It’s Summer Inside | Designer Mally Skok’s Colorful Massachusetts Home

The designer with Isabella, one of her beloved dachshunds.

Credit: Sarah Winchester | Styling by Jennifer Figge

“They are such divas, have you noticed?!”

The two dachshunds, Rosie and Isabella, are scrambling at my feet, and this declaration rises and falls in an animated South African accent. Mally Skok is fairly seismic, her presence vigorous and enlivening—no surprise to the many clients familiar with her Mally Skok Design fabrics and wallpapers. Her collections evoke India, Africa … or a sudden plunge into fuchsia petunias. If Mally herself were rendered as a paint chip, no single color would do. A palette, most definitely, would be required.

Among the vibrant tableaux in Mally Skok’s Massachusetts home is this room done up in her “Brimfield Pink” pattern, inspired by a plate she once spotted at the Brimfield Antique Show.
Credit: Sarah Winchester | Styling by Jennifer Figge

We’re roaming through her home—the one she designed and built 20 years ago with her husband, David, in Lincoln, Massachusetts—admiring the view over Farrar Pond. This is a house where even the air has room to spread out and breathe. The ceilings are high; the windows drop to the baseboard, “like English country homes, making little pools of light,” she says. The wide entrance hall straddles the house, front to back—step past the main door and you see all the way through to the backyard.

It is the antithesis of the sad little 1970s house that once sat here, though Mally did try to save that one. “I said, ‘I can fix this—no problem!’” she exclaims. “South African–style, we think we can fix everything. I hate waste, I hate throwing things away.”

But when the dwelling proved unsalvageable, she suddenly had designer’s carte blanche. “I’d never designed a house from scratch, because I come from this make-do part of the world. When you start doing the work, it’s so interesting what you’ve filed away subconsciously.” She nods toward the foyer. “I realized I love houses that when you walk in the door, you can see the garden on the other side.”

The designer with Isabella, one of her beloved dachshunds.
Credit: Sarah Winchester | Styling by Jennifer Figge

This “map in your brain,” as Mally calls it, also determined the flow of living room/dining room/hallway-in-the-middle, “like the old Dutch farmhouses in South Africa.” The butter-yellow kitchen has what Mally describes as “un-kitchen-cabinet areas.” The color has gone in and out of fashion, and she doesn’t much care (nor does she remember what it’s called). A warm copper sink glows in the center island, and potted foxgloves bring the outside in. She definitely wanted a pantry—again, like those country houses—and it is burnished with a brilliant shade of eggplant by Farrow & Ball. A huge fan of that paint maker, she notes, “There’s so much pigment, that’s why they’re expensive. The paints have got depth.”

But the memory map doesn’t stop here. Each room vibrates with evidence of a life well traveled. Born in Cape Town, Mally was 6 when her family moved to Johannesburg, so “Africa plays a big part in my world view.” It’s also where an overriding strength formed. “My dad died of a heart attack when I was 11 years old,” she says. “I think it’s part of my ‘don’t sweat the small stuff,’ because I know what something really bad is, and it’s that. It’s not that you don’t like the color of the chairs you ordered.”

From there, it was off to London and finally to Concord, Massachusetts, which was supposed to be temporary, but when she and David walked this property, “it was a life-shifting moment,” she says. “We decided to make a go of living here. And much as I love London and England, it doesn’t really matter where you live. You make your own little bubble.”