1 of 2
Alise O'Brien
2 of 2
Alise O'Brien
Few addresses inspire reveries about St. Louis’ Gilded Age like those that line Westmoreland Place and Portland Place, the tony Central West End enclave that housed more than its fair share of Chouteaus, Cervanteses, Lamberts, and Mallinckrodts during its turn-of-the-century heyday. In 1978, when the hoomeowners bought the Beaux Arts gem that had been built 80 years before by Charles Fach, a pioneer of hardware sales in the West, the wife headed to the cache of microfiche at the old Missouri Historical Society, where she got a tantalizing glimpse of that bygone era.
“They would list in the paper ‘visiting days’ for each house, when you could come with your calling card,” she says. “What a way to live.” But while she evinces the sort of marvelous fascination with her home’s history that might be expected from anyone who’s committed themselves to the meticulous upkeep of an aging, august manse for the last 30-some years, the space has barely a hint of nostalgia.
Case in point: the morning room, where those well-heeled Victorian ladies likely settled in on “visiting days.” As the youngest of the couple's three sons prepared to leave home, the couple decided to turn over a new leaf. They enlisted the help of Arlene Lilie, co-owner of Arlene Lilie Interior Design (4739 McPherson, 314-367-4000). An impressively scaled landscape by contemporary Australian painter Mandy Martin, which the homeowners had purchased years earlier from the former Austral Gallery in Lafayette Square, seemed to inspire her very un-Victorian ambitions for the room: open, airy, and expansive.
The designer and client worked side-by-side, sometimes literally. “Arlene and I were painting on the wall—sample after sample—to get the exact right shade of butter,” the homeowner says. The clean-lined contemporary sofa and matching armchairs in a subtle textured pattern complement that hard-won hue, while the cerulean damask on the lounge chairs harmonizes with a subtle note in the Martin landscape, nudging its blue tones closer to the fore. The painting’s golden glow finds its reflection in the custom silk strié draperies that frame the original multi-pane, double-hung windows, which allow in plenty of natural sunlight. “This is the morning room, after all,” Lilie says.
“We were trying to make the house more fresh and young, more livable,” the homeowner says, echoing what some see as the quandary of occupying such a landmark home, that it can feel like living in a museum. But if she declines to fetishize her home’s history, neither is she at all keen to dismiss it. There was no question, for example, of failing to preserve the morning room’s original exquisite plaster moldings—or its pair of solid wood bifold doors dating from the 1920s.
The result? A grand history blends subtly and almost seamlessly with the family’s own, while refusing to be stuck in the past. The house is pulled together by a glossy black that proceeds from the refurbished checked marble of the entry hall to the marble of the coffee table to the finish of the upright piano where the family's youngest son learned to play. “I have lots of fond memories, sitting in here watching him practice,” she says, “taking lessons from this funny Romanian woman.”
