When restaurateur Rose Bonura bought her historic 18th-century home 27 years ago in Stamford, Connecticut, she dreamed of the day when it could be properly and gloriously restored. It might have taken just over two decades, but the time finally came, thanks to a hungry traveler who wandered in one day for his first of many, many meals.

That visitor was New York–based interior designer Ryan Lawson. Lawson's partner and he have a house up in Connecticut about an hour outside the city and practically every weekend, they go to a restaurant in New Canaan called Rosie,” Lawson says. The food-loving designer and the design-loving foodie quickly bonded. Bonura’s house, they both realized, would be a shared labor of love.

Lawson has spent the past four years carefully renovating and updating the interiors of Bonura’s two-story Colonial. “Miraculously, she is only the fifth owner since it was built in 1730, which is crazy to think about.” The original owners had six children, and the property was passed down five generations before Bonura’s stewardship began. However, after buying the 1,300-square-foot house in 1994, Bonura’s sole focus was raising two children and, later, running her popular eatery. 

The first order of business was to enclose the original back porch and turn the space into a long open-concept dining area that flows into the kitchen. It has the original roofline of the house above it, so Lawsonv opened it up to the rafters, they kept the rooms at the front of the house intact and left them the original scale.