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Photography by Alise O'Brien
Built in 1932, the house was structurally great, but very dark. The starting point for the design was the Cowtan & Tout wallpaper; the color of the adjoining rooms comes from that pattern. Note the details: the border of grosgrain ribbon with brass nailheads and the hand-painted floor leading into the powder room.
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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
Dressed in a button-down shirt and khakis emblazoned with embroidered crests, John Ansehl casts the look of a man who just stepped off of a yacht—or a country-club veranda. A few nights prior, he’d celebrated his birthday at Bar Les Frères. Although he lives outside of Chicago and designs homes everywhere, Ansehl has the itch to come home, after three decades away.
“I do a lot of high-end all over the world, but I don’t have any what I call ‘faux-château’ clients,” says Ansehl, proprietor of John Philip Ansehl Design (939 W. North, Ste. 750, Chicago, Ill., 312-646-2134). “I have the chairman of the board of Crate & Barrel, who has just this beautiful little French Norman house from the ’20s. I have really rational clients. They don’t care about the size of the room, just as long as I make sure I do every detail.
“I’ve done some stupidly large houses, but I don’t make it a habit,” he continues. “It’s like fashion. If it’s tailored and nice, don’t screw it up.”
He’s returned to St. Louis to design a house purchased by a close friend’s son, also a native, who just relocated here from the West Coast with his wife and two young children. “He is very traditional,” Ansehl says of his client, a Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School alum. “And she’s New York. She’s bold. She has great style and great fashion—and they are in their thirties.”
At 3,600 square feet, the Ladue house was an exact fit. “In total, we looked at 20 homes,” the wife says. “When we saw this house, we said, ‘This is it.’ This is the perfect-size house. There was one other my husband liked, but it was way, way too big.”
When the wife asked Ansehl for the name of the best designer here, he barely took a breath before answering. “Me,” he says, laughing. “I have worked from Scotland to L.A. I said, ‘I want to come back to St. Louis, and I’d like to maybe open a design studio and a store.’ I’m looking for space. This is my hometown.”
Ansehl says the family’s moving truck arrived from California with a dining-room set and a Ralph Lauren coffee table. Everything else, he bought.
“Better me than them,” he says, laughing. “Then it ends up what I want it to be—although I am not really a controlling designer at all. It’s not my house.”
Starting with the foyer, Ansehl established a color palette of black, white, red, and green. He had the walls lacquered red and trimmed in black grosgrain ribbon with nailhead accents. Local painter Peter Engelsmann did the floor in a black-and-white geometric pattern; a Federal-style mirror was hung on the wall.
The living room was papered in a lively multicolored Cowtan & Tout print with hidden monkeys popping up throughout the design. The trim is chartreuse. In the dining room, Ansehl had wainscoting added and the walls papered in green lizard. “That’s a lot of belts,” he says. “I really wanted it to be traditional and contemporary at the same time. I had the geometric black-and-white rug made. I’m known for details like this,” he says, pointing to the French knots adorning the chair cushions.
A few steps down, you enter a second living room, termed the summer living room. Color blasts from every corner, including the shocking-pink linen sofa, boldly striped chairs, and a huge canvas on the wall. “I found the painting in New York, and I thought it really captured everything,” Ansehl says. “I built this room around the painting.”
The master bedroom, also on the first floor, is a sharp contrast to the riot of color outside its door. With pale blue walls, a bed dressed in white Leontine linens, and a bath with walls papered in a blue-and-white watercolor print, it is peacefulness personified. “This is totally incongruent, but this is what she always wanted,” Ansehl says. “She always wanted a light blue, really serene bedroom.”
Upstairs are the children’s rooms, both with dormers, which have been updated with bright paints, large stuffed animals, and lively art. There’s also a guest room outfitted with Raoul Textiles’ fabrics, which are both hand-blocked and custom-colored.
Throughout every room, Ansehl’s signature touches abound. Those French knots crop up on several of the upholstered pieces. Multiple rooms host rugs and furniture that he personally designed. The foyer sports a ceramic stand from Z Gallerie in the shape of a pair of black riding boots. Two umbrellas in slicker yellow jut out of the top.
“I obsessed in the middle of the night for the perfect yellow umbrella,” Ansehl says. “I was online all night looking for it. Every detail is important to me.”
