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Photography by Alise O'Brien
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Photography by Alise O'Brien
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Photography by Alise O'Brien
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Photography by Alise O'Brien
The most striking feature of this Brentmoor Park home entry has to be the stunning foyer wall. This is wallpaper to end all wallpapers, really more of a mural.
The rolls, says St. Louis designer Jessie D. Miller, measured 4 ½ feet long and took the better part of a week to install. (Scaffolding was involved.) The pattern appears like marble magnified a thousand times. Black and white and swirling, it brings movement in and has a gorgeous organic quality.
Miller has been working on the first floor of this gracious home for almost a year. The redesign was a Christmas gift from the owner to his wife, who had distinct plans for modernizing the spaces.
“Her dream was to have everything white,” Miller says, “but I didn’t think that would work here.” Miller steered her instead toward contrast, established in the first instance by the mural and echoed through the family room to the veins in the kitchen’s existing white Carrara marble countertops. Miller’s stamp on the kitchen is the huge backsplash—framed by a beautiful stone arch—which at one time was aqua.
“I like creating different moods in rooms,” says Miller. “A dining room like this tends to be used mostly in the evening by adults. I felt it needed to be sexier.”
“We replaced what was there with super-classic subway tile. We wanted to calm everything down,” Miller says. “You appreciate the architecture more that way.” Another handsome feature of the kitchen/family room is the elevated fireplace. Like the arch, it’s fresh out of a French château. Miller incorporates a lot of mixed metals into her design. There’s a solid brass console table in the foyer, and the family room contains two handsome chestnut leather–and–chrome chairs. The dining room table is overhung with a brass-and-glass globe chandelier.
As for that dining room, Miller transformed it by lacquering the paneled walls in black, a technique she also used on the stair railing across the foyer.
“I like creating different moods in rooms,” she says. “A dining room like this tends to be used mostly in the evening by adults. I felt it needed to be sexier.” It is. The glistening, extraordinarily long custom-made table directs the eye out to the Italianate garden: cobbled paths, trees in pots, and—across a pool in the shape of a half-moon—a pretty summer home. The 18 dining chairs, Miller says, are iconic Midcentury, Platner-inspired, with brass wire bases and charcoal-gray upholstery.
“I like to mix modern and traditional,” Miller says. “I think it’s worked.”
