Alise O’Brien
Tania Beasley-Jolly “doesn’t do literal.” The Delos zebra-inspired rug in her living room looks like an animal print—with a botanical underpattern. The master bedroom’s color scheme of black, gold, and Fra Angelico blue—a tribute to Jeanne Lanvin’s atelier—is so subtle it registers, at least at first, as soft black-and-white. And this turn-of-the-century house, which she shares with her husband, Billy, and young son, Miles, feels true to its history even though it’s filled with yellows and pinks and midcentury furniture.
This comfort with ambiguity, with both/and rather than either/or, comes from Ms. Beasley-Jolly’s background in art. She has a master’s in art history; she worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga., and is chairing this year’s Dada Ball at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
How do you enjoy one of Marc Chagall’s mysterious green cats, flying through the cosmos, with a literal mind? The artist would tell you himself: C’est impossible. Ms. Beasley-Jolly’s embrace of whimsy and complexity is what has freed her to nimbly integrate a multitude of eras and price points—Le Corbusier with Edwardian fireplaces, Philippe Starck with Target.
“I like contemporary modern,” she says, “But I like to zhuzh it up and give it a bit more elegance. That’s the juxtaposition for me—I mix the contemporary with the antique. And the curtains always are silk,” she laughs. “But even in my fashion, I’m a proponent of high and low.”
The Jollys were living in Antwerp, Belgium, when they purchased this house, which was built in 1903. Mr. Jolly works for Monsanto, and though he and Ms. Beasley-Jolly are both St. Louis natives, his work has zipped them all over the globe. (She has now segued into writing and is shopping around a novel she describes as “chick lit with a conscience.”) Before the family returned to the States, Full Circle Design Works gutted and rehabbed the building, saving historical features where they could and rebuilding from scratch what they couldn’t. Ms. Beasley-Jolly points out some faint dog gnaw-marks on the columns of the fireplace surround in the living room as evidence of the former, while the skillfully built, multi-angled plasterwork over the staircase is an example of the latter. “It’s almost like a prism,” she marvels.
During their house search, the Jollys looked at 30 houses online, including some in University City, the Central West End, and Parkview. In the end, they chose the young, urban vibe of South City. “We knew, without question, after living in Europe, we had to be able to walk to get coffee,” she says. “We knew we needed to be urban. And we knew we wanted to be part of a sort of a revival, and South Grand and Morgan Ford are so up-and-coming.”
It was at The Future Antiques on Morgan Ford, in fact, that Ms. Beasley-Jolly found two fabulous Hollywood Regency chairs, upholstered in velvety pollen-yellow velour, that now anchor the living room. Initially, her idea for this space was “very Upper East Side, very monochromatic, permutations of beige, very chic,” but she realized she needed something sunnier and more extroverted after living in Belgium, where the weather was dreary and color palettes tended toward gray, putty, and flax.
“Those chairs just changed everything,” she says. “I can’t stay away from color; am I crazy? How could I have even have thought that I would be able to do that? It’s such a part of my aesthetic.” In fact, she’d already chosen floral Osborne & Little wallpaper in yellow, orange, and gold for the adjoining dining room, which matched the chairs marvelously. So she had yellow curtains (silk, of course) made for the windows, with Greek piping that picks up the black in the zebra/leaf rug, and accessorized with translucent Bourgie lamps from Centro Modern Furnishings and Madeline Weinrib pillows. “I do a lot based on fashion,” Ms. Beasley-Jolly says, “so the yellow was the starting point, but then I’d loved Gucci’s 2008 spring line, where she used all this wonderful pink, yellow, and black. I loved everything in the collection, so everything in that room, that was my inspiration. The yellow chairs started it, and then everything went from there.”
The master bedroom was similarly inspired by fashion, specifically the House of Lanvin, one of her favorite designers. Here, the gold comes in the form of soft silk curtains, the blue as touches in an Italian glass light fixture and an abstract canvas—painted by Ms. Beasley-Jolly herself—hanging above a mirrored Hollywood Regency dresser. She even brought a blue Lanvin shoe box to the painter to have that soft, powdery blue mixed for the walls of the adjoining master bath. Down the hall, another of Ms. Beasley-Jolly’s painting hangs in a tiny room with walls painted the color of violet pastilles, which she describes as “a little reading room, a little nook of a room.” This, she vows, will one day be filled with custom shelving—and shoes. For now, her wardrobe is housed in a mirrored closet in her office, which is separated from Miles’ bedroom by a pocket door.
“This is my little boudoir,” she laughs. “It’s funny—this is my office, but I don’t write in here. I write at the end of my dining-room table. I always have and I always will. But one of the reasons each room has its own personality is because I don’t know where I’m going to want to be from day to day. That’s the artist in me!” The room is feminine without being too girly, its Laura Ashley “Summer Palace” wallpaper balanced out by lighthearted accessories like the metallic hot-pink piggy bank on the desk. “I wanted chinoiserie,” she says of the walls, “but de Gournay is hand-painted silk. Now, I’m probably not going to die in this house, so I’m not going to put that up. But I wanted something feminine, because I knew this was the first place where I was going to have my own room—I think every woman should have her own room.”
Miles’ room, on the other hand, has a Rat Pack theme. “This is wallpaper I found in Belgium, a French company,” she says. “And it was weird; subconsciously, I didn’t even realize it was yellow-and-brown, like downstairs. But yeah, it just works very well with all the woodwork. When we moved here, he was
3 ½, so this gave us time to move him into a bigger-boy theme. My kid is way cool. He spent most of his life in Europe; he’s not babyish.”
It will come as no surprise that the Jollys are also serious collectors of art, though Ms. Beasley-Jolly emphasizes that the work has to mean something before she’ll consider bringing it into her world. That includes work by local artists, among them Jerald Ieans (an early piece, black-and-white, shellacked with a layer of Elmer’s glue) and Max Key (whose huge, baroque canvases are inspired by interior design); fine-art photography reflective of places they’ve lived; or just work that is personally symbolic. She points out a three-dimensional piece by Atlanta-based artist Kevin Cole that she bought for her husband.
“It’s called A Cry and a Smile, and I bought this for my husband when he was getting his MBA, because what [the artist] uses as motifs are ties,” she says. “This is roofing tile that he melts, and he shapes it into ties. What was also of great significance to me: When [the artist] was a young boy being raised by his grandfather, growing up in the South, his grandfather used to take him outside and say, ‘Look at those trees. You should feel so lucky to be in America right now where you are, because many of your ancestors hung by their neckties because they wanted the right to vote.’ So being of African-American descent as well, once again, it’s got to have more than just pretty colors. It’s got to have meaning to me.”
In one case, narrative helped her appreciate a piece of furniture her husband really wanted that she was lukewarm on—a Starck BaObab desk, which the couple carried up to the third floor, funny angles and all. “My husband wants so few things,” she says. “What’s cute about this is it’s the one thing he absolutely had to have.” And once she heard its back story, she fell in love with it, too.
“I knew that the baobab tree existed in Africa,” she says, “but I didn’t know that the tree sits in the center of town and is where the elder presides over local disputes. So one goatherd might come up and say, ‘He stole my goat.’ Or ‘He stole my chicken.’ But it’s where law happens. I just loved that. And it’s so Jetsons-esque. When you’re behind it, the inside is almost like a cave or a carved-out tree.”
So Mr. Jolly has his desk. And though he says he reserves “veto power,” he is otherwise happy to let his wife take the lead when it comes to the house.
“I am really happy with it,” she beams. “I think it’s fairly unexpected when you walk in, you know? I love being able to enjoy the heritage of it, but being able to fuse a part of my own personality—and zest—into what was already there.”
