Photography by Jay Baker; styling by John Fletcher
Joanna Collins was the kind of art teacher who swept into the classroom—dark hair swirled into a chignon, graceful gestures softened by flowing white scarves or challis shawls—and freed her students’ spirits. She taught painting and drawing at John Burroughs School for 36 years without once coercing a slavishly copied still life. She also painted and curated, and on weekends, she’d pop into Ken Miesner’s Plaza Frontenac flower and gift shop to see the latest spoils brought back from Europe. Soon she and owners Ken Miesner and John Sullivan were fast friends, going out to dinner together several times a year. Mr. Miesner would bring her flowers from their garden, tiny ribboned bunches of primroses and forget-me-nots. “She’d hold the posy very dramatically,” recalls Mr. Sullivan, “and it usually wound up in her hair before the evening was over.”
Ms. Collins had never married, and she still lived in the cottage where she’d been born in 1928, her memories safe within its limestone walls and cedar shake roof. Messrs. Miesner and Sullivan thought the place charming, but never managed to wangle a tour inside: “We’d go early, we’d go late,” says Mr. Sullivan, “but she was always waiting outside!”
They’d seen her 50 pink and white peony bushes, her shade garden of ferns and lilies-of-the-valley, her potager of herbs and asparagus—but they’d never so much as peeked inside the cottage when Ms. Collins died in 2000. She left her home to Burroughs, and the school put the four-acre lot into an Ozark Regional Land Trust so it could never be subdivided. Messrs. Miesner and Sullivan asked their real-estate agent, Peggy Shepley, to keep watch. The following year, when the school decided to sell, she wrote a letter about their friendship with Collins, how they’d love to renovate, using the same materials, and name the house “Collinwood.”
They later learned that the bidder who’d matched their offer wanted to tear everything down and build something contemporary.
Meanwhile, as they waited to hear, Mr. Sullivan was diagnosed with head and neck cancer and warned he might not live. He was in the hospital on September 11, 2001, and he’d just watched the second tower collapse when the phone rang.
“We got the house,” Mr. Miesner told him.
“The terrorists are going to blow up the world, I’m going to die of cancer and you want to spend years of savings on a beat-up old house?” Mr. Sullivan exclaimed. His voice softened. “Sure, why not? Do whatever makes you happy.”
Mr. Sullivan was recovering, despite predictions, when architect David Pape started bringing blueprints for what they now realized would be a massive rebuilding project. The house had been stripped to the rafters, and one whole wing had to be torn off because the subfloor was cracked. But there were views to the north and south gardens from the huge bay and casement windows in the living room—the one room they were able to keep intact—and butterfly closures in its wide walnut-planked floor. They had the picture moldings, crown molding and wainscoting painted in subtly different shades, mixes of sage and green-gold and the slightly olive tint of dried rose leaves, all expertly matched to pick up the colors in two Dutch School oil paintings they’d found in California. Above the fireplace, they hung a Venetian mirror created circa 1680, clouded by centuries of eager preening.
They planned a library—its built-in bookshelves filled with flowers, antiques, gardens, parties, travel, royalty, religion and fashion—where they would read the morning paper by the fire in winter and open the French doors to the garden in spring.
At the entryway, they took dramatic steps, moving the door a few feet west and building a staircase with a graceful turn at the top. One night at dinner, Mr. Miesner scribbled a design for its railing: a rope of wrought iron at the top, the balustrades extending below the steps and a Haddonstone newel post they’d bought in England as the endpoint.
The kitchen would be open, its bar overlooking a two-story great hall with exposed beams from an old Illinois barn and a massive Missouri limestone fireplace. They added comfortable leather couches and, finally, a TV they could watch together as a family—cuddled with Bebe, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel as shy as she is brave, and Tucker, a rescued puppy-mill Shih Tzu.
Their home would be a similar mix of provenance and rescued treasure: a 17th-century Flemish Madonna X-rayed by experts at the Art Museum; a bowl of ostrich eggs cradled by antlers; snuffboxes and Staffordshire lambs. In the attic, they found a French Victorian mirror in pieces, its crown a monogram: “A.C.”—Albert Collins, Joanna’s father. They could sense their friend everywhere they turned.
When Mr. Miesner’s mother was ill, they thought she might come to live with them, so they created a first-floor powder room, one in which the “linen closet” opens to a shower.
“Are you guys going to put that beat-up old mirror in your new bathroom?” one of the construction workers asked. “Oh, most definitely,” they said. French, built circa 1720, it could have been part of the mirrored panelling in a ballroom. Inspired, Mr. Sullivan created a second focal point for the room, layering seashells into what could be the headdress of a mythic island queen. “He couldn’t stop himself,” grins Mr. Miesner.
Upstairs, their symmetrical house splits at the landing. Turn right and you climb the last few stairs to Mr. Sullivan’s suite, the Napoleonic décor in the bathroom inspired by an old steel-line engraving he found on Ms. Collins’ mantel. His bedroom glows with ivory and pomegranate red, his toile-curtained bed watched over by a French carved pearwood 18th-century Madonna.
“Religious art is always so personal; it comes from the deepest part of the artist’s heart,” Mr. Sullivan says. “And it’s not popular for resale, so it’s usually not very expensive! And—” he turns serious again—“I love it.”
Mr. Miesner’s room is done in garnet red with gold, rich and warm, held steady by Venetian plaster walls and opened by windows on both sides. “It’s sort of a treehouse feeling,” he says, surprised to realize it. But there’s gravity here, too—a massive French 18th-century walnut armoire he bought in Gaslight Square 30 years ago—and sweet earth in the oil paintings of lambs in English meadows. At the writing desk, when he tires of paying bills, Mr. Miesner gazes out through the glass balcony door at a hillside covered in daffodils, a small perfect gate, English urns overflowing with sweet-potato vines, a centuries-old elm tree … and the pink and white blossoms covering his friend’s 50 peony bushes.
brilliant. steal it.
When John Sullivan saw their gorgeous new fireplace mantel, he winced: It was “screaming white.” Heading for the kitchen, he soaked bags of green tea in boiling water and started rubbing, aging the limestone ever so slightly and leaving behind a whisper of the palest green, a soft echo of the sage panels.
