When Kristi Pinkham decided to hang a vintage swing in her living room, she knew she was making a statement. Her playful addition, with its turquoise chain and cream vinyl seat, wasn’t designed to reject formality or traditional decorating rules. The swing, Pinkham says, was her way to say, This is a house for the little ones, too.
The same can be said of the living room playhouse—beloved by Dixie Jean, 16 months—and the two trapeze rings that hang in the family room, where Milo, 6, and Bode, 4, spin like figure skaters until they fall to the ground in peals of laughter. “I wanted the house to be fun for the kids,” says Pinkham, a St. Louis–based wardrobe and prop stylist. “Our life is our family.”
Pinkham, 36, and her husband, Trevor Pinkham, 35, moved into their Ballwin ranch in 2019. After outgrowing their first home, a charming but tiny bungalow in Webster Groves, they decided to move west to Claymont, an enclave of Midcentury architecture. There they rented a house for a year while waiting for the right property to come on the market. At the seven-month mark, Kristi— pregnant at the time with Bode—got the sign she was hoping for: a notice for an upcoming estate sale a few doors down from their rental. A treasure hunter at heart, she showed up and got a sneak peek at the house. Two weeks later, the couple had a contract. “We found this kind of abandoned house that we could do pretty much whatever we wanted to it,” Kristi says.
Alise O'Brien
But the renovations in Ballwin were more complex than any of the Pinkhams’ past DIY projects. Nevertheless, the couple forged ahead with the work mostly themselves, motivated by the prospect of saving money and the satisfaction of learning new skills. Trevor, with his knack for problem-solving, would serve as general contractor. “A lot of this stuff really doesn’t freak me out,” he says.
From the start, the plan was to open up the interiors to light and “make the house a fun open space for the family to run around,” Kristi says. They got rid of narrow passageways between rooms, bulky built-ins, and two main walls, one separating the living and family room and another between the family room and kitchen. “Now, if you’re in the front yard, you can see all the way through to the house into the backyard,” says Trevor, a project consultant at Chesterfield Fence & Deck. They pulled up wall-to-wall carpet and vinyl floors and replaced them with hardwood. A wood-paneled bar in the family room was demoed, but a glass mirror was salvaged and repurposed in the new kitchen to bring in more light.
Alise O'Brien
Yet, with all this work going on inside the house, Kristi couldn’t get her mind off of the exterior, a rusty brick with trim that was falling apart. “I was eager to make it look really good, so I bumped it up the list [of priorities]. We painted it pretty soon after moving in,” she recalls, in a classic black-and-white palette.
For the most part, the Pinkhams potter around the house once the kids have gone to bed. “We stay up way too late,” says Kristi, “but I feel like we’ve also gotten a lot better at having our kids along for the adventure. We can’t wait until they’re older; we can’t wait until we’ve had enough sleep to start.” During the stay-at-home months of the pandemic, Kristi and Trevor took on their most challenging design task yet: hanging the gold-and-white wallpaper in the family room.
“You think: It’s wallpaper; it’ll go up easy. I’ve ripped down walls; I’ve framed doorways, all sorts of things, but I was, like, What did I get myself into?” Trevor recalls. Kristi’s vision was to use the wall as the room’s centerpiece but she wasn’t quite sure how: “Should I do built-ins? Do I make a whole gallery wall? But I’ve always loved wallpaper.” She sourced the large-scale pattern online from Anthropologie, which was offering the exclusive design from York Wallcoverings. When the wallpaper finally did arrive (COVID-19 delayed the delivery last fall), she realized that it was pre-pasted, not peel-and-stick as she’d ordered. “OK, here we go,” she recalls thinking. “I wasn’t going to send it back, out of fear that I wouldn’t get it.”
Alise O'Brien
Kristi and Trevor tackled the project one strip at a time, every two or three days. “It was exhausting,” she recalls, thinking back on the painstaking act of removing all of the air bubbles and lining up the seams just right. “What were we thinking? This is an angled wall with a beam in the middle. But that’s the way it’s been for a lot of our projects: If you think about it too much, you might not do it.” The room’s large leather sectional and indoor/outdoor table from CB2 give the family plenty of room to spread out for movies and Lego sets. A large pouf, bought at an estate sale, adds a modern touch.
Kristi’s latest purchase is a collection of cardboard blocks from IKEA that she plans to spray-paint in shades of tan and cream. “When they’re stacked, they’ll look really cool, like a sculpture,” she says. In typical Pinkham fashion, the blocks, in a range of sizes, add a design element to the room and are also there for the kids to tinker with.
Alise O'Brien
Decorating a house calls for considerable ingenuity. It’s a creative exercise similar to conceiving a fashion editorial, Kristi says: “You’re telling a story, building an aesthetic.” Her process for decorating the house began by choosing a color scheme or riffing on a special find, slowly building an eclectic mix infused with personality and warmth. Photo albums, which Kristi keeps on her iPhone so they’re always on hand, serve as a record of the furniture, décor, and colors sourced for each space. “It’s like at work, when I have racks [of clothes] or pictures of things that I’ve brought to the shoot. The albums are a vision board,” she says.
Visualizing the pieces as a cohesive unit gives Kristi the confidence to buy what she loves when she sees it. Take, for instance, the vintage wicker Mario Torres parrot lamp in the living room and the pink velvet dining chairs that she found at a local estate sale. “They found me,” says Kristi.
Alise O'Brien
And Trevor—what does he think of his wife’s cool and unexpected choices? “I’ve always left that up to her. She’s the genius behind all of it. I know there’s a lot of guys who would say, I’d never let my wife paint a wall pink in my house, but it makes it so much more fun. I walk into the house every day, and it’s still never boring to me.”
All the fun decorative elements took on heightened importance last year when everyone was at home. “I had two crazy boys, and Dixie was born in February,” Kristi recalls. “All of the playgrounds were shut down, so we were all here, making the house our own playground.” The family was lucky to find one of the last stock tanks in the area and bought it even with a hole in it, knowing that Trevor would come to the rescue and fix it. The kids have been swimming in it all summer long. “What would I do without Trevor?” Kristi says, smiling. “We’re like the classic couple where the wife dreams it all up and says, ‘Here you go, honey.’”
