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Photography by Alise O'Brien
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CLICK HERE FOR MORE IMAGES OF JACOB LAWS' LADUE REDO. WATCH A VIDEO TOUR OF THE HOME BELOW.
You know a house has character when you can imagine it as a person. Eugene Mackey’s first house, built for his family in 1948 when he was fresh out of architecture school, is kind of like that. On one hand, it’s all protractor angles and cool stone, but it’s got a swagger to it, too—like those 1940s screwball-comedy heroines who could crack goofy jokes while wearing Dior gowns and not come off as incongruous.
Both houses and movie stars are prone to the occasional bad makeover, though. When the current homeowner purchased the house, its charms had been smothered beneath wall-to-wall sisal carpet, pink paint, and heavy Chippendale furniture. The front of the house had been enclosed to create an entryway, and the flagstone facade had become an interior wall; the enclosure included a dining area on a platform edged with a flagstone half-wall. After stripping out the carpet, the homeowner had the original concrete floors polished and sealed, but not stained, because their natural color already complemented the flagstone. The homeowner also set up a dining area on the platform, choosing a Bensen Radius table, Herman Miller Nelson swag-leg chairs, and Marcel Wanders’ Zeppelin chandelier for Flos. Designed to diffuse and scatter light, it floats over the tabletop like a giant jellyfish—though it’s actually meant to look like a cocoon.
As she worked her way through the redesign process, the homeowner hired Jacob Laws of CURE Design Group. “It was important to me to respect the integrity of the building’s original architecture,” Mr. Laws says, adding that the approach was key for the homeowner, too. “I wanted to incorporate different textures and periods and styles to give his design even more character. I thought of it,” he says dryly, “as an incredibly chic older woman who just needed a face-lift.”
Mr. Laws has a vivid way of describing the house; he calls the entryway “a hybrid of chic, sculptural midcentury meets the Flintstone cave.” (Mr. Laws is unequivocal about the fact that this house has a sense of humor.) And that Flos chandelier: “It reminded me of like those huge, giant cobwebs that hang in the trees,” Mr. Laws suggests, gesturing to the tangle of trees and flowers just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. “There’s so much foliage outside, they kind of worked effortlessly together.”
Mr. Laws says he wants to make spaces filled with meaningful objects that have been collected over time (or that feel that way, at least), as opposed to merely decorating rooms. In order to achieve that effect here, he says, he imagined how the house would have evolved “if the same owners/design enthusiasts had been there since the mid-20th century.” About half of the furniture is vintage midcentury, including classic pieces from Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen, which Mr. Laws mixed with Regency and neoclassical styles. He used a neutral color palette and repeated themes—circles, curves, midcentury chinoiserie—to create “a certain fluidity from space to space.”
Overall, Mr. Laws says, the floor plan did not change very much. The kitchen had already been gutted and revamped, using white Caesarstone countertops and honey-colored zebrawood cabinetry. He found the aluminum pulls, which “are modern,” he notes, “but still have the chinoiserie feel to them.” To play off of the natural stone that remained, Mr. Laws covered a wall and the backsplash with chiseled lavastone tiles.
In the center of the house, the concrete floors give way to maple hardwood, which were original to the house but had been, Mr. Laws says, “that yellow color that you saw a lot in the ’60s.” The living room and hearth room, which sit side by side, face a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, a curving wall topped with clerestory windows on the other. Mr. Laws points out the graceful way the curving wall meets the linear one—just one example of Mr. Mackey’s elegant design work in this house. Mr. Laws says he set out to make these two rooms “look like a lot of the pieces had been here for decades, but had been reupholstered over time.”
In the living room, a vintage Mies van der Rohe daybed is covered in the same Glant fabric as the Thayer Coggin armless sofa; the three-legged barrel-back lounge chairs are done in a Manuel Canovas fabric that suggests the swirling isotopes of the atomic age. And peeking over the sofa is one of the classic modern pieces: Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s slim-necked Arco lamp for Flos. A few carefully chosen antiques—including a Turkish rug and an Indian peacock mirror—give the room gravity, while the Union Jack hung on the curving wall (actually a panel of Vivienne Westwood wallpaper), and a flock of silk-screened pinwheels (by St. Louis artist Kim Wardenburg) give it a sense of levity.
Join the staff of AT HOME on the photo shoot of the house first built by Gene Mackey for his own family and recently redone by interior designer Jacob Laws of CURE Design Group.
In the hearth room, the dark veneer of the homeowner's Herman Miller Eames lounge chair and ottoman are complemented by an Asian credenza, which also picks up the chinoiserie motif. Just to the side of the hearth room is a work nook with a Saarinen tulip chair, which tucks under a marble-topped Parsons desk.
In the master bedroom, Mr. Laws’ directive was to use some color and keep it light and not too serious. He papered one wall with an almost William Morris–esque Cole & Son iris wallpaper in purple, green, and silver. Mr. Laws had an enormous Century headboard upholstered in a charcoal tweed—“I call it the ‘Priscilla Presley headboard,’” he laughs. He placed a pair of vintage bergère ottomans at the foot of the bed, which he had silver-leaved and reupholstered in an aubergine Larson silk to match the wallpaper. The border on the Frette linens and the George Nelson pendant lamp (which the homeowner chose for herself), pick up the midcentury Asian theme.
The colors reflect the palette in the master bath, which was completed before Laws began work on the house. The visual centerpiece of the room is the light fixture, Artemide’s Mercury Suspension chandelier (which does indeed look like blobs of shiny quicksilver, floating in space). Floor-to-ceiling brick tiles match the gray of the Century headboard; in a wall of monochromatic mosaic tiles, a built-in niche over the tub houses a row of Jonathan Adler ceramics. The tub is simple and sculptural, and faces a glassed-in shower.
There’s one more bit of Asian influence that came into play in the house: the idea of wabi-sabi, the Japanese notion of beauty in change and incompleteness. “Every time I design, it’s a mix of perfection and imperfection,” Mr. Laws says. “There’s nothing more boring than a house that feels like a display home. Every piece should have its own sculptural quality. Every piece should have its own story.”
Which it naturally has, if it’s a great piece, just like great houses have stories. And sometimes, when it’s an exceptionally great house—like this one—it almost feels more like a biography.
August 30, 2011: This story has been updated from the original version that appeared in our September-October issue.
