neighbor and daylight reaches only three sides, the gentle sheen helped carry light deeper into the rooms while lending the walls a more traditional—and future-renter-friendly—durability.

Knostman color-drenched the kitchen as well, refinishing the formerly cobalt cabinetry in Farrow & Ball’s earthyBroccoli Brown. The green-brown tone ties the space to the landscape beyond and the home’s warm materials. “The afternoon I repainted those cabinets, you could literally feel the whole house shift,” she recalls.

Among the first tasks Knostman’s husband undertook after receiving the keys was removing the old roll-down blinds. In their place, the couple hung custom café curtains from Etsy on inexpensive tension rods. The half-height panels delivered privacy from the closely packed neighboring homes without forfeiting the sunlight streaming through the tall windows. They proved especially transformative in the bathroom, where they fluttered in the breeze beside the claw-foot tub. “It’s funny that one of my first investments wasn’t a sofa or dining table,” Knostman says. “It was finding ways to let more light move through the house.”

The family room posed the greatest challenge. A nine-foot-wide addition at the rear of the house, it featured soaring ceilings, repurposed bowling-alley floors, and a passage to the backyard cutting straight through it. Conventional furniture arrangements only made its awkward proportions more pronounced.

Rather than filling it with several petite pieces, Knostman went grand. She commissioned a 10-foot sofa spanning an entire wall, then sourced a nine-foot table salvaged from nearby Robert Morris School and cut it down into a generously scaled coffee table. “It taught me one of my favorite design lessons,” she says. “Small spaces don’t always need small furniture.”

Swapping builder-grade fixtures for softer, more sculptural ones restored character to the rental, though Knostman couldn’t hardwire lighting everywhere she desired. Her workaround was candle sconces, including a brass pair flanking the fireplace. She even repurposed an old light fixture stripped of its wiring by nailing it directly to the wall and placing a taper inside. Elsewhere, a modern linen globe pendant inherited from Ford gained a historic counterpoint through an inexpensive ceiling medallion. The pairing introduced just enough tension to keep the interior from feeling like a period piece.

Sourcing a media console for the narrow family room proved nearly impossible. It needed to stretch across most of the wall beneath the television while remaining shallow enough to preserve the walkway to the backyard. Everything Knostman found was either the wrong size or beyond her budget. So, the couple crafted their own from a $15 wooden plank and four stones gathered in the backyard. The low, sculptural shelf suited the room better than anything they could have purchased. Above it, a piece of drop-cloth artwork concealed the television when not in use.

The solution captures Knostman’s approach to the entire house: Look closely at what is already there, embrace its imperfections, and resist waiting for some future home before making daily life more beautiful. “We lived there for three years,” she says. “This wasn’t a placeholder. It was our home.”

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