As any home entertainer can attest, the holidays can feel like a deadline for many of the more labor-intensive projects around the house. And sometimes, that means the whole house. Such was the case with one young family who closed on a property in February 2020 and were looking forward to returning to New Orleans. With just nine months to prepare, they needed to transform the blighted property for the ultimate homecoming celebration: Hosting Christmas for extended family.
Previously composed of walled-off, discrete rooms, the house was originally built in the 1920s as part of a development of single-family homes near Audubon Park. With the help of Dotan Bonen, the family gut renovated the house to achieve an airy, contemporary living plan (just right for welcoming the 20-odd uncles, aunts, parents, and cousins for lively Sunday meals).
Today, the home retains the intimate, street-front scale of the original build, as well as its more endearing details. A speckled terrazzo stair ushers guests from the front door to the living and dining areas, and original ironwork is still intact. To its neighbors, the house’s most noticeable change is likely that the predominantly red brick exterior has since been wrapped in a fondant-like layer of white stucco. (And save for a broken window and dislodged tile from the slate roof, the structure emerged relatively unscathed from the ravages of October’s Hurricane Ida.)
And yet, renovation work aside, the question of decor remained. Enter Penny Francis , a local interior designer who had supplied the wife’s mother with furnishings for years through her northern New Orleans store Eclectic Home . “I think the store is sort of like an interview,” Francis says and laughs. The collaboration was the clients’ first time hiring an interior designer, but Francis’s personality and exacting eye made the decision an easy one. As the wife puts it: “I fell in love with her within two minutes.”
“We wanted to play with height here, because we had a lot of height on the other side, where the windows were,” Francis says. The wall seen here is the ideal place for a tall standing cabinet, which, as Francis says, the homeowner was drawn to thanks to its use of cane. The kaleidoscopic wallpaper is by Zak+Fox. The midcentury lounge chairs were a gift from the client’s mother, and they were re-covered in a Kravet velvet.
The homeowners hoped to integrate a range of furnishings accumulated over years of living in city apartments in the U.S. and abroad, as well as pieces inherited from family members. But those furnishings spanned a litany of styles. The wife and her mother are midcentury aficionados, while the husband’s family were known to embrace early American and French antiques. “We wanted to preserve both of our upbringings and lifestyles,” one homeowner says.
After editing the family’s collection of furniture, accessories, and art, Francis entered the next stage of her work. “We reinterpreted what they had that could be [updated by]... changing the finish or the fabrics on those existing pieces,” she says. Adding some custom elements, such as the double-pedestal table in the dining room, ensured that items gelled together and that dimensions made sense for the house’s footprint.
The living room offers a case study of that type of resourceful approach. In the room a restored, black-lacquer Ming-style coffee table anchors a jovial sitting space which is flanked by an organic, crescent-moon sofa and two Louis XVI-style armchairs. For the latter, Francis reupholstered the seats in velvet fabrics by Zak+Fox , complementing a bold, patterned paper on a nearby focal wall. “That paper has amazing blues and greens, and natural colors,” Francis says, along with a lemon yellow pop. Across the room, a pair of groovy, Venetian glass lamps pair nicely with early American chairs. A carved marble mantel—a beloved relic of the original home—anchors a side wall.
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Throughout the space, Francis’s eye for color is clear. “One of the things that [the wife] told me early on was that she wanted me to get her out of her comfort zone of all white,” Francis says of her client. “She wanted me to push the envelope.” Still, that didn’t mean color just for color’s sake. Instead of going fully chromatic across walls, trims, floor coverings, and furnishings, the designer was more strategic in her use of upholstery fabrics and paint accents. (The glossy, deep-sea green of the living room is one key example.)
Elsewhere, Francis worked with the buyers to blend their respective styles together. The primary bedroom, for instance, sets a 1920s-style fainting sofa against a bevy of pattern and includes a midcentury bed. And yet, the most popular area of the house seems to be its stylish exterior. “We created the backyard with Penny to feel almost like a hotel,” one of the homeowners says. “There’s nowhere more fun to be than around our pool.”