The Best Southern Rooms

Although regular issues of "Southern Accents" magazine are no longer published, a special issue has been produced which they have called "The Best Southern Rooms, 135 of Our Most Beautiful Spaces".  One of my projects which was published in the magazine a few years ago partially reappears with the four rooms that follow.  Sadly, two of my favorite rooms of the house that were shown previously did not make the editorial cut this time;  I will include them in a future post, however.

I was planning an addition for the clients, recently married and living in the lady's charming 1920s house on a prominent corner lot on the boulevard of Belle Meade, the self-governing community to the west of Nashville.  A former owner had sold the rear garden, however, and set-back building lines for the corner severely restricted any addition.  When the house just two doors from the lady's close relative came on the market, it was decided to move instead of adding to the existing house as the new house had the required rooms for the growing young family and just needed some aesthetic improvements.  The new house was not new in age, but was a traditional, 1950s house, in the Leave-It-To-Beaver style with several extensive remodelings and additions over the years.  While it occupied a very large, desirable lot on a road of small estates, we were all suprised when the real estate transaction made the front page of the local newspaper;  the sale broke the county record for residential real estate.  (The area is full of houses much more lavish and attractive, but they were custom built and/or had not changed hands in years).

In the two story Entrance Stair Hall, I changed the staircase, but that is one of the spaces not included in this edition.  The Living Room, which is to the right of the entrance, stayed much as it was architecturally.  The Louis XV style chimneypiece was exisitng but in a very peculiar multi-colored marble which was faux painted to resemble limestone.  I designed a pair of large, comfortable upholstered chairs to flank the fireplace, but they are replaced in this photo with the Marshall Field models that were flanking the sofa opposite.  Hector Samada from my office hung the owner's collection of drawings.  The cabinet and table flanking the fireplace are Swedish antiques, just part of the owners' large collection.  In tandem with this project, I also helped them with their home in the equestrian community of Wellington, Florida, and we travelled to Stockholm to search for additional furnishings for the two projects.

In the adjacent Dining Room, a Swedish chandelier hangs over the table surrounded by Russian neoclassical armchairs.  The opposite wall is actually more interesting as it is covered with a huge framed drawing, a "cartoon" of a Rubens tapestry.  My only architectural improvement to this room was to add an actual door, double-acting, to the trimmed opening to the adjacent serving pantry, blocking the view to that space, the Breakfast Room and the Kitchen beyond that had previously been just one long shot through the house.

My architectural improvement to the Family Room was to decrease the width of this opening to an adjacent Sitting Room;  it was formerly 16 feet wide.  The enormous steel beam in the load-bearing structual wall had to remain, so the opening height remains as existing or I would have preferred to raise it.  Josie McCarthy collaborated on this project and chose the wonderful printed linen that covers the walls (and matching curtains, not seen), as well as many other invaluable contributions.  Again, Hector Samada hung the framed prints, all birds of prey, a collection numbering almost 30 that covered the Entrance Hall walls and up the stairs of the previous house.  I designed most of the new custom made lampshades, including these for the great pair of red tole lamps from Colefax and Fowler, found on a shopping trip to London, that were specially re-wired to also include an uplight to bounce illumination off the high ceiling.

In the Sleeping Room of the Master Suite, I laid out the pattern of the Chelsea Editions embroidered linen fabric to utilize the scalloped border for the bed hangings of the Louis XVI style bed.  Josie and I both like to use side tables or chests rather than typical bedside tables that so often are newly made too low for a traditional bed's mattress height.

It was a fun project, especially interesting for me because of the improvements I was able to make to the architectural aesthetics of a house lacking refinement, yet held in high regard by the general public.