Photography by Alise O’Brien
A threshold can be an object, such as a stone doorsill. It can be that empty space inside the doorframe. It can be a new beginning. But the threshold of the Clayton apartment of designer Ken Stückenschneider (314-726-2000, stuckenschneider.com) is an astonishment. Knock on his front door—dark wood, in a Gothic arch shape—or give the altar bells on the tiny table in the hall a shake. When the door opens and you step inside, it’s like the walls push out several feet, and the world is suddenly filled with an extra measure of air and light.
Stückenschneider’s 8-year-old daughter, India, helped pick out this apartment. She loved the “Juliet balcony” and the turrets. “And who doesn’t want to live in a castle?” Stückenschneider says.
Not that it didn’t take work. When they moved in, it was a clichéd single-dad apartment, “all black leather and tan,” with manila envelope–colored doors and floors, as well as bland brass hardware. The first step was to strip, bleach, and lime-wax the floors, one of the designer’s signatures. Then came finer details like the window treatments fluttering around the balcony windows, inspired by El Greco’s Portrait of a Cardinal (a painting that Stückenschneider remembers from his days as a docent at The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The artwork inspired the home’s colors, as well as its fabrics: red French silk velvet woven on small looms; damask lace; and hand-woven silk, wool, and linen, all sewn together by a draper-upholsterer in Dallas.
A tiered living-room ceiling that automatically drew visitors’ gaze upward “really needed something that gave you a reason to look up there,” Stückenschneider says. So he brought in Tim Glastetter of Refined Finishes in Washington, Mo., to hand-stencil words and phrases on its surface, including the word sprezzatura, first used in Baldassare Castiglione’s 16th-century book of manners, Il Cortegiano. It means effortless elegance, something Stückenschneider always strives for in his work. There’s also a quote from 19th-century British poet Matthew Arnold, a favorite of T.S. Eliot’s, which can be seen on the front of the Saint Louis Art Museum: “Art still has truth. Take refuge there.”
The apartment is unabashedly elegant: smoked mirrors, a wicker sofa, 18th-century Chippendale dining-room chairs. But it has a masculine edge, too. Let your eye wander, and you’ll see lots of red pajama stripes; William Hogarth prints and Tom Huck’s “Evil Death Bugz” linoleum cuts; a Mies van der Rohe Brno chair upholstered in soft, distressed brown leather; painted mahogany dragon tables. There are also antique Scottish deer antlers, which face a deer mount brought from the designer’s 100-year-old family farmhouse. “He’s kind of like a mascot,” he says, “so we call him Lucky.”
With clients in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Canada, London, the Caribbean, Barbados, and Bermuda, the designer made sure he created a space that gave him “the perfect place to come back and be grounded.” But the most striking thing about this third-floor apartment? It doesn’t feel like an apartment.
“I think of it as an atelier,” Stückenschneider says. And when all of the windows are open to the tree canopies and a breeze gently blows in, it
even feels like a house—or, perhaps, a castle.
