FINE DINING: A chandelier with cascading lights is suspended over Spencer’s white lacquer dining table. (Elizabeth Lippman)
HIGH & LOW: Flanking a new sofa are mid-century lamps from a thrift shop. (Elizabeth Lippman)
Vintage purple mohair chairs found on eBay add a groovy vibe to the living room. (Elizabeth Lippman)
Good Morning America” co-anchor Lara Spencer and her husband, David Haffenreffer (a former CNN anchor now in real estate), recall finding their unusual home. It was 2005, and they were searching in Connecticut. “We happened upon this little part of Greenwich called Riverside,” Spencer says, “and we knew this was the place to raise a family.”
The house, a basic 1920s New England farmhouse, had been reconfigured and added onto over the years until it became, Haffenreffer says, “endearingly quirky.”
Porches were converted into oddly shaped rooms. More porches were added — and then more rooms, too. “We loved the neighborhood, and we loved the feel of the house,” Spencer says. “From the minute we stepped inside, we knew it was right.”
In its 4,200 square feet are four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a dining room, a 20-by-40-foot kitchen, a playroom for the kids (son Duff, 10, and daughter Kate, 8), Spencer’s reading room (once another bedroom), Haffenreffer’s office (formerly a maid’s room) and a sun porch.
The kitchen is so large that, in addition to a marble cooking island and a table and chairs, there’s a seating area with a couch, a steamer trunk for a coffee table, a working fireplace and a TV. “It’s so nice to be able to cook while the kids are sitting there watching TV or doing their homework,” Spencer says. “The kitchen is the hub of our house.”
As for the home’s decor, Spencer — who does all her own decorating — approaches it like an adventure. She believes in “the three R’s: rescue, recycle and reinvent.” She hits up flea market, auctions, yard sales and sometimes even dumpsters, mixing her finds with new designer pieces. “To me,” she says, “it’s not about whether you can afford to shop at antique stores or order up entire rooms from a catalog. It’s so much more fun to do it this way. If I wasn’t doing what I do for my day job, I’d certainly be trying to figure out a way to do this full-time.”
Sometimes, what Spencer does comes close to treasure-hunting. There are two numbered Picasso lithographs from the 1960s that she discovered at a Salvation Army store. “They were $35 for the pair, and they’re worth about $3,500,” she says. “I’d thought they were posters, but when I took them in for framing, the framer recognized the paper and verified that they were the real thing.
“I think that helped me get the job when I was hosting ‘Antiques Roadshow’ in 2004. I told them that story, and they could see I was serious about finding antiques.”
Other great finds include a 1940s indoor/outdoor bar she got at a yard sale (“It was in treacherous condition, and my husband thought I was out of my mind, but I could see it had good bones”) and a set of four kitchen chairs she bought for $10. “I’ve re-covered them so many times,” she says, “that I finally got the genius idea of using a shower curtain to re-cover them. I also added chrome tacks for a bit of glam. Now they’re indestructible and beautiful.”
As for her career, there’s talk about Spencer — who returned to “Good Morning America” in 2011 after nearly seven years at “The Insider” — having a bigger role in ABC’s planned afternoon version of “GMA.” She won’t discuss those rumors, but she does say: “We have a lot of momentum, and viewers are starting to notice.”
Spencer also created and produced a show for NBC called “It’s Worth What?” and created two shows for HGTV — a pilot that got picked up for a series called “Flea Market Flip” and a one-hour special based on her book, “I Brake for Yard Sales.”
The book is a look at the pleasures and the pitfalls of searching flea markets and yard sales for hidden treasures. It offers pointers on how to find pieces, what to look for and even flea-market etiquette.
“The book was a long time in the making,” Spencer says. “It started because when I was a kid, my mom would go ‘sale-ing’ — that was our word for going to yard sales — and I would go with her. It was magical to see the transformation of the things she bought when she was finished with them.
“As I got older, I started sale-ing on my own. And when people came to my house they loved my stories. They’d ask: ‘Where’d you find that? How little did you pay for it? What did you do to restore it?’ That led to the book.”
And hitting flea markets has turned into a family tradition. “My mother and I totally bonded over our flea-market searches,” Spencer says. “And now my daughter comes with me on my searches. So now Kate and I are bonding over them, too.”
LARA SPENCER’S FAVORITE THINGS
* Purple mohair chairs designed by Warren Platner that Spencer found on eBay; she paid $2,000, and they retail for more than $6,000.
* Amid-century painting of a city scene by Lee Reynolds
* A vintage Haffenreffer sign; her husband’s family were beer brewers and during Prohibition switched to ginger ale.
* A Pop Art painting by Todd Goldman
* Classic wing chairs covered in black leather
* An indoor/outdoor bar she had restored
* The front porch
* Mid-century lamps that she found in a thrift shop
* Picasso numbered lithographs