Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
it all started with the floors.
Sara and Dave Costello described exactly what they wanted in their new home. Designer Seth Cluley knew just where to find it.
From there, Sara and Seth and a team of inspired co-workers, family, and friends embarked on an incredible collaboration—part mind-melding, part serendipity, and a whole lot of trust. The resulting home blends rustic and refined elements in harmony, a reflection of the seamless partnership between homeowner and designer.
When Sara and her family had ideas, Cluley and his team delivered beyond their expectations. Where something wasn’t right—a piece of furniture or a room configuration—everyone worked together to make it fit perfectly with their shared vision for this Lancaster County home.
“Whatever’s in your head doesn’t just miraculously appear,” says Sara Costello. “You have to have the right people who know what to do. People have said this is such a happy house. You can’t put something together like this without a lot of people really working well together.”
Rustic elegance
In Wild West movies, there’s always one character—the rambunctious but beautiful heroine, or the rugged but soft-spoken hero—who’s both rough and refined. This home is that rough and refined character.
Sara Costello met Seth Cluley, designer with the Lancaster-based design and woodworking collaborative Tellus360, the first time her husband Dave and his brother, Tom, of Costello Builders, East Petersburg, constructed a home for the Lancaster Building and Industry Association's early summer Parade of Homes. When the 2012 Parade of Homes came around, Dave and Sara decided to build a home for themselves.
“We started it with these floors,” says Sara. “Dave and I looked at different companies. Nothing seemed to fit.”
They wanted wide, dark, tactile planks, something so inviting that “you come and just want to hang out and have a hard time leaving,” Sara says. Seth took them straight to the Tellus360 store on East King Street in downtown Lancaster.
“These are the floors that I want,” Sara said as soon as she walked in the door.
Tellus360 milled several pine samples to find the right semi-coarse feel. The roughness gave a variegated but uniform look to the dark stain, creating depth and interest. For continuity, the floor extends throughout most of the house, upstairs and down—a unifying theme for the home’s eclectic elements.
“Everything comes to life,” Sara says.
In the kitchen, Sara wanted an island, but with a bench instead of a bar. Seth designed a wooden bench of many hues. He topped the island with a built-in burled wood cutting board and a cement microtopping finished to a slightly gritty feel.
“It’s super strong and durable,” says Seth. “But very lightweight,” adds Sara. For Cluley, who has an extensive background in paint and finishing, Deco-Poz is an eco-friendly alternative to pouring solid concrete countertops.
“You can do it in whatever color you want,” Seth continues. You can do stencils and designs too, he says.
The Costellos asked Tellus360 to transform a tree, bark and all, into a tabletop to pair with the bench. And there it is—smooth top, bark sides, and an end “leg” that’s actually the same piece of wood sliced and expertly mitered to create a seamless 90-degree turn.
“It was amazing how the grain continues like they bent it,” marvels Sara.
The Costellos wanted their home to mix old and new. Elegant chandeliers illuminate the island from a coffered ceiling with the rich patina of antique bronze. The patina on the ceiling and the stove hood, and even on the nearly invisible frames of the island drawers, was created with an oxidizing paint, manipulated to look like real bronze.
“I said we’re going to really bronze up your kitchen,” recalls Seth. “In everything, like the island, we wanted it to feel like this was an old house, just . . .”
“Redone,” says Sara.
“Instead of a new house,” finishes Seth.
Collaboration
Pinterest, a virtual cork board where users can “pin” and share inspirations they find online, came in handy as Sara and Seth shot ideas back and forth. So did field trips to Tellus360’s studio and workshop.
But mostly, Sara and Seth found in each other like minds with a love for the unusual, the remade, and the beautiful.
“We work well together,” says Sara. “I’m very focused and have visions of what I want, and he definitely gets that. He just does. I’ll say something, and he’ll come back with a rendering or a sample, and it’s exactly what I want.”
The home’s layout is “completely nontraditional,” says Sara. “We don’t have your old rooms that went to waste, like the formal dining room. We don’t have a formal living room. Those are spaces we find are just wasted. This is where we live.”
“That’s where we started,” says Seth. The home’s old-new, rough-refined, open-room design inspired a minimalist color concept—sand, gold, black, light blue—that could be mixed and matched for effect. “In all three floors of the house, the main areas are the same color scheme, but sometimes they’re flipped,” he says. “Downstairs, the trim is lighter and the walls are actually the color of the trim on the first floor. It really makes the whole house feel together.”
“It needs to flow,” adds Sara.
Other family members also collaborated easily with Seth and the Tellus360 team. Twelve-year-old Carli says she wanted a blue background with brown stripes in her bedroom. “Seth showed me this tree stencil that looked like stripes,” Carli says. “And I also wanted a loft and a bunk bed. Tellus made my bunk bed out of actual trees. They made the ladder made from plumbing pipes. I wanted a loft with all these pillows so it’d be a comfortable place to read.”
“She had her vision,” says her mom. “Her vision was there, and the guys made it happen.” The result is, according to Sara, an exact reflection of Carli’s character—feminine, but rough-edged—a girl who gets so muddy playing outside that her mom has to hose her down. It is also a teenage girl’s dream, with nooks and bunk beds and the hideaway loft reached by rope-railed stairs. The tree stencil shimmers in a light bronze tone, and bird stencils added by decorative painter Tom Henman soar skyward across the walls and ceilings.
The chandelier was a disappointment at first, with its frilly shade and a few strands of crystals. Here, another heaven-sent collaborator—Jill Hoffines-Erb of Floral Designs of Mount Joy, who created the home’s on-point arrangements on short notice—came to the rescue. She enveloped the fixture in birch branches and just knew that it needed strand after strand of crystals.
“Jill said, ‘It needs to rain gems,’” recalls Sara. “I said, ‘Exactly! That’s exactly what it needs to do.’ Everyone understood.”
Remaking
What to do when the vanities for the Jack-and-Jill bathroom shared by Carli’s room and a guest room were the right size and shape but were painted with oppressive sailboat scenes—suitable neither for guests nor a teenage girl?
This was not a project where everyone said, “Oh, well,” and settled for the merely OK. Henman lightened the vanities with pink paint and stencils of French poems and stamps. Throughout the home, furniture, mirrors, and décor started life as pieces that wouldn’t have worked here. The Costellos wanted to reuse their old furniture, so beds were bronzed, night tables retopped, and armoires repainted. A dresser was refashioned into a powder-room vanity, a lookalike of an expensive, ready-made version. The huge mirror above it looked “a little too glam” for Sara’s taste, so Seth framed it in barn-salvage planks, letting the glass peek through holes in the wood. The living room’s homemade, birdcage-enclosed chandelier cost considerably less than its “ridiculously expensive” twin from a famous home-supply catalog.
“I had that birdcage in my house,” says Sara. “It had legs, so Dave sawed them off. We opened the top and bought a chandelier on Amazon. It happened to match perfectly. We didn’t do anything to it, so that was crazy. This is a nicer version at a much cheaper price. And it was fun that we did it ourselves.”
While the house was finished, the garage became a kind of HGTV workshop, where Seth might be working on one piece while Sara, Dave, Sara’s mom, and Carli worked on another.
“Neighbors would drive by and look,” says Sara. “We’re all out there stippling.”
The Tellus360 artistry is on display in a guest room, a visitors’ oasis where Seth asked for free rein with the design. “I had their parents in mind, just as a place for them to stay.”
Now, says Sara, “they kind of never want to leave.”
And no wonder. The nightstands, bed, vanity, and mirror were made from salvaged wood from a Philadelphia bar. The headboard came from an industrial warehouse in New York. The vibrant painting on the wall is a creation of Sara and Carli from a “Jackson Pollack experience” workshop at Tellus360. On an adjoining wall are framed photos of Sara and Carli making the piece.
“I didn’t realize they were taking pictures while we were doing that,” Sara says. “When I looked at those pictures, I literally lost it. I started crying.”
Every feature of the room and guest bath – from drop cloths used as curtains, to the stone sink with a rock for a stopper, to the antique Irish desk retopped in zinc, to the mirror framed in the wood discards of a Lancaster house fire—spotlights the mad genius approach that Tellus360 brings to design and repurposing.
“We wanted to test that we can show up and do anything,” says Seth.
The Costellos, for their part, wanted to showcase local artisans.
“All of this is local,” says Sara. “We want to show that we can do this here, and we can make our economy thrive locally.”
“A happy place”
In the Costellos’ backyard, on the garden bed adorning the firepit and fountain, is a substantial gray stone—about knee-high with a piece projecting from the base. “My excavator found this amazing rock,” Sara explains. “I went right away and sat on it. It looks like a little bench, like a dragon or a sculpture. He hasn’t seen that I used it in my landscape, so I can’t wait to bring him over and show it.”
The excavator who went out of his way to show the homeowner a unique rock symbolizes the creative, cooperative spirit that went into building this house. Contractors pitched in to help each other. The family put sweat equity into furnishings and fixtures. Even a lattice over the stone-walled wine rack was an idea that Sara and Dave conceived and built themselves to bring a note of warmth into the space.
When the house was done, the artisans of Tellus360 surprised Sara by presenting her with a vintage coal mine cart, complete with wood handles and iron wheels. Sara had admired the cart in the Tellus360 workshop. She put it to use as the living-room coffee table—a rugged statement in a bright, refined room with picture windows, a white sofa, and that birdcage chandelier.
“I love the fact that it’s real,” Sara says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with recreating, but you can actually use something that was already there and not just trash it and throw it in a dumpster. You can make it a focal point of this beautiful room.”
And there was the old-fashioned dumb luck of building this home that still makes Sara and Seth marvel. When the stairs—stained and painted in a deep, dramatic brown—were being installed, Sara thought the newels just seemed stylistically wrong. Did she have time to find new ones? Three hours, Seth said. A whirlwind tour of salvage shops produced a matched set of antique newels carved with crowns—a motif repeated mischievously throughout the house for its architectural appeal.
“The place where Sara got these rarely has two newels,” Seth says. “She found two of them, and they have a crown on top, which is unbelievable.”
The hectic day before Parade of Homes judging happened to be Carli’s birthday. Carli and friends congregated in the home theater, a comfortable, dual-purpose space designed in conjuction with Wee Bee Audio Video to be as welcoming for teenage gabfests as movie nights. In the midst of chaos, Sara had a dozen giggling girls on her hands, but she kept reminding herself that it was the home's first party.
“You have to keep a balance,” she says. “It’s her birthday, and that’s a very important day. I didn’t want to say we’ll just do it later. She still had her special day.”
That philosophy grounds the life to be lived in this comfortable, accessible home. Even during the Parade of Homes, Sara didn’t have the heart to kick out guests who lingered after closing time.
“You know what? That’s what I want,” Sara says. “Be careful what you wish for. Your guests will never leave. It’s a happy place.”
Story by M. Diane McCormick
