A brick three-story in Lafayette Square, Steve Engel’s 19th-century home—windows trimmed with light-green paint, cornice decorated with a navy blue pattern, door framed by two gas lanterns—isn’t short on character. Knock on the door, and it’s likely that Ty, Engel’s retired Cane Corso stud, will greet you. A chocolate-brown hunk of a dog with teddy bear ears, he’ll peer through the glass of the double doors and bark for his human to come collect you. It’s just the start of the charm—even more awaits inside.
Engel, an agent with RedKey Realty in Frontenac, got his start renovating houses when he lived in South Florida, his home for 34 years. But he grew up in University City, and eventually, after moving back in the mid-’90s, lived all over St. Louis—Clayton, Ladue, a loft on Washington. That last location wasn’t as pedestrian-friendly as he’d have liked for his daily walks with Ty. But the search for the right home took a while.
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“I looked at housing more through the architecture and the design and the functionality and, many times, because I like doing projects. It was a creative thing,” he says. “It wasn’t, like, ‘Give me four bedrooms and two baths in this school district.’ It didn’t matter. I was looking for the right house.”
What he ended up finding first was the right neighborhood.
Engel had sold clients on Lafayette Square, and he started going to the park with the pup to get a feel for the neighborhood. He liked seeing parents with strollers there. He liked the architecture of the homes, which felt uniquely St. Louis to him. He liked that the neighborhood lived as if it were its own little pocket in the city.
“The character of this neighborhood—that’s what drew me here,” he says. “It was one of the few neighborhoods where I got invited to dinner parties just to meet the neighbors. A lot of the people who own some of the commercial properties here live in the neighborhood. They’re pioneers, truly,” he says, laughing.
“It just feels very alive when you walk out the door,” he says, “but here, I’m very private.”
“Here” is 10-foot doors, 11-foot ceilings,period moldings, exposure from the south, west, and east through large handmade windows, no two of which are the same size—all the character that sold Engel. It was a contrast to many of the other houses in the neighborhood, which had been “white-boxed.”
“Renovators came in 15 or 20 years ago when the neighborhood started to pick up, and all the moldings, all the good stuff, got taken out and sold,” the homeowner explains. “Then they drywalled everything and put in new floors and bathrooms. You walk in, and you could be in a house of the past 10 years.”
That’s not to say that the place didn’t need work. “I feel like over the years, the homes I bought had good bones, good architecture…but it’s like rescuing houses,” Engel says. In this rescue, he rebuilt chimneys and the front steps, tuckpointed the brick, and capped the home with a new roof. The floors are original but had to be stripped of layers of old flooring, and in some spots parquet glued on top had to be removed.
The biggest project? Engel points to the carriage house out back, which was in poor shape when he purchased the property. He was advised to tear it down but, after pulling the siding off, realized that it wasn’t in as bad of shape as he thought it would be. “I was pleasantly surprised,” he says. The tiny house now wears siding in different patterns of white—shiplap-sized planks and thinner boards near the bottom and middle of the structure, gingerbread scallops and sawtooth patterns at the top—and is decked out with modern black light fixtures. Neighbors who had to look at the dilapidated building for 20 years were delighted, Engel says: “I’m actually known in the neighborhood for doing that garage.” To complete the backyard, he plans to add a new fence, hornbeams to frame the perimeter, gravel beds, and uplighting, aiming for a structured and linear look. Once finished, the carriage house will become a studio apartment.
Back inside, with Ty sprawled on the seagrass rug in the bright-white living room, Engel describes his style as eclectic. He used to collect a lot of antiques but realized that with too many, it starts to feel like a museum. His living room is well curated, with a 1930s painting by the German-American artist William Freinik and a modern white sofa from Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. On one wall, a painting of a city map by the St. Louis artist Mark Horton hangs above an 18th-century French directoire commode, both sourced from Robert Morrissey Antiques. The pieces are framed by two Mies van der Rohe loungers from the 1950s, placed in front of a Barcelona glass table by the same designer. The pairing of the warm, rich wood of the antique and the abstract art and mirrored-chrome frames of the leather chairs shows that Engel is an expert in playing with periods, styles, and finishes. As he puts it, “Good design doesn’t go out of style. It doesn’t matter when it’s from.”
His expertise is repeated in the dining room. In front of the original Carrera marble fireplace, a white Saarinen table under a matte-black Fortuny pendant is ringed with four Italian Neoclassical–style chairs. Engel mixes original and non- with the artwork. A replica of the court painter Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus sets a jovial mood above a buffet by Barbara Barry for Baker; on an adjacent wall is a Giovanni Battista Tiepolo drawing, a hand in a reddish chalk plucked from a sketchbook that Engel acquired at a Christie’s auction.
The master bedroom holds a raised platform with a decorative railing in front of the bed. It’s quirky, Engel says, so he kept it. The carvings in the rail’s newel post match the motif etched into the fireplace, in front of which lies Ty’s dog bed. Black-and-white photos Engel took while living in Europe dot the space.
Throughout the home, there are constants: Benjamin Moore’s Simply White on many of the walls, a collection of Chinese export porcelain, Greek key–patterned floor coverings, modern light fixtures from Engel’s favorite, Visual Comfort (save for the living room’s chandelier, a Gustavian reproduction from Jon Paul Designs & Collectibles).
Having only lived in the home for a year, Engel has checked off many of his to-dos. There are more to come. He wants to change the kitchen floors and cabinet colors. Perhaps redo a bathroom or two. The marble fireplace in the dining room has some staining—for now, he thinks of it as a patina. And he plans to turn the third floor into a home office. Exit one of the doors up there, and you find yourself on a flat roof, which he wants to turn into a deck. The view of the city, the one he came home to, is beautiful at night. It’s just one more of the home’s many charms.
