For interior designer Anne McDonald, color is not merely aesthetic but a sensory framework — one informed by a home’s history, geography, light and the lived experience of a space over time.
In her own Linden Hills Craftsman, a three-bed, two-bath, 2,300-square-foot home built in 1921, color creates a palpable atmosphere. Candlelit cream, youthful blue, spring green and dusty blush layer against blackened emerald and saturated oxblood, resulting in a home that feels at once ensconcing and alive.
Photography by Tim Lenz | Styling by Liz Gardner
“Every room has an opinion,” says McDonald. “It’s not a sterile, inanimate object — it’s inhabited with feelings and motion that move through it constantly.”
But that presence didn’t exist in 2020, when McDonald and her family moved in. Early in her career, she had worked on the home for its previous owners, helping to plan the kitchen at a time when she was still defining her own aesthetic. “I was brought in to do the space planning and layout, and let them drive the ship,” she recalls. The results were stark: white factory-made cabinetry, white countertops, white subway tile and white-painted millwork.
Upstairs, the primary bathroom was a jumble of early 2000s renovations, or what she calls “sheetrock features,” with soffits and walls that jog at unusual angles. “It had nothing to do with the 1920s Craftsman.”
Over time, she began to rework the home through cosmetic updates, not just to infuse color but to rebalance it. Craftsman architecture, she notes, already carries a certain weight — dark wood, heavy detailing and a sense of masculinity.
“I live with all boys,” she says of her husband, Josh, and teenage sons, Hawken and Soren. “I need to feel represented as the feminine presence in the home, but I also don’t want it to feel like they’ve walked into a girl’s house.”
That balance is evident in the home’s color palette. In the kitchen, walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s Dimity — a white with a strong yellow undertone — make the room “feel like it’s aged or under candlelight,” while the rich veining of the white Calacatta Monet marble counters brings an organic softness.
The dining room shifts to deeper shades, wrapped in an edgy Zak + Fox floral wallpaper and grounded on the trim with Farrow & Ball’s Calamine, a cooler blush with a slight lavender undertone, tempering the lightness of the kitchen while introducing a color story that continues throughout both floors. The living room, which features trim painted in Portola Paints’ Hyde Park, a deep green pulled from the dining room wallpaper, has an eclectic mix of furniture, including an 18th-century French coffee table and a 1970s B&B Italia Le Bombole armchair.
The home’s second floor, which felt at once exposed and cramped due to a lack of doors and a dysfunctional bathroom, now has a primary suite awash in blush and oxblood. A six-month renovation transformed an unbalanced space into one brimming with personality. “It had the smallest fiberglass shower I have ever seen,” says McDonald of the original bathroom. “I couldn’t even lift my hands up to wash my hair without both my elbows hitting the wall.”
Sloped ceilings, tight clearances and code requirements made finding the right floor plan to achieve a primary bedroom, generous bathroom and walk-in closet while maintaining the nooks and crannies, quite the puzzle. “It took us nearly a year to figure out how it was going to work, and usually that’s pretty easy for me,” she says. “Trying to move the toilet, reimagining where the shower would go.”
The primary suite is now layered with blush — Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster, a color she frequently uses for its serene effect — paired with a custom blush mohair rug, vintage nightstands and a custom bed. “There’s something about being cocooned in blush,” says McDonald. “The skin looks even more beautiful when surrounded with this warm, blushy tone; it makes it glow.”
In the bathroom, she’s crafted a spa-like experience with a steam shower entirely wrapped in an oxblood zellige tile. “I didn’t want a lot of glass; I wanted it to feel enclosed,” she says. Unlacquered brass, a marble vanity and wood floors that continue from the bedroom create a space that feels warm and cozy, even on chilly Minnesota days.
The approach reflects how McDonald thinks about color more broadly. With a background in fine art and early experience working for a historic-paint colorist, she learned to see color as something shaped by material, light and place — not applied arbitrarily.
In Minnesota, where daily life shifts with the seasons, that sensitivity becomes essential. “We spend so much time in the living room in winter — it’s really cozy, the light feels a certain way,” she says. “In summer, we move to the porch. Color has to move with you.”
