By Jan Parr
Produced by Gina Bazer

Winters’s shop is housed in what used to be a pharmacy. The interior has an underlying black-and-white color scheme, which Winters points out does not have to be overly dramatic. “It’s a great neutral that works well with gold, camel, brown, and red and also with washed-out blues and soft greens,” she says.
 

Megan Winters is out to loosen up staid homes on the North Shore, one overly controlled silk flower arrangement at a time. Decor can be traditional without being “old and boring, been-there-done-that,” she says. Winters, a former global packaging exec who chucked it all in 2009 for her true love, interior design, recently opened a shop and design studio bearing her name. It’s filled with old and new finds from Europe (mostly France, where she travels frequently) and local flea markets and junk shops. She likes breathing new life into timeworn things by painting, upholstering, and gilding them. Especially gilding. “I love to gild!” she says.

Winters, who, with her sister, designed a room at the 2009 Lake Forest Showhouse, filled the new space with her own custom furniture, along with inspired and inspiring home accessories—coffee-table books, wine coasters, and frames, among them. “I don’t believe everything has to cost a gazillion dollars,” she says. “If it’s all at a certain taste level, that’s how you create a space that is beautiful and a reflection of you.”

Megan Winters
675 Forest Ave.
Lake Forest
847-295-1675
meganwintersdesign.com

Photograph: (portrait) Katrina Wittkamp