When the (cocktail) tables are turned and designers are tasked with adorning their very own properties, they’re particularly susceptible to a situation they’re skilled to diagnose and deal with in their very own purchasers. “I name it sky’s the restrict paralysis,” says Houston-based inside designer Marie Flanigan of the choice fatigue that business professionals typically endure when mining the boundless depths of their market data, design training, and stylistic rigor. The decorator provides, “While you’re uncovered to the newest and biggest on a regular basis, you are feeling compelled to rethink the best way you do issues.” To wit, Flanigan estimates that she alters homes each 5 years, a not-uncommon sample amongst designers, she notes.
In anticipation of constructing a dream house (however not essentially a eternally house), the designer and her husband, Joe, quickly slowed tempo, taking three years to mull over the destiny of a nook lot they owned in Houston Heights. Finally, the couple had the classic bungalow already on the property moved to a different a part of city, and began from scratch on what would turn out to be a 4,000-square-foot neo-Tudor—an homage to the historic neighborhood’s century-old “Hobbit homes,” as Joe lovingly refers to them—that Flanigan designed with Houston architect Kelly Cusimano.
The brand new dwelling on the block possessed an genuine sense of place, to not point out a bygone sense of time, because of the salvaged brick (some stamped Houston) originating from demolished midcentury properties within the metropolis. The Flanigan household of 5, together with youngsters ages three by means of eight, moved in just some months in the past.
If their historical past of frequent shifting is any indication, it’s T-minus 4 years, 9 months, and counting for the household to maximise the potential of what Flanigan calls their “English cottage with a Texas twist.” Step one was to seize a Lone Star degree of daylight with a well-placed array of the designer’s architectural “first loves”—an unusually amorous reference for home windows. Flanigan’s ardour for panes is obvious in a small library with an ethereal and expansive presence because of its double-height home windows and floating cloud ceiling. On this marquee area, a studied homage to Alabama architect Bobby McAlpine’s completely fenestrated work, nary a sunbeam is sacrificed by the window remedies. Even the opaque curler shades enable a glowy passage of sunshine, and Flanigan claims that the sheer curtains by Mark Alexander had been an experiment—in any case, they don’t block out the Texas-size rays, as material is wont to do round in these components. “It’d be tremendous personal in right here in the event that they did, however what a disgrace to not expertise these home windows,” she says.
Inside a tableau of textured neutrals supported by a solid of dramatic accents—from wealthy hues like russet, evergreen, and blue-gray to luxurious supplies resembling lustrous velvet and burnished brass—Flanigan layers completely different time intervals and kinds, an method impressed by the masterful mixture of classicism and modernism patented by one other of her design heroes, John Saladino.
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In the lounge, for instance, a considerable Bauhausian espresso desk, by which pitted travertine is juxtaposed in opposition to clean rift-sawed oak, is an natural foil to the room’s components of Hollywood regency—a sienna-hued velvet couch and vintage brass sconces, the latter impressed by the long-lasting sheaf-of-wheat desk in Coco Chanel’s Rue Cambon house. Flanigan’s daughter, the youngest of the three kids, reigns over a dainty area the place chinoiserie textiles harmoniously coexist with a pendant of seaworthy macramé and a Moroccan-inspired mattress drape. The eating room’s hand-painted customized wallpaper, that includes a thick grove of bushes based mostly on an 18th-century Aubusson Verdure tapestry, provides an Outdated World distinction to the modern furnishings. However vying for the function of centerpiece is the Menil chandelier from Flanigan’s lighting assortment for Visible Consolation.
The designer says she’s street testing the glamorous alloy band with crystal fringe (additionally in situ are her textile designs for Annie Selke, just like the hand-knotted wool rug in the lounge or the jute rug within the library, each at the moment being put by means of their literal paces). “I would like to know how the designs stand as much as actual life,” Flanigan says. “Simply within the brief time we’ve been in the home, I’ve already discovered a lot.” The radiant gentle fixture, impressed by the elegant structure of the Renzo Piano–designed Menil Assortment museum in central Houston, is a literal brass ring that serves as a proverb, symbolizing the shining achievement of a dream house.