Alise O'Brien
Patty Kelley gazes up at a cathedral ceiling and shakes her head. "We were going to go into a condo, had the deposit down and everything," she confides. The Kelleys had twice gutted and renovated their beloved old house in Town & Country (AT HOME, Spring 2005), but after 30 years, she says, "I just wanted to get away from everything." Thinking of proximity to kids and grandchildren, she urged her husband, "Let's get in a little closer." The condo in Clayton seemed just perfect. And he seemed fine with it ...
"A condo?" Joe Kelley says now, a twinkle in his eye. "Not until I'm using a wheelchair. When she put that deposit down, I started scouting for an alternative."
One day he called Mrs. Kelley and said, "Come with me. I found another place."
"Where are we going?" she asked suspiciously — and when they drove up to the construction site for a new, exclusive subdivision, she looked at him in dismay.
"What in the devil are we going to do with Country French? Everything we own is English! You're in big trouble, buddy. I want no part of this."
"We won't have to buy a thing," he assured her. "Everything will fit right in."
Everything did fit right in — in the library. Their designer, David Suttle, took their favorite pieces as his starting point and built the room around them.
The 10 other rooms? They redid them. And the furniture from their old house is in the basement now, waiting for their kids to take it. "We would have needed more anyway," Mr. Kelley rationalizes: "Some people say at our ages we should be downsizing, but we went from 3,000 to 5,000 square feet!"
Mr. Suttle's challenge was to make a high-ceilinged château feel cozy.
He began in the library, using caramel walls, slightly darker wood paneling and custom cabinetry to make a room with a 17-foot ceiling seem warm and intimate. The Kelleys brought the fawn cotton-velvet sofa. Underfoot, a mossy green shag with flecks of dark brown begs toes to twine in its dense, soft merino wool pile. Mr. Suttle made the cream stone fireplace the room's focal point, giving it a Canterbury arch he then echoed at the top of the bookshelves. He'd designed the nickel fireplace fender, upholstered in soft beige leather, for the Kelleys' previous house, but it slid right into place. He recessed the windows above the new fireplace, preferring "shadow lines and reveals" to flat windows flush with the wall.
"The minute you break a surface, it adds dimension and a more interesting spatial quality to the room," he explains. "It also breaks the boldness, the severity."
Mr. Suttle replaced the glass door the builder intended for this room with a narrow archway, thick as a castle's walls, to keep the entryway's vastness from overpowering the sense of welcome. Step through, and you're back in the entrance hall, its 17-foot ceiling and sweeping scale emphasized by a magnificent French console buffet, grand mirror and dark argyle rug.
The Kelleys wanted the coziness of an Irish cottage — but they also wanted a sense of flowing space and a home that felt open to the outdoors. Mr. Suttle — who's used to problem-solving on a larger scale in the international, commercial projects he does as a partner with Suttle Mindlin Architects — managed the paradox with a hundred different tricks.
He sought out heart pine from Stoddard, N.H., for the wide plank flooring and staircase ("In St. Louis the whole darn town is oak," he sighs). A 23-foot fieldstone fireplace emphasizes the two-story living room ceiling. Mr. Suttle kept the colors monochromatic — white, cream, linen and pale wheat — to avoid bringing guests' eyes down. Suede and velvet, playful ribbon trim and fuzzy textures on the upholstery warm its oversized outlines. Smooth and rough textures mix — painted cream wood, the rough stone fireplace. It took three electricians to hang the massive iron chandelier. A rug that ran wall-to-wall in their old house made the perfect area rug.
Set against one wall, the kitchen doesn't feel as if it's part of the vastness — yet it's open to the living room, divided by an island designed as furniture, with a pastry shelf above smooth granite to pique interest.
The window over the massive stove was change order number one: Instead of two mullioned windows (now illuminating the garage), Mrs. Kelley wanted a clear, arched single window. Creamware can be glimpsed through the glass doors at the top of the cabinets, lifting any sense of heaviness or excess height.
Columns create a sense of entry for the morning room — and hide the thermostat and light switches. The Kelleys drink their morning coffee here, watching the sun rise and birds gather outside one of the three windows, then return to watch the sun set through the opposite window. The third window (the one that stared at the back of another house) has been turned into clerestory windows, a grid of deep, lit squares that shows off a Majolica collection. Chamford (clipped) corners are simple painted wood, adding to the cottage feel. But the dining room shifts back to formality as smoothly as a Porsche on a mountain road. Mr. Suttle combined the builder's two separate arches into a single large arch, nudging the interior wall into the hallway and using the space for built-in cabinetry, so loose pieces wouldn't clutter the room. The dining room chairs, redone in aubergine jacquard velvet, came from Le Moulin Rouge restaurant in Paris; the choir chairs from Notre Dame Cathedral. Through its French doors, the veranda's stone archways look as if they've been there for centuries.
The Kelleys' first Christmas in the new house was December 2007, and they decided to start simply. In the library they put their nativity scene on the mantel, off-center, and swagged silky magnolia leaves below it, draping loosely and letting the garland trail down the other side. In the living room, a light fixture served as the star atop a 13-foot tree. The trimmings came straight from nature: giant pine cones; garlands of branches, icicles, stars and birds; and a family of polar bears sprawled at the bottom. In the dining room Mr. Suttle had caramel velvet bows made to nestle above the sconces' crystal teardrops.
The house can hold hundreds for a party or special occasion (both Mr. and Mrs. Kelley come from huge families), but it never feels vacuous or hollow. Most of the living's done on the main floor; upstairs is an office, guest bedroom and nursery (their grandchildren both live just a couple of miles away), and downstairs is a nostalgic clubhouse.
Irish family members kept asking about the lane's name, Glocca Mora. So Mr. Kelley did a little research — and found Glocca Mora didn't exist, except in the 1948 song.
a This home almost hadn't existed, either — they could've easily wound up in that Clayton condo. Instead, Mr. Kelley's a trustee for Glocca Mora, and all three other residents granted him permission to put a shamrock on its sign.
The Kelleys had found their new home.
