Photography by Carmen Troesser
Kristin Moomey’s latest passion project can be traced to her time spent in the northern Italian city of Genoa. In 1996, she was studying architecture there, enthralled by the port city’s historic buildings and hilly landscape, when she discovered its elaborate pebble mosaics, seemingly around every corner, in modest gardens as well as in grand piazzas. Decades before settling in the Benton Park home that she now shares with her husband, Marcus Moomey, and children, Moomey envisioned recreating one of those mosaic gardens at home.
In 2000, after she completed graduate school in St. Louis, she and Marcus purchased their three-story home. Within a year of buying the house, Moomey was thinking about what to do with the outdoor spaces. “But we had so much to do inside the house that I just didn’t get to it for 20 years,” she recalls.
Even then, it wasn’t until COVID derailed a renovation project in the spring of 2020 that the Moomeys, now parents to two daughters, turned their attention to the outdoor spaces, beginning a major overhaul of the yard that transformed the grassy slope into a modern version of a Victorian terrace garden.
Kristin and Marcus wanted to have enough of the hardscaping in place to host a socially distanced high school graduation party for their older daughter in June. When they met their deadline, and after taking a few weeks off, Moomey decided that it was time to tackle the mosaic.
She’d already overcome the project’s biggest logistical challenge: sourcing the rock. Gray Mexican beach pebble is common, as is the polished black rock she wanted to use. After spending the spring researching, she settled on white Caribbean rock from the local Lowe’s that offered the contrast she’d loved in the Genoese mosaics. She used 5,500 pebbles.
Photography by Carmen Troesser
Kristin Moomey
“One of the things I loved about this project is that I had confidence in it from the first day,” Moomey says. “I thought, If 25 years of thinking about this and sketching it isn’t enough, then nothing would be enough. There’s no reason I can’t do this.”
The area’s outer border consists of 187 bricks the couple had salvaged decades earlier from the back yard, prepped in much the same way as they would’ve been for a standard patio project. From there, Moomey added dry concrete mix and began setting pebbles on their ends, packed them tightly, about a third of their length down into the sandy mix. Over the July 4 weekend, she started with the eight-petaled flower at the mosaic’s center.
“When that center circle was in place and I stepped back to look at it, I nearly cried, because I realized then that all the things in my head could be realized out here,” she says.
After hours of toil over the holiday weekend and a couple of post-workday sessions, she had the first half finished and ready to water, which would set the concrete. She completed the rest in shorter spurts; she recalls it as a stressful process because the work in progress would need to be protected from water, lest the concrete set.
“So I didn’t sleep well until I had gone through the process enough to get a portion of it set,” says Moomey, who left work one day to make sure the mosaic was covered when storms were threatening.
Neighbors stopped by and offered support, leaving notes when she wasn’t there; a Lowe’s employee recognized Moomey as “the mosaic lady” on one of her many trips to the store. That encouragement, both in person and, during an especially tough phase in the project, on Instagram, helped her push through to the final section.
By the time she finished the last section, she’d been exposed to vicious summer mosquitos. Her hands and knees were shredded. But the mosaic is complete: Moomey can look out her bedroom window and see the pattern, which reflects design elements of her historic Italianate home and her family. Lines that start in the southeast and northwest and meet in the middle represent Moomey and her husband, and there are four stars, one for each family member.
“When I wake up,” Moomey says, “it’s the first thing I see, and it brings me complete joy.”
