Alise O'Brien
A Sunday in April 2002: Jennifer Williams leans back, sunshine on her face. It’s her 36th birthday, and she and her husband, Matt, are relaxing on the brick patio they’ve just finished. It’s the crowning touch to the three-year renovation of their University City home. No more mortar or sawdust, no more paint fumes, no more swatches.
The phone rings. “Honey, happy birthday!” Mrs. Williams’ mother says. She’s got news, too: “Your favorite house just went on the market!”
The big cream one on the corner, with the green shutters. Mrs. Williams used to walk past it on her way home from school, squeeze her eyes shut for a few seconds, and imagine living there.
“We’ve got to at least go and see it,” she urges her husband, who’s listening a little warily.
They drive over late that afternoon. The house is for sale by owner, and as they walk through, the couple who’ve taken such amazing care of the place tell charming stories about raising seven kids there. When Mr. Williams sees his wife’s face, he whispers, “We can buy this house.”
They go back to U. City and get their checkbook.
They start renovating all over again, but this time it only takes a year. Mr. Williams is passionate about using authentic materials and respecting a home’s history, and that turns out to be surprisingly easy in this Kirkwood home, then 92 years old (and 100 this year!). A High-Style Craftsman, the house is accepted for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in fall 2002. It was built for the Jones family with a fortune made by Capt. Jones, who, penniless after the Civil War, cut off his uniform buttons to make a suit and established what eventually became The American Manufacturing Company.
The house lends itself readily to renovation. Six of the seven fireplaces still work, the seventh is easily uncovered—and the Williamses add an eighth outside, on one of the second-floor sleeping porches. The left side of the home’s huge linen press was previously dismantled and made into a doorway, but Mr. Williams finds all of the original cabinet doors in the garage. When he needs to replace a window, he has Messing Planing Mill make a wooden replica of an existing window; he also had replicas made for the shutters and door hardware.
Mr. Williams even buys used brick for the back terrace and pool surround, continuing the brick edge right down into the water with no interruption. It’s a clean, modern trick, but it’s softened by black wrought-iron fencing and the faded red of the brick. “New brick’s cold and hard, but there’s something cozy and warm about it when it’s resurrected like that,” he observes.
With two kids and four businesses (Saint Louis Cellars, Saint Louis Closet Company, TKO DJs, and 22 Company), daily life’s a whirl. But in summer, when they’re not in the pool, everybody hangs out on a big old sleeping porch up on the second floor, napping or watching Cardinals baseball. Ceiling fans and breezes from all directions keep the porch cool even in August, and the bugs either don’t want to fly too far from the grass or get queasy at high altitudes. “The old-timers had it figured out,”
Mr. Williams remarks.
Winter evenings, the family reads or watches movies in the cozy “Red Room,” a confection of pink and cherry red that was once a front parlor. They’re surrounded by sentiment: Mrs. Williams’ late father built in the bookcase, which holds everything from their business textbooks (the couple met at a luncheon for young entrepreneurs) to an antique Uncle Sam bank that started Mr. Williams on the road to financial prudence when he was just a boy. Walls are softened by pink print fabric—the curtains from the U. City house—and the couch and chairs are pillowy, with red cotton-and-merino throws to snuggle into.
Mrs. Williams made all of the design decisions, choosing a basic palette of sage green, rose, and ivory (“happy, comfortable colors”) that echoes through the living room, dining room, and sunroom. The house has the “long views” cherished by English Home purists, which makes harmony imperative. Mr. Williams points from the hallway. “One thing Jennifer’s taught me to realize is color coordination,” he says. “You can stand here and see three rooms, and although they’re unique and different, the colors carry through.”
“I wanted the rooms to flow from one to the other, not look like a furniture store with varying vignettes,” Mrs. Williams explains. “I chose each fabric and paint color with all the other rooms in mind, whether they adjoined or not.
“My decorating style can be classified as a mix between English, French, and things I just love,” she continues with a grin. Mainly, she wanted “a happy, welcoming family home that had lots of light, lots of comfort, and lots of love and great memories”—but that still did justice to the house’s scale and architectural significance. “Both Matt and I grew up in older homes,” she says. “His favorite memory is of family dinners on the back patio of their house in Forest Ridge, in Clayton, and mine is of my mother’s amazing style and ability to change the décor by the seasons.”
Funny. Before Mrs. Williams arrives, her husband talks about how amazing she is, changing even tiny details—like the grouping of framed portraits on the 18th–century carved-oak French buffet—to reflect each season.
Those family photographs are a signature. “We love great antiques, but we are not real collectors of art,” Mrs. Williams says. Her favorite art is her children’s faces, so she and Mr. Williams take photographs constantly. “If you take enough pictures, you’ll get good ones,” Mr. Williams promises—and the results are visible in frames all over the house. Mrs. Williams even framed two pieces of her kids’ artwork in antique gold-leafed frames and hung them in the dining room: “There is nothing better to see than children’s artwork and children’s faces to make you happy!”
Warmth fills the house, from the grace notes of relationship, like the family portraits and memorabilia, to Mrs. Williams’ vice of light (don’t tell the energy czar), which keeps every room glowing after sundown. “I can’t stand a dark house,” Mrs. Williams explains, “and it always seemed like a lot of work to turn lights on and off every time you walked in and out of a room. My father would hate me saying this—he was a stickler for turning off lights. But I have always believed that all houses look better with their lights on, so our house is lit well every night! I turn the lights on as soon as I get home from work.”
During the day, nature does the trick: Sunlight streams into the sun porch that wraps around the house, and breezes billow through sage- and ivory-striped curtains. This long border room used to be outside the house; enclosing it gave the home a circular flow and a sort of nimbus of sunlight. When the kids are in a quiet, focused mood, they play chess out here, nudging forward figures their grandfather carved as a wedding present for their parents.
The Williamses’ most practical move was placing twin computers on the enclosed back porch, with crimson leather chairs for the kids to squirm in, plus a view of the backyard promising relief when the homework’s done. On the back wall are white lockers and low shoe shelves, allowing all of the “stuff” of the school day to be neatly stowed.
The Williamses’ most radical move was turning the separate kitchen, breakfast room, and walk-in pantry into a single oversize, buttercup-yellow kitchen. “We had one of those nights with a few Bud Lights, and I said, ‘I could take this wall down,’” recalls Mr. Williams.
“Every party eventually migrates to the kitchen,” Mrs. Williams says, “so we host most of our parties in the kitchen! We’ll serve five or six small courses prepared right in front of the guests by a guest chef, each course paired with a different wine. The format encourages them to get involved with cooking and pouring; it creates more energy and allows everybody to interact with each other easily, instead of being seated and able to converse only with people on either side of them.”
There are touches of formality amid the ease: lots of silver (they even collect antique silver napkin rings when they travel, then engrave them with the city and year), a china collection, heirlooms of all kinds. But overall, the house is lit with ease and warmth.
Which is just the way Mrs. Williams always imagined it.
