Photo by Alise O'Brien
In 1991, landscape designer Matt Moynihan moved into a little brick cottage in Clayton. Built in 1928 by a retired couple, it was basically “a three-room-per-floor house,” never meant to accommodate children. There were three bedrooms on the second floor: one for the husband and wife, one for guests, one for the maid. They shared one tiny bathroom—not as tiny as the first-floor powder room that had been built, oddly enough, next to the front door. But as a singleton new to the house, he kept things simple. When he first moved in, Moynihan remembers with a laugh, “I had a couch and a drawing table.”
By 1998, he’d added a subterranean garage just off the basement (which really had not been much more than a glorified crawlspace). There was something else new about the house, too: His partner, architect Brian Smith, had joined him there. Over the next decade, the pair—who run Gunn & Smith Architects and Moynihan and Associates, respectively—would use their combined talents to transform the house and garden.
The first big project, Smith says, came in 1998, when he moved in. “We did a kitchen extension,” he says, with a redo of an upstairs bedroom and that modest bathroom. In 2007, they temporarily moved out and hired Tom Carron Construction to do a gut remodel. The old knob-and-tube wiring was stripped out and the house re-electrified; the HVAC was redone; and geothermal wells were installed. The square footage of the house was expanded considerably, both on the first and second floors. And the pair ripped out that tiny powder room and added an elevator. One senses that Smith and Moynihan have gotten blank looks or questions about that elevator in the past—and so are quick to explain how practical it is.
“We basically use it as a dumbwaiter,” Smith explains, for trash, recycling, and laundry. “And if you’re doing a gut rehab,” Moynihan adds, “you can put in an elevator for less money than a nice-looking staircase.”
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
The house came with a nice-looking staircase—winding, a little treacherous, and almost certainly not a set that could be built under 21st-century building codes. But it’s an important reason that the house still feels authentically historic—yes, even in its newest rooms. There are subtler reasons, too. “The old steel windows, we refurbished them rather than throw them out,” Moynihan says. (He kept two grad students from the Sam Fox School busy for an entire summer, grinding and repainting them.) During the big rehab, they also preserved the original exterior brick, blending it into the new exterior walls. Some things had to go, though, and Smith was happy to ditch the old metal radiators. “They were almost like big pieces of furniture,” he says.
The main reason that this house feels so harmonious, though, is Smith’s design for the space. “When you think about what Frank Lloyd Wright did to architecture, where you can look out to all four walls from where you are in the house—right now, I’m seeing all four walls,” Moynihan says, standing in the room adjacent to the foyer. “Even though it’s a masonry house, Brian carved all these openings in a way where you’re always in an open-plan house with a central core, and all the rooms pinwheel around it, so it feels more contemporary.”
That mix of historic and contemporary is reflected in the pair’s tastes in art and furniture. “It’s not a decorated house,” Smith says, just a space filled with objects they both love, added over time. That includes a classic Charles Eames lounger and three Eames rosewood screens, placed in corners, Smith says, “as segueways to soften the architecture a little bit.” There’s a table designed by acclaimed Modernist architect Isadore Shank, with a found base and a tabletop made of seamlessly laid marble tiles; a 16th- century captain’s table; a Christian Liaigre dining room table; a massive wooden hutch from rural Missouri. “It was made in the mid-1800s—the fasteners are all pre-industrial,” Moynihan says. “It’s almost Shaker in design, so it goes well with the contemporary pieces.”
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
On the walls, you’ll find a Robert Motherwell, but mostly the selections are by St. Louis artists: Barbara Holtz, Erik Spehn, Leslie Laskey, Bob Hansman, Arthur Osver—and some bold, gorgeous watercolors by a certain world-renowned landscape designer named Matt Moynihan. When they travel, Moynihan paint-sketches beaches and tiny Italian towns, but there are also paintings of houses, including a few dating back to his childhood in Ohio. “I was painting in high school, and a woman bought paintings from me,” he says. “She said, ‘When I die, I’ll send them back,’ and they were in the will—so the estate sent them back!”
Moynihan’s artistry is also evident outside, including a vegetal privacy fence. Moynihan planted magnolias, then added black bamboo right underneath them. Bamboo grows in forests, Moynihan explains, so it’s very happy sharing space with trees. “Because the house binds it in, it’s like in a planter, with the magnolias, so it’s grown right up through the branches in a very fun way,” he says, “and the trees keep it from tipping over.” It’s as tall as the house, partially covering the second-story windows, to magical effect. (“Magic” is the word for the whole garden—Smith says the neighborhood kids tell them it’s like something out of Harry Potter.)
Matt is the chef, and his cooktop doesn’t have a hood; it’s under a window, overlooking the garden. When he and Smith entertain, they use the room that makes sense—the logical “dining room,” with its long table and wood-burning fireplace, or something more intimate in the heart of the house. And this is definitely a house with a heart—it welcomes dogs and friends and laughter, sympathetic tears, hugs, complicated debates about art and movies and history. It is organic arcitecture in its truest sense: a house that responds to life as it’s lived.
