Sharon designer Jason VanWarren creates beautiful homes for modern living
By Jamie Marshall
Photographs by John Gruen
Jason VanWarren was a junior in high school when he walked into the grand opening of Linda Banks’s design shop, Simply Home, in Falmouth, Maine. Banks had recently decamped from Darien to the picturesque coastal village after a successful career.
“It was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” he recalls about her classic Connecticut/New England vibe.
Jason went home and sent Banks an email asking her for a job. “I told her I wanted to be in design, to do what she does.”
Banks hired him to help out in the showroom, and then started bringing him to work sites so he could see the design process from start to finish.
“I was lucky to have her for a mentor,” Jason says. “I learned how a business runs, not just making things beautiful but the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes home transformation work. It cemented that this was what I was going to do.”
Achieving the vision Banks inspired was years in the making. His journey involved many twists and turns before he ended up in Sharon, where he launched his own design business, Ellsworth Home.
Jason earned his interior design degree at Endicott College, and spent several years working for an old-school firm in Boston. “We took top-to-bottom renovations to the next level,” he says. He went on to get a master’s degree at the Florence Design Academy, oversaw three renovations for his family—each at a different stage in their lives—and worked for several high-end New York City firms, including Jacques Grange and Rees Roberts + Partners, where he was a partner for three years. “You can still see their influence in my work,” he says.
In 2012, Jason met his now husband, Keith VanWarren. They were on their second date and Keith asked him to swing by his Upper West Side apartment and look at a renovation plan. Jason was not impressed. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t do any part of this plan.’ I gulped and said, help me understand why,” Keith recalls.
Although he’d only seen the place for a few minutes, Jason told Keith exactly what he would do with the space.
“I said, can I hire you?”
That was the couple’s first but by no means last project together. They moved in together soon after. After two years they needed more space, and Jason—a country boy at heart—needed less city.
They looked at all the usual spots before following several friends to Salisbury. “It felt like a strangely familiar small town,” he says. They found a house to buy in Lakeville. “Think Grey Gardens but without the raccoon situation,” says Jason. It took almost three years to transform the property, which they eventually sold in June 2020.
For Jason, the move to Connecticut sparked an opportunity to shake things up. In 2021 he launched his own firm, Ellsworth Home, which specializes in all aspects of the design process, from architecture to interiors. It is a chance to do what he loves best: to design for the way someone lives, so it becomes more than a house; it becomes part of their life.
The couple recently completed their fifth renovation here: a classic white Colonial on a little-traveled farm road. In theory, the 2001 build seemed an unlikely candidate for Jason’s discerning eye. But he could see the potential, with some fine tuning and architectural corrections. “If the architecture is wrong it doesn’t matter how nice the furniture is,” he says.
As for what’s next for the self-proclaimed serial movers and renovators? “I think we’ll stay,” says Jason. “We are really happy here.”
