This Hampton Park beauty is called home by a couple, their two young children and college-age daughter, three large dogs, and the wife’s mother, who is from Mexico and lives with them part-time. A few years ago, when the couple was in the market for a new home, finding one large enough to accommodate them all was of paramount importance, but the house also needed to be big enough to allow the wife, a collector, to finally have her expansive art collection under one roof.
“I’ve been collecting for a long time, but nothing was ever in one place,” says the gallery owner. “I was just waiting for the right house.”
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Set on more than an acre, with a circle drive and wide front veranda, the “right house” makes a grand first impression. The Mission-style home is more than 100 years old, calling to mind ladies in Empire-waist dresses and gentlemen in cuffed trousers and bowler hats stepping from touring cars. The homeowner had an altogether different picture in her head, though: “To me, the front veranda was very Mexico. I kept imagining sitting on the front porch, drinking margaritas with the bougainvillea trailing down around me. It just felt like home.”
Her Mexican heritage is significant, but by no means is it the only important influence on this global traveler, who picks up everything from high art to tchotchkes while traveling abroad. She studied in France as an undergraduate. A fine arts major who added degrees in literature and French, the homeowner now owns an art consulting company and a commercial art space. To run those businesses, she travels frequently to New York, Paris, and London to meet with artists and dealers.
“Every time you travel somewhere, you discover a different part of yourself, or a different aspect of who you are or what you love,” she says. When she goes to Paris, she relives her early 20s, when she saw the City of Light for the first time. The go-go pace of New York jumpstarts her already amped-up level of energy. The ruins of Tulum, Mexico; the vineyards and villas of Italy; the vast stillness of the Arctic—they’ve all made an impact on the homeowner, who describes her design aesthetic as eclectic.
Make that “eclectic with a capital E.” The homeowner explains it this way: “I love things that have a history, that have been owned and touched, that have some sort of story to tell. If I’m drawn to something, I bring it home to ‘talk’ to the other objects. It becomes a broader conversation.”
No shop, no auction, no estate sale, no flea market is off limits. “There’s no grand plan,” she says. “It’s high-end with low. I just buy what I like, and then I fit it together.”
Her eye for the interesting and the offbeat is evident in the home’s large foyer, with its original hardwood floors, wainscoting, and beams. She’s dressed the space with contemporary bronze sculptures by Nicole Eisenman, old Spanish Colonial chairs that would be at home in a mission church, and a new white Spanish Mission–style settee from Arlene Lilie Interior Design.
To the left of the foyer, the homeowner has turned a former study into a glitzy space where you can envision yourself sipping martinis while dishing with close friends. “I immediately saw this as a bar,” she says. Built-in cabinets that almost certainly housed books in another life now hold glassware for wine and highballs. A découpaged 1920s cabinet, antique decanters on a glass-and-brass tray, and a sassy gold lamp amplify the light, an effect that the homeowner says is particularly beautiful at night. These vintage elements play off contemporary white embossed-leather chairs set opposite chairs upholstered in deep-gray crushed velvet. Yet for all its glamour, the room—which has become one of the homeowner’s favorites—is cozy.
The living room, on the other side of the foyer, features floor-to-ceiling original wood paneling and a decorative plaster ceiling. “I just love that it’s so dark in here,” the homeowner says. “I thought it would be really fun to put all of my dark furniture in one room and the white furniture in another, instead of contrasting them.” She’s decorated the dark room with paintings by British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, oversize sofas and tables, and an antique fan chair in purple. “It took me a while to find a home that would take oversize furnishings,” she says. “I like big things.”
Visitors pass from that deliciously dark living room to a solarium filled with light. White upholstered sofas anchor the room, which is filled with some of the owner’s favorite pieces: an African headpiece, purchased at auction; a 6-foot-tall wooden Buddha; a 6-foot-long papier-mâché dinosaur found at Miami’s Art Basel; narrow antique tables; and a folk art piece by the late Virgil Myers, a large Noah’s Ark complete with more than 60 pairs of animals. “I say I’m getting things like the dinosaur and the Noah’s Ark for the kids, but really I’m getting them for me,” the homeowner says with a laugh.
In the dining room, nearly two dozen Fortuny lamps hang in a random arrangement from the coffered ceiling. “I’d been collecting these lamps for a long time, not knowing what I would do with them,” the homeowner explains. “When we got this house, I spent two days with this amazing electrician to painstakingly place these asymmetrically and off-center.” Light reflects from a silver sculpture by British metalsmith David Clarke, who takes objects—in this case, silver trays—and welds them together. “It becomes a puzzle,” says the homeowner. “It’s magnificent and so pretty, especially at night.”
A large painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye dominates the focal wall of the room. “This is the grandest piece of art that I own,” says the homeowner, noting that this is the thing she’d grab first if the house were on fire and her family and dogs were already safe outside. “I’m much more focused on the art collection,” she explains. “I don’t look to collect specific artists, but I do tend to gravitate toward women artists and minority artists, and it’s mostly figurative work. I love portraits.”
Whether a work of art, an antique chair, or the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris, she’s drawn to things and places that have a past: “When I travel, I like to think of all the stories of people who have walked across this same street. In a place like New York, with all those apartments, there is a life happening that is common to all of us. Everyone has a birthday; everyone is gathering for dinner somewhere; we all get excited about many of the same things. I like finding things that have a sense of history and that connect us in some way.”
