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Photographs by Alise O'Brien
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Hinton added Christmas novelties—icicles, tiny stockings, paper snowflakes, glitter stars, vintage glass baubles, and even a little greenery—to this unique take on the Advent calendar, found at Treasure Aisles Antique Mall. The cutout paper numbers are tacked to a framed stretch of burlap with pins decorated with sprigs of holly.
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Made of felt, this ornament—which was purchased in multiples from a shop in Kirkwood, making it one of the few things Hinton didn’t create herself—echoes the shape of an old-fashioned holiday sugar cookie.
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For tabletops, Hinton likes a natural look. Here, she’s combined a number of elements, including family silver and Waterford crystal; white cloth napkins and white chargers from Pier 1 Imports; antique Italian china patterned with gold turkeys, purchased from Warson Woods Antique Gallery; vintage accessories, including pheasant statues and foil bells from the 1930s; and lots of greenery. Hinton gets her pine boughs from Summit Farms in Kirkwood and Garden Heights Nursery on Big Bend.
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This miniature tree, made of vintage rhinestone jewelry, is not one of Hinton’s creations, but she makes similar objects; she also crafts French beaded flowers, an art dating back to 17th-century Europe, where they were crafted for churches, tabletops, and parade floats.
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For the tree, Hinton uses ornaments and objects she’s collected over the years—some not strictly seasonal—that naturally flow with the look she’s after in any given year. She and Condon also like a full, tall tree that spreads out up to the open second story across from the house’s loft space.
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Purchased at an antiques shop in Kansas City, this wreath often stays up year-round. “I just like the look, the coloration and the subdued old-timey look,” Hinton says. She’s hung it over the hall mirror—across from another mirror—which amplifies its sparkle and the reflective surfaces of the glass ornaments.
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A detail of a place setting in the dining room.
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Hinton’s highboy is filled with family crystal and porcelain—mostly French pieces purchased from the accurately named, and now sadly defunct, Brilliant Antiques.
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One of Hinton’s vignettes, created with a pressed glassware plate, a vintage Santa cutout, sparkly snow, miniature trees and reindeer, and a cloche with a bird on top. It faces another assemblage with similar elements that is not exactly the same. “I change those seasonally,” she says.
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For the living room tree, Hinton used vintage icicles to give it a “magical, dreamy, and cinematic” look.
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This tree, whose needles are made from pink cut paper, was once used in a shop in St. Louis, though Hinton purchased it at Mission Road Antique Mall in Kansas City. The hydrangeas are from her garden. And the little clocks allude to her fascination with the passage of time. “At Christmas, that always seems sentimental,” she says, rather than a reference to mortality. The Advent calendar, purchased at The White Rabbit, is outfitted with a series of miniature drawers rather than the traditional shutters.
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“I always have studded oranges with cloves, ever since I was a young girl in Girl Scouts,” Hinton says. “I usually have cinnamon and cloves and oranges mulling on the stove, really probably from Halloween on, so that’s just the fragrance that I like,” she adds, “as well as [the] aesthetic effect of the oranges on the room, before they really start to turn into pomander balls in the middle of March!”
Part cottage, part château, part Joseph Cornell shadow box: That’s how writer Bowen Hinton describes this house. “I can only say this—the house is like a being in and of itself, it truly is,” she says. “It just has an aura. When I speak of my home, I speak of the home itself … I think of myself as a steward. It just has too much interconnectivity with past stewards, and I would say potentially future ones, so yes, it’s just magical. It’s magical for lots of reasons, I think.”
This is poetic, and entirely accurate—you can find the Cotswold-style cottage on Page 258 of Missouri’s Contribution to American Architecture, published in 1925, two years after the house was built. The book’s been passed down from owner to owner, beginning with Marion Niedringhaus, who commissioned St. Louis architect Beverly T. Nelson to design it in the first place; illustrator Mary Engelbreit, who lived here in the late ’90s and early aughts, was in that chain of handing down. In Home Sweet Home, a coffee-table book that gave Engelbreit’s fans a peek inside the house, she describes how she stalked this charming little cottage-in-the-urban-woods for years. It was a swifter process for Hinton and partner Tom Condon, co-head of the football division of Creative Artists Agency, who relocated to St. Louis from Kansas City in the fall of 2007.
“When Tom purchased the home, I had never been in it,” Hinton remembers. “We had seen it together for the first time, but I had not been inside. The first time I walked through it, I said, ‘This house loves people. It loves to have people here. I want it full of people—strangers, family, guests.’ It’s not meant to be grand. It’s not meant to be anything other than inviting.” And it is: “Everyone who walks in is just touched by this house.”
Which means it is a classic Christmas house. But Hinton’s approach to dressing it up for holidays is entirely original. There is nothing prefab, nothing pulled out of a box, ready to go. She scouts, saves, gathers, and makes by hand. You’ll see a crow motif running through the house’s décor; it’s a bird she identifies with for its love of color, sparkle, serendipity, and novelty. She also loves Joseph Cornell, the New York artist known for his astonishing assemblages in shadow boxes. Though labeled a surrealist, he always rejected the term: He felt the movement’s images, charged with chaos and amour fou, were “black magic.” He strove instead, he said, to produce white magic, unusual but radiant images that used tropes such as parrots, pharmacies, ballerinas, and the night sky. Hinton has a similar talent for pulling together assemblages from harmonious but surprising elements.
“It’s serendipitous how I put things together,” Hinton explains. It’s a kind of intuition. Put objects together in vignettes, and see how they talk to each other. “Certainly in this house, it seems to lend itself to dramatic little vignettes,” she says, “because it’s open.”
That’s especially true in the living room, which is open to the second story; you can see the rafters. Hinton and Condon like to have a big tall tree that stretches out into that spaciousness. Hinton decorates the tree with pieces she’s collected over the years, many of them vintage. “I have things on the tree that you wouldn’t even say would be seasonal,” she says, “but they seemed to go with this ethereal, dreamlike, phantasmagorical-type tree. And with a piece, maybe it’s there one year, and I won’t have it there the next year … There’s never really a theme.”
Hinton also loves natural elements like dried hydrangeas from her garden, greenery boughs, and oranges studded with cloves. “You can have a little bit of wordplay there—‘scentimental,’ with or without the c,” she laughs. “It’s both. I’ve always done that since I was a little girl, and it’s scent-imental because I love the fragrance … It just seems like Christmastime to me.”
That evocation of Christmas atmosphere spills out into the yard, too. The wishing well is roped in white lights from Thanksgiving until Valentine’s Day; the trees in the backyard are illuminated, as well as the gazebo and the pool house. They also illuminate the front fence in lights, adding wreaths and bells to create what Hinton calls a fanciful “retro postcard” look, which Hinton hopes gives neighbors a little mental lift as they drive by.
Hinton’s design instincts are fresh and inventive, but they also spring from a love of history and tradition. The tree in the hall, made of pink paper feathers, is hung with little clocks to allude to the passing of time, not in a heavy vanitas sort of way, but in a way that’s wrapped in the coziness and nostalgia of the holidays. And though different ornaments come out from year to year, she definitely has her holiday rituals—including the last one, taking down the tree.
“That’s a solo celebration. Not with a bottle of champagne—but I probably should have one,” she laughs. “I have my saw and my little ladder, and the dogs sit there and watch in amazement. And it goes back out the door.”
Photographs by Alise O'Brien
