Photography by Alise O’Brien
Step through the front door, and the first thing you see is a wall of butterflies, intricately spun cobwebs, even a drab green walking stick, all tenderly placed in antique frames. As you walk through the house, you’ll spot telescopes, 18th-century French botanical prints, pressed leaves, an antique aquarium…
Some homes exist only to shelter us from the outdoors. This one studies nature and borrows its beauty.
“I grew up in a household where close observation of nature was very important,” explains Laura Miller. “My brother’s a Ph.D. marine botanist; he did things like collect butterflies.” She loved science just as passionately, but she thought all of those rare and marvelous specimens should be seen, not locked away in steel cabinets.
So she became an interior designer, her style as graceful—and as grounded—as a river birch.
Then she and her husband, Paul Miller—senior vice president of The Omega Group for UBS Financial Services—bought an 1891 house on Portland Place, and she wove bits of nature into every room.
Move into the center of the house (designed by Theodore Link, architect of Union Station) and you find yourself surrounded by a Hudson River Valley scene by St. Louis muralist Michael Fenwick. “I wanted it to be peaceful and green and even,” Mrs. Miller says, “so no one thing jumps out at you.”
Colors throughout the house are serene: soft gray on the living-room walls, inspired by window glimpses of the neighboring house’s antique limestone. A charcoal-brown toile patterned only with trees. Ecru canvas slipcovers. The fresh, delicate green of fern fronds. The dull silver of a steel barrister’s bookcase that looks like it belonged to Charles Darwin.
The effect is that of stepping from glaring heat into a cool, shady garden.
Mrs. Miller continues to refine the house. She recently replaced floral bedroom drapes with simple white silk. She painted both the living room (which used to be yellow) and the dining room (which had gone from red to bright green) the color of weathered limestone. “I find I’m more comfortable with the quiet,” she says.
In the living room, a 40- by 78-inch Van Dyke print, an elephant’s-ear photograph in sepia tones by Madeline Longstreet (“The New Botanicals,” May/Jun 2010)—at once antique and contemporary, scientific and pretty—hangs to one side of the mahogany grand piano. A dark bamboo desk stands against the opposite wall. A white feather curves in a glass sphere, and antique frames hold algae pressings by Mrs. Miller’s brother: “He has these cataloged, and I like to get them on the wall,” Mrs. Miller says.
She doesn’t design in an overly themed way: “Sometimes someone is into shells, and it knocks you over the head; they are on every surface,” she says. Her references, used as art and texture, are as subtle as nature itself.
But they add meaning to every room.
“I like the organic feel of it all,” she says. “It feels important to me, not like decorating that’s just all fluff and fringe and fancy fabrics.
“One of the things I’ve been really attracted to lately is painting on canvas,” she adds, pointing to slipcovers with ferns silk-screened by Longstreet. In summer, the dining-room chairs’ Napoleonic bee needlepoint is slipcovered, too: “I like how it relaxes the chair,” Mrs. Miller says.
Margaret von Kaenel, who did a magnificent oil portrait of the Millers’ 12-year-old Rottweiler-boxer mix managing to look both canine and queenly, also created a huge floor cloth for the dining room. “Just finding a piece of canvas that big was a challenge,” Mrs. Miller says. “Then it had to be covered with multiple coats of gesso, the back sealed, a 4- by 4-foot damask print hand-stenciled on the front, the background color aged. The art form goes back to 15th-century France, although most people associate it with New England or Shaker, which I hate.”
Mrs. Miller still gets asked to design, but she now also owns her own company, 20 Minutes to Fitness, with centers in Clayton and Chesterfield. The emphasis on streamlining—her busy schedule, other people’s bodies—carries over into her home, which is as straightforward as it is elegant. The catering kitchen comprises an efficient row of stainless-steel appliances (laundry, dishwasher, wine cabinet, you name it) across from a wall of cupboards with a ladder system. “It’s pretty much the guts of the house,” she says. “Tools, nails, towels for the pool, hooks for winter coats… We love this room.”
In the Millers’ bedroom, a rickety bamboo stand has been replaced with stable mirrored nightstands that can comfortably hold a Stieg Larsson thriller or a mug of coffee. Wall-mounted sconces throw off plenty of light to read by, and a plasma TV is sleek and naked, ready for viewing. “My old design partner, Suzedie Clement, would die,” Mrs. Miller says. “She’d hide it in an armoire!”
Function doesn’t deprive the senses: Mr. Miller’s bathroom has a heated floor, a heated towel bar, a spacious glass shower. Mrs. Miller isn’t tempted. She’ll keep her huge bath and dressing room with its dark marble floor, her dressing table tucked into an arched alcove, one closet filled with slanted shelves for her shoes, another with long, shallow drawers for lingerie.
The sitting room where they spend most of their time is softly lit by a photographer’s umbrella diffuser, casting a glow across a 6-foot-wide painting of a leaf pressing from Oscar de la Renta’s home in the Dominican Republic. “I gave a picture to Margaret von Kaenel, and she took on the project in a way that pleased me very much,” Mrs. Miller says. “She called the botanical garden, found the plant’s name, learned about its root ball—a very scientific approach!”
Outside, on the generous second-floor landing, Mrs. Miller hung gorgeous butterfly and beetle specimens in their original mounting drawers.
When she first climbed to the third floor, though, she gasped in horror. After almost a century with a grand, open staircase, the landing had been closed off with drywall and a narrow door by its previous owners, in an attempt to save energy. “It was depressing,” says Mrs. Miller. “I thought, ‘If I could find two identical sets of French doors, that would be the answer.’ Then I went to Fellenz, and he had them!” (For more on Fellenz Antiques, see “Point of Entry,” pg. 80.)
The first room off of the third-floor landing is long and narrow, with a fireplace in the middle. “Kevin Hurley, one of our neighbors, thought this was maybe a schoolroom,” says Mrs. Miller. “When we moved in, it had been used to store off-season draperies. No one does that anymore.”
Most of the home’s 13 bedrooms are up on the third story, and Mrs. Miller toyed with the idea of simply closing off that floor. (She has a large guest room downstairs, walls painted the light, bright green of new bamboo shoots, the bed draped with mosquito netting.) “Then I thought it’d be fun to just decorate those rooms simply,” she says, opening a door to reveal the seashell-white, textured walls and antique white linens she used throughout. Only the details differ: a white bassinet in one room, a telescope in another.
The Millers’ house is the second oldest on the city’s two grand places, Portland and Westmoreland. At a Central West End estate sale, Mrs. Miller found an old G.W. Peters drawing of the streets that once appeared in Harper’s Weekly; she bought and hung it.
So how did she first fall in love with the house?
“I didn’t, really,” she says. “I saw myself in a more formal Georgian. But this was available, and my husband loved it.” At first, she says, the house felt oppressively masculine, its wood dark and its windows heavy with drapery. She lightened and opened it, letting the breeze flow through and the architecture speak. “I took down the heavy drapes, thinking I’d figure out what I wanted—and it was just wooden blinds.
“I think this house has given me the opportunity to be a little more…not funky…edgy?” she says. That’s not quite right, either: She likes elegance as much as ever. But here, the elegance has grown both quieter and more daring. She feels free to experiment, because the house welcomes modern pieces in a way other mansions do not.
A midcentury Lucite tea cart and coffee table and Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost Chair now add a clean transparency to the living room. A high, round metal table is the focal point of the reception room.
“Shannon [O’Dougherty, who owns Sambeau’s Ltd.] made this table,” she says. “I couldn’t see it in a formal house.” Yet it’s the perfect counterpoint to the serene river valley that surrounds it, its steel a hard-edged contrast to the slipcovers’ soft ferns.
Nature is not formal or fussy.
It takes chances.
Resources: Living room: Van Dyke–process elephant’s-ear brownprint photo: Madeline Longstreet, longstreetcollection.com; antique metal table: Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers, 7447 Forsyth, 314-726-5515, iveyselkirk.com; antique garden table in foreground: Gringo Jones Imports, 4470 Shaw, 314-664-1666; interior paint in Stone: Restoration Hardware, Saint Louis Galleria, 314-863-7566, restorationhardware.com; Ray Althoff midcentury Lucite-and-chrome coffee table: Warson Woods Antique Gallery, 10091 Manchester, 314-909-0123, warsonwoodsantiques.com; Ray Althoff Art Deco mirror over fireplace: Warson Woods Antique Gallery; pair of antique, mirrored Kim Kovac obelisks on fireplace mantel: West End Antiques Gallery, 4732 McPherson, 314-361-1059; tulip vase on coffee table: Wisteria, 800-320-9757, wisteria.com; sea-urchin bowl holding starfish: Anthropologie, Saint Louis Galleria, 314-727-7419, anthropologie.com; Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost Chair by Kartell: Centro Modern Furnishings, 4727 McPherson, 314-454-0111, centro-inc.com; dog portrait: Margaret von Kaenel, 314-726-6392, mvk-decoart.com. Sitting room: valances hand-painted on canvas: JoAn MacBryde, macbryde@charter.net. Dining room: antique bookcase used as a china cabinet: Shelton Davis Antiques, 4724 McPherson, 314-361-2610; garden table: Teson Farms Nursery, 8419 Manchester, 314-961-5551, tesonfarms.com; interior paint in Stone: Restoration Hardware. Entrance hall: metal table: Sambeau’s Ltd., 4724 McPherson, 314-361-4636. Kitchen: lab stools: Design Within Reach, 44 Maryland Plaza, 314-361-1701, dwr.com. Second-floor landing: botanical collection: R. Ege Antiques, 1304 Sydney, 314-773-8500, regeantiques.com. Breakfast room: antique aquarium and arrow-back Woodard garden chairs: R. Ege Antiques. Bedroom: interior paint in Linen: Restoration Hardware; round, nickel-plated table: twigs & MOSS, 7715 Clayton, 314-454-0447; 1940s garden chairs: The Designing Block, 7735 Clayton, 314-721-4224, thedesigningblock.net; bed, slipcovered, with monogrammed headboard: Pottery Barn, multiple locations, 888-779-5176, potterybarn.com; bed skirt: Soft Surroundings, 33 The Boulevard–St. Louis, 314-262-4949, softsurroundings.com. Bathroom: shower curtain: Anthropologie; glass ice bucket with snail handles: Tiffany & Co., 64 Plaza Frontenac, 314-692-2255, tiffany.com; antique lighting fixture: Jon’ Paul Designs and Collectibles, 7014 Clayton, 314-645-2722, jonpauldesigns.com; antique French chair: Sambeau’s Ltd.
