Photography by Alise O'Brien
When Andrea Miles left the huge, formal Central West End mansion where she’d lived for years and bought a 1905 Georgian house in Compton Heights, she’d just gotten a divorce. Suddenly all the decisions were hers alone to make—no more trotting, swatches in hand, to ask for an opinion. And she wanted a happy house.
Her choice gave a bedroom to each of her children—her 14-year-old son, Miles Moran; Sophie Moran, 11; and Josie Moran, 6—plus a guest room for Ms. Miles’ travel-happy parents. There was a curved-tile roof, a gracious front porch, a music room for Ms. Miles’ 1933 Steinway and a back yard with room for a pool. But the house felt a little dark, a little dingy. A woman had lived alone in the house for years, early in the century. Her carriage house had been torn down and replaced with a garage so plain Ms. Miles could only compare it to a doghouse. At least two buyers had bought the house just to flip it. An older couple had bought it but made few improvements (unless you count the massive, awkwardly built hunter-green deck that took up most of the back yard). And neighbors murmured tales of a ghost.
“He leaves a penny,” Ms. Miles says vaguely, glancing around. “I didn’t want to know too much. I figured I’d be good to the house, and he’d be happy.”
She started with the supreme test: She painted all the dark woodwork white. When lightning didn’t strike, she had every electrical outlet, lighting fixture and dimmer, every faucet and every square of tile replaced. She did keep the tile in the laundry room and the Jacuzzi in the master bath—but she had its surround retiled.
Mark Eggering, the contractor who did everything on the house except paint and tile, watched with pleasure as she chose, in his opinion, “just the right hardware, just the right tile” for each room. “The bathrooms had been done very cheaply,” he says, “and the kitchen was—phew! Old wood cabinets, some built-in stuff that was out of sync with the house ...”
Ms. Miles had pored over enough catalogs and visited enough suppliers that the day she closed on the house, she started making calls: “Put the order in.” “Put the order in.” “Put the order in.” She grins, remembering. “The delivery guy was here seven times a day, but it only took us three months to replace everything.”
Then came the painting. Ask her about white paint, and she’ll explain her aversion to ceiling white—“it’s gray”—and why she’d rather use more coats of pure white on her trim than fewer coats of white with a drop of umber in it. Paradoxically, for a woman who loves the splashy hot-pink cabbage roses on her Yves Delorme bedroom sheets and curtains and the pink, purple and green of her daughter Sophie’s room, Ms. Miles likes her walls pale. Even when she leaves true white for a softer, moodier pastel, she wants only a hint of color. “I always use the lightest color on a chip, and sometimes I’ll tell them to use the quart formula in a gallon,” she says. “Sherwin-Williams has what they call luminous colors, and I love them because they are so clear. I think their paint has a lot of titanium in it.”
With all the bright white and French pastels, all the pinks and lavenders and intense periwinkles, the house began to lose that ponderous gravity, until it felt like a bunch of balloons that could ascend at any moment. Ms. Miles put a concrete birdbath in the entry hall (she plops her purse there) and used a wide pale-blue-and-white stripe on the walls. She placed the piano in the west parlor, painting her music room pale lavender and its fireplace white. She painted the opposite parlor a pale apple green and its glass-doored bookcases white, to set off the wide stained-glass windows above them and the black iron fireplace between them. She found a celadon Ultrasuede chair at a Selkirk’s auction and grouped it with a chaise longue and chair covered in cotton duck. She did her dining room in carnation pink and mango, with a pink glass candelabra, chairs upholstered in pink mock croc and window treatments in an iridescent fabric that’s pink on one side, mango on the other.
You’d think she studied art, but she’s a former math teacher famous for her attention to detail. She had all the hardware in the house plated with polished nickel (chrome for the bathrooms and satin nickel outside), and she found glass-ball Baldwin doorknobs. But she didn’t stop there; for her doors she bought Merit hinges, so sturdy the Navy uses them.
Next she made her kitchen lighthearted, painting the wooden floor with big cheerful flowers. The stools around the stainless prep table are a mix of drummers’ chrome and bright Pottery Barn stools that roll where they’re needed at the touch of a finger (races have been outlawed). Ms. Miles brought her glass-doored refrigerator with her and surrounded it with frosted-glass-doored cabinets, running a railing above them to anchor a ladder.
Even a ghost could see that she had done such things before. Ms. Miles is building a professional interior-design career by word of mouth, having already done design jobs for friends and acquaintances. She edits compulsively, grouping objects and paring collections down so nothing overwhelms the viewer. She mixes contemporary and antiques, using color and fabric to tie them together visually. And she draws order from repetition, lining up clear glass vases across the bookshelves, buying six antique plant stands with griffins at the base to border the pool and covering the wall above the stairs with ornate white frames. Starting with a single white mirror frame, she hunted down similarly ornate frames from a supplier in Florida and had all the gold leaf painted white. Now they blend into the white high-ceilinged wall of the stairwell yet add depth, and they look, in white, like a master artisan’s ornamental plasterwork.
In the bathrooms, Ms. Miles doubled playfully: two side-by-side sinks for her daughters; two sinks and a double shower in the master bath. She found an iridescent periwinkle tile for her son’s room and discreetly moved the toilet behind the shower, so it wasn’t the first thing you saw upon entering.
The ghost stayed quiet, although Mr. Eggering did find a dime one day. “Inflation,” he pronounced gravely.
By then, Ms. Miles was in the middle of her last and best project: the back yard. She’d already put in a buoyant saltwater pool, choosing an elegant Grecian rectangle shape. Mr. Eggering and his father had built her a saltwater hot tub. With all that salt, she thought an outdoor shower would be easy and fun. But—maybe something more?
“This house isn’t made for wet children,” she announced after that first summer there. She would put a toilet in the garage for the kids, who spent pretty much their entire summer in the pool. And what about a tiny kitchen? “I had all winter to think about it,” she says. “And I really wanted the children to be able to get Popsicles without going inside.” By spring, she was ready with a dishwasher, sink, microwave, toaster oven, refrigerator, washer, dryer and pantry.
She had the garage’s “cheeseball siding” covered in lattice and trimmed out for some structural detail. A table umbrella from World Market set the color scheme with its cheerful soft stripes of periwinkle, kiwi, taupe and ivory. She shaded the second-floor balcony with an ivory canvas canopy and drapes. Mr. Eggering built her a pergola over which wisteria could fall, and she found a hanging rack for nine window boxes that she filled with lavender-blue and white verbena and million bells.
“I would like to be a shut-in,” she confesses. “I kind of am in summer; I just leave to get the Popsicles. This is going to be a lifesaver.”
Too bad ghosts don’t swim.
brilliant. steal it.
Ms. Miles believes in creative reuse. She saw a glass orb at Williams-Sonoma Home and decided to top her newel post with it. She polished the silver base, lacquered it and used Liquid Nails to affix it. Meanwhile, she turned an old iron hospital bed (her mother and one set of grandparents were all chiropractors) into a trundle bed for her younger daughter.
