Marcy Dash Friedman has seen it all—the sports-themed spaces, the billiards room, the custom wet bar where the guys can hang out and smoke cigars.
Call them what you will: a guy’s room, a hangout, a “man cave.”
Whatever you call it, Dash Friedman wanted one for herself.
When her two sons, ages 23 and 25, went off to college, Dash Friedman took over her sons’ TV and music room, and the makeover began. Walls painted brown and pink in a delicate faux finish. A reupholstered pink floral chair. Custom built-in book shelves with a striking white finish.
“My son walked in and said, ‘Pink?’” Dash Friedman recalls. “I said, ‘It’s not your room anymore. It’s mine.’”
Popular design shows on television now hype up the “man cave”—one series, Man Caves, on the DIY Network, is devoted to nothing but this trend. The supposed getaway room is meant for men to have a beer, watch sports, perhaps play games, and do whatever else is deemed manly.
“Guys need an exclusive space to hang out in their homes,” explains the show’s website. “A refuge, where they can enjoy what they love.”
This leaves many South Jersey women scratching their heads and asking, “Where’s my personal space?”
“I come last,” Dash Friedman says with a laugh. “With a lot of women, that’s the way it goes. So, I guess I have my own little cave in my home. I had to set a rule, or else there would be nothing for me.”
“A woman has different needs than a man has,” says Kathy Geller, an interior designer and the owner of Rooms in Bloom in Moorestown. “A man wants to create a space that’s just his, where the woman can’t say, ‘That looks terrible,’ or, ‘That doesn’t match.’
“She, on the other hand, just wants a place to sit down and take a breath, sit and have a glass of wine,” Geller says. “Women want a place to get away from everything. They want a soft place to fall. A quiet, beautiful, soul-nurturing kind of place, where they can just be.”
Depending on the woman, that “getaway” can vary widely. Area designers have worked on everything from a crafting and sewing room, a formal “dressing room,” an extended closet or a home office.
Dash Friedman, who owns Dashing Designs in Cherry Hill, is currently working with a client to design a getaway space she requested in her finished basement—a crafting center and gift-wrapping station.
Larry DiCicco, of DiCicco Builders in Mount Laurel, also works with local women to help them find their dream space inside their home. Currently, he is working with one customer on a special project—a personal sauna and home gym.
For a lot of the women, it’s more than just having their own space built for them, they want to have input too, making sure the area has plenty of personal touches. For Barbara Omert, designing and building a custom home with her husband gave her the perfect opportunity to create not just one space to call her own, but several.
Sharing her visions with a designer, Omert, of Moorestown, created a sprawling closet and dressing room complete with velvet curtains and a professional makeup mirror, a conservatory filled with plants and flowers to read and relax, and her own personal wine cellar with a custom mural and stone walls where she can gather with girlfriends.
“We have our little sitting area in the back of my wine cellar—I can’t even get my girlfriends out of there once they go in,” Omert says. “They forget what time it is. You can sit and talk, and it’s really pretty in there. It’s comfortable. You can put your feet up.
“It helps to get away from the whole stress of the day. All day I’m on, whether it’s something to do at the house, running to an appointment. These spaces–I always feel total relief. I’m totally relieved of my duties of the day. It’s my time. My ‘me’ time.”
Omert claims her husband doesn’t mind one bit. Outside, in the couple’s outdoor kitchen area, he likes to smoke cigars with friends to unwind.
“That’s his man thing … by the fire pit,” Omert says.
Often, the female “cave” simply comes in the form of a closet–a really, really amazing closet. “It’s like a dream for woman to have the ultimate closet,” offers Terri Fisher, owner of Closet Gallery, a custom closet company serving the tri-state area for seven years.
“Lots of times, when they have an empty room in the house—we turn a lot of bedrooms into dressing rooms,” Fisher says. “Especially mothers—they’re doing this or that … and they need something for themselves. They can relate to a personal space for their belongings. They incorporate chandeliers—that makes a statement right there of what they’re trying to achieve.”
But Geller insists that a big budget is not required to create a little personal space.
“You may just want a place to do crafts—just kind of shut the world out,” Geller says. “A dressing room is a great place, and you can do that if you have a space in your closet to add, say, a lounge chair, a small table and some lighting. Make it a little getaway in your dressing area.”
Vickie Zell, of Cherry Hill, grew tired of staring at her closet covered in old, 1960s floral wallpaper. She decided she wanted to carve out a space of her own to organize her clothes and jewelry the way she always wanted.
Zell and her husband gutted their master bedroom, creating tons of extra space. Together with their designer, Dash Friedman, they built the closet of her dreams.
“We took care of the kids first,” Zell says. “But after living here for 13 years, we decided it was time to take care of ourselves. I wanted space that was useable and pretty. It was time.”
The closet is a shared space, Zell admits, but her husband’s area is much smaller. Today, Zell relishes her new, larger space complete with built-in cabinets, shelves and jewelry organizers and a small chandelier.
“I love it; it’s terrific,” Zell gushes. “I’ve been having a lot of fun getting it organized. Just the fun of putting stuff in there is great.”
Published (and copyrighted) in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1 (April, 2012).
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