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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
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Alise O'Brien
Interior designer April Jensen lives in a 150-year-old home in Glendale, a white Federal farmhouse with elegant Italianate details set at the end of a long driveway. Its rambling beauty is made for the movies: four terraces, a wide front porch with a haint-blue ceiling, and the original red barn—now a pool house—in the backyard.
Five years ago—on the day she and her husband, Jason; their children, Lily, Julien, and Tallulah; and a gaggle of dogs moved in—the pipes burst in their youngest daughter’s bathroom, sending a torrent of water from the second floor through the built-in bookcases in Jason’s office below and on into the basement. “‘Well, that sucks,’” Jensen says, recalling the couple’s initial reaction.
But the family was too excited about living in the house to let one bout of bad luck ruin their day. Instead, they turned the experience into an opportunity to renovate: updating the lighting, adding a new thermostat and audiovisual system, and painting the whole house white, helping highlight its fine details and original woodwork. “I’m calm under pressure,” Jensen says. “When it’s over I’ll typically fall apart,” she adds, laughing, “but then it passes. Life is short.”
If Jensen sounds fearless, it’s because worry doesn’t factor too much into her life. The design of her home is an outward manifestation of her inner confidence. “I don’t think I overthink things, and somehow it just all works out,” she says. Whereas the previous homeowners had decorated the house in a traditional manner—dark paint, heavy drapery, an intentional division of rooms—Jensen used a lighter touch, allowing her instincts to guide her. “You want your house to have, or look as if it could have, a history about it—and then you add fun fabrics, or a great light. Something needs to be a little unexpected.”
The first purchase for the living room was a bit expected, however. The minimalist gray sofa was similar to the tufted sofa in her mother’s house that Jenson had loved as a child. “But it sat in our living room, and you weren’t allowed on it unless you asked first,” she says, “so when I bought this sofa, I decided that I would use it every day.” It’s important to Jensen that her family and friends feel at ease. “There is not one thing about this house where I’m, like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that’ or ‘Don’t do that. Don’t sit that there,’” she says. Even the family’s three poodle mixes—Bon Bon, Bebe, and Winnie—feel comfortable roaming the house atop the original quarter-sawn, white-oak floors. Jensen also bought a marble-top Saarinen table for the living room, a set of side tables that she had refinished, and green-and-white cotton draperies from Highland Court that complement the view to the outside. Then, the designer says, she “happened to trip across these two chairs from Anthropologie.” She was drawn to the fabric, a vintage-inspired mix of yellow, jade green, and blue flowers. “To me, these colors are just so happy,” she says. “The chairs were really the impetus for the design of the house.”
In the dining room, the use of vibrant color plays out in shades of green, warm wood tones, and a pop of fuchsia, courtesy of a painting by St. Louis artist Peter Manion. Jensen bought the room’s antique angel wings at the famed Round Top Antiques Fair in Texas, rejecting her initial doubts. “I really debated those,” she says, admiring them from a gray leather chair in the living room. “They could have gone wrong really easily.” But there was something about the way they were so simply displayed that Jensen just loved and couldn’t pass up. In her own house, she didn’t think too long about where or how to hang them either. Today, they’re juxtaposed with a Midcentury Modern display unit styled with some of the designer’s favorite things, like the milky-white and minty-green milk glass from her treasured collection. “I love that something as simple as a butter dish, or a vase, is so incredibly beautiful,” she says.
In general, Jensen is known for favoring a streamlined look—too many things, she says, and a room becomes “hard to read,” and at the moment she thinks her house feels a bit cluttered. She’s been given a few pieces of furniture by her mother-in-law, who is downsizing; a sconce in need of repair rests on the dining room floor; and delivery boxes from Chairish and fabric samples for upcoming home projects are scattered across tabletops. But this is just life. In her work with clients, Jensen encourages them to think less about making their homes look perfect, and more about creating authentic spaces that reflect their true selves. “Buy what you love, and you will find a place for it,” she says. For her, decorating is about drawing in broad strokes first, then fine-tuning each room with accessories and color. “The colors don’t all have to match, but we do have to have a similar tone [throughout the rooms],” she says. The designer also isn’t one to think, “‘Oh, now I need to go shopping for this wall.’ That would be paralyzing to me.”
In many ways, the house is a celebration of the designer’s passions: music, pop art, thrift-store finds, family. Jensen and her husband own eight record players, and the couple loves listening to all types of music on vinyl, she says. “We probably go to 100 concerts a year.” Her home office is an eclectic mix of fine antiques, great finds, and, yes, yellow silk drapes. Ever a practical person, Jensen chose to hang that billowy fabric in a room that doesn’t get a lot of traffic. “I also don’t have small children who would pull at them,” she says, explaining her decision-making. “Though I probably wouldn’t worry much about that either.”
Decorating the house isn’t the whole of Jensen’s life, no matter what the loveliness of the interiors might tell us. In fact, Jensen says, she often runs out of time to do all the things she’d like to around the house. She prioritizes family, and in the past five years her business has been on an upward trajectory. Her Brentwood studio is a beehive of activity. Jensen recently hired a new marketing firm, as well as a life/business coach: “He came in, and we had to consciously decide, ‘What are our values? What’s our mission? And where do we want to be?’ I don’t know that I’ve ever asked myself these questions.” Paying more attention to what she really wants has given Jensen a sense of balance, at work and at home. “It’s not about things,” Jensen states, “but [instead] about what happens to you when you’re living in an amazing space.”
