Stylemaker: Jen Ziemer
Favorite local store:
I love shopping at Zachery at IMS for wonderful accessories and found pieces.
On consulting with another interior designer for her own home:
Collaboration is always better than design in a vacuum. I’m lucky because my business partner (Andrea Dixon) is an amazing interior designer. I definitely run things by her. Sometimes we are too close to our own homes, and have a tough time making decisions—just like our clients do. It’s great to be able to say: “This or that?”
Favorite online shopping resource:
I love to shop local, but I’ve found a lot of cool, unusual art on One King’s Lane.
Jen Ziemer and her family recently moved to a vintage 1913 Summit Avenue Tudor. The interior design honors the period of the space but feels anything but traditional.
“I’m Anthropologie meets J.Crew meets unexpected vintage meets funky art,” says Ziemer, laughing as she tries to narrow down her style definition.
“I respect the architecture, but then we put ourselves into it.” Her husband, Tim, sons, Kyle and Griffin, and miniature bulldog, Otis, also make themselves at home here, but the décor is unmistakably hers. Few mix and match pattern, color, and era as well as Jen—but then her design chops are official: She’s an interior designer and co-owner of Fiddlehead Design Group in Minneapolis.
Her approach to design—don’t do what anyone else is doing—came into play in her family’s new space. “When we walked in, the bones were there,” she says. “It was all white—almost Shaker-simple.” Nice, but not her: “I absolutely have to have color around me,” she says. She saw the home, major updates already completed, as a blank canvas upon which to splash color, mix unexpected patterns, and add “all the layers.”
The dining room exemplifies her affinity for layering. “I love fabric,” she says. The vibrant, patterned fabric on the dramatic bench provided the starting point for designing the dining room. Wall coverings, wainscoting, place settings and objets d’art followed, each loosely—but artfully—related to the last piece.
The key to creating a layered, eclectic look is to let go of the fear, she says: “I’m not afraid. People hold back, but I’m here to say, ‘It’s OK!’ I don’t have rules, for me or for my clients. I tell them, ‘You see it. You like it. We’ll make it work.’”
By Katie Dohman
Photos by Sara Rubinstein
