Alise O'Brien
The train clanks by, just a Major League pitcher's hurl away. With a quick tug on the tail of his T-shirt, Henry Lange comes to the door, looks through the glass, mouths the word "Mom" and points upstairs. Then in a flash, he's gone. With the logic only a 5-year-old could explain, he leaves his pants behind.
Soon his mother, Trenna, appears. A petite and lovely blonde with striking blue eyes, she opens the door and, after quickly scanning the room, apologizes for Henry's detritus — his half-eaten lunch, his toys, his trousers. But this is a house where the living is easy — and every inch of the house is lived in. Although Mrs. Lange had no intention of ever moving into it.
A mere eight months after the Langes had settled into a new house, the real-estate agent called.
"She said, 'I have the house you should have moved into,'" Mrs. Lange recalls with a grimace.
The thought of relocating again, and so soon, didn't interest her in the least. But the agent had seen the pictures Mrs. Lange collected of what she considered the perfect domicile — "a Hamptons cottage, something cozy, something that wasn't overly decorated." The exterior would be shingled, the interior packed with walls of windows and nooks and crannies.
This other proposed house, merely blocks away and also in Kirkwood, was a dead ringer.
Mrs. Lange trudged over.
Summon U-Haul. It was time to move. Again.
While the new house may have been nirvana, Mrs. Lange also did some significant tweaking. The shingles on the outside were perfect, but the interior was a little dark, a tad dreary. Mrs. Lange used to own the Kirkwood shop Sycamore Moon, now shuttered. She is a woman with style — the sort of shopper who can spot a treasure in a sea of trash, the kind of person who knows what works and what won't, exactly what she likes and doesn't, and the sort who can transform something as mundane as a paper cupcake liner into a snazzy accessory.
"The first thing I did was to paint every wall white," Mrs. Lange says. "I always wanted a house where I could whitewash all the walls. Not every house is suited to it. In newer homes or an apartment, it looks like you couldn't think of anything else. In this house, it is perfect."
Then she moved the dining room. "It never felt right," she says. "About four months in, at three in the morning, I said, 'I'm obsessed with this. I can't sleep. I'm getting up and I'm moving.'" Now she has dinner with Henry and his 8-year-old sister, Hadley, at the end of the living room; the former dining room has been turned into a small den.
Then Mrs. Lange filled the rooms with furniture from the last house — the few pieces remaining after a major clean-out. "When we moved here, I had the biggest garage sale ever," she says. "What I didn't sell, I sent in two truckloads to Goodwill.
"Most I didn't care about, but ... " She sighs. "I had this beautiful vintage settee. I was just in one of those moments where I was 'Just take it, just take it.' I wish I had kept it. Still, with each move, I have let go of so much stuff, and it's a good feeling. I keep the special things. As you get rid of stuff, you realize that a lot of things are just stuff. I like stuff, don't get me wrong. But I can let it go, too."
So she worked the remaining pieces into their new digs. "In the last house, we bought furniture to fit into a specific space," Mrs. Lange says. "I designed those rooms. Here, this is pieced. This is a puzzle. You keep moving things around until they fit. You know intuitively. It's almost more fun to just take what you've got and make it fit."
As she talks, Henry starts drumming elsewhere in the house. Mrs. Lange suggests he cease. With a modicum of reluctance, he does. Then, like a SEAL on a mission, he stealthily crawls into the room. Then he's gone again.
The entire house is swathed in sunlight. The first-floor windows have no curtains. The colors are strong and bright — splashes of orange here, pops of lime green there.
A couple of old end tables got fresh coats of paint and ended up in Hadley's room. Chairs inherited from Mrs. Lange's great-grandmother stayed downstairs. Many of the house's embellishments — such as the oversized wooden fish and vintage maps hanging in Henry's room — were finds at Gypsy Caravan, the annual flea market held on Memorial Day to raise funds for the Saint Louis Symphony. Others, like the collection of white pitchers in the dining room, either were collected over the years or came from Mrs. Lange's own store.
Now that enterprise has essentially gone cyber with sycamoremoon.info. "It consists of an online magazine that covers home, entertaining, fashion, design and décor," Mrs. Lange says. "I'm very color-driven and theme-oriented. So you click on a page, and it has fashion ideas. Everything coordinates with the season, the theme." An inveterate magazine reader — and more significantly, page clipper — Mrs. Lange has a collection of 23 binders, their pages packed with ideas gleaned from innumerable publications. "I have binders on children's rooms, colors, patterns, ottomans, couches, parties — everything you can think of," she says. She offers up some of those ideas as well as free downloads — like iron-on transfer patterns for kids' T-shirts. As she works on her own projects — be it decorating the house for Halloween or going to garage sales with friends — she shoots images that will more likely than not show up on her website.
"What I love about this house and working from home is, the house is my laboratory," she says.
Henry is back. Mrs. Lange looks up and smiles.
"Thank you for putting your britches on, honey. That's better."
