Easy Cake Decorating For Halloween

Mikkel Vang

The first sign that Blake Tovin and Suzanna Frosch's home is anything but your average country place appears right at the couple's front door. This Dutch split-style entryway, painted a green so dark it's almost black, boasts two oval windows set at an angle and suggesting the eyes of a bullfrog or, perhaps, Casper the Friendly Ghost. As it turns out, the unique feature dates back even earlier than the house, an 1820 Flemish Colonial located in a quiet hamlet of New York's lower Hudson Valley. "The guy who restored the door for us said the style, and the heavy lockset, make it a dead ringer for the late 1700s or very early 1800s," Tovin explains.

What you find on the other side of this evocative gateway — collections of glass eyes and apothecary jars, as well as an autumnal color palette that includes bold orange and moody chartreuse — brings to mind a Halloween display any day of the year. But in the month of October the home really springs to life, with plastic spiders crawling on picture frames and flocks of cutout bats taking flight across walls and alighting on table settings. A solemn oil portrait gets a jolt of black humor with the addition of a construction paper witch's hat. And tattered cheesecloth and faux cobwebs drape over sofas, chairs, and windows, creating a haunted-house effect reminiscent of Miss Havisham's place in Dickens's Great Expectations, or even the Addams Family's gothic manse.

But while it may be tempting to label Tovin and Frosch as a real-life version of Gomez and Morticia Addams, the pair, who moved into their home eight years ago, are hardly the town oddballs. They have two very normal, and adorable, children — Walker, 13, and Isabelle, 6. Frosch, who possesses a quick smile and a calm air, works as an artist and recently spent three weeks volunteering at a Tibetan orphanage. And soft-spoken Tovin makes a living designing furniture for mainstream retailers like Restoration Hardware and Crate&Barrel, as well as for contemporary textile artist Jack Lenor Larsen.

The couple's shared artistic nature fuels a fearless confidence in the way they mix and match most everything: from eras to styles to price points. Take their dining room, for instance, with its rustic farm table, midcentury Thonet chairs, and industrial pendant lamp designed by Tovin. Then there's the living room, where a flea-market Empire table holds court in front of a comfy Crate & Barrel sofa while an austere Elizabethan portrait looks on.

Even the house's floor plan has a playful nature: It twists and turns and rambles, as if rooms were added willy-nilly. And in fact, they were. "This place is a real rabbit warren," says Tovin. "It's typical of a lot of the homes in our neighborhood, which have been frequently revised over the years."

Despite the piecemeal way things took shape, the four-bedroom structure feels cohesive. Like a well-crafted poem, it stops, starts, and changes rhythm, but ultimately everything falls perfectly into place. Wide-plank oak floors, stained a brown-black hue, lead from room to room, creaking underfoot like the deck of an old ship.

Surprises abound. What appears to be a standard (albeit Chinese red) bookcase, stuffed with novels by the likes of Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, and Virginia Woolf, is also a powder room door. In the kids' bathroom, an otherwise traditional claw-foot tub commands attention with a coat of bright pumpkin-orange paint. And while latticework and flowers usually conjure a sweet, sunny day in the garden, the motifs become positively moody when recast in muted shades of mustard on the kitchen walls. Somehow, this wallpaper manages to look both centuries old and of the moment, which pretty much sums up Frosch and Tovin's aesthetic. The pair possess an ability to find a fresh point of view amid objects that wear the patina of age or, as Tovin refers to it, "natural corrosion."

Though the two swear that provenance doesn't matter, and refuse to pledge allegiance to any single style, a common thread unites their wide variety of accumulated treasures. The couple's almost compulsive desire to collect curiosities from different places and periods, to arrange these finds into elaborate vignettes, or capture them under glass, is almost textbook Victorian.

"We never stop looking for things," Frosch admits, "because there's always one more great piece to add to the mix." Like, say, an oversize model of human teeth, or bell jar after bell jar after bell jar. "I rarely pay more than $50 for a cloche," she adds, as if justifying the habit, "and you can find them for as little as 10 bucks." Besides, Tovin explains, they aren't just hoarding objects, but mini history lessons: "Everything we own," he says, "and the way we decorate, speaks of a different time."

Surely, then, they were horrified when their daughter, Isabelle, decided to dress up as Hannah Montana last Halloween? "Actually," recalls Frosch, "I was like, 'Okay, I don't really get it, but it's your call.'" Of course, there was never any real reason for concern. Isabelle, clearly her mother's daughter, has already outgrown her brief Disney teen-queen phase. She thinks that this October she'll return to her usual getup — the one Mom made for her three years ago. "I'm probably going to be a witch," Isabelle says, sipping milk through a straw. "I think that's better than Hannah Montana."

See photos from Inside a Spooky Home.

Writer and editor Joe Bargmann lives on the river in Grand View, New York, with his wife, Nancy, and two standard poodles, Muddy and Lincoln.

Joe Bargmann Special Projects Director Makers, innovators, entrepreneurs, cars (classic English roadsters to rocket-powered), space, chefs, restaurants, golf, crowdfunding, 3D printing, sonic paper, The Sonics, Link Wray, Lykke Li, ridiculously ambitious projects that end up getting done (if only after months of persistence and troubleshooting), chainsaws, art and more art, Paris, Rome, New York (in that order), gardening, fishing, and living life in full-attack mode.

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