A Traditional Fort Worth Home with Ample Artwork

Details

Traditional White Gallery with Bamboo Console

The gallery's steel-framed windows back a bamboo console with mirrored panels. Chinese sculptures and jade pieces add interest to this space.

Traditional Yellow Bedroom with Striped Lampshades

The guest bedroom's yellow walls are a pleasant neutral background for the fusion of floral and striped upholsteries. The table lamp and wall sconce have matching striped patterns.

Traditional Black Powder Room with Chinese Silk Walls

The powder room makes a statement with walls upholstered in hand-painted Chinese silk and a contrasting white mirror.

Traditional Pink Dining Room with Candle Chandelier

A chandelier crowns the dining room; a 19th-century French painting hangs above a sideboard. Seating is ample, making this room perfect for entertaining.

Traditional Yellow Bedroom with French Armchairs

For the master bedroom, Minton re-covered French armchairs—from the wife’s former drawing room—with a custom herringbone textile that coordinates with drapery fabric from Brunschwig & Fils. The existing chest is topped with an existing mirror; its scale is appropriate for the elegant space’s 16-foot-high ceiling.

Traditional Yellow Bedroom with Painted Silk Wallpaper

Hand-painted yellow silk wallpaper envelopes the master bedroom; Minton had the wool carpet custom-made to complement it. He then had the bed’s headboard frame painted with colors from the wallpaper. Harmonizing with the space, benches at the foot of the bed received new life with a Schumacher fabric. Mirrors are from the Minton-Corley Collection.

Traditional Neutral Library with White Oak Paneling

The library is paneled entirely in cerused quarter-sawn white oak. Rather than staining the wood, Minton directed builder Joseph Gearheart to have it fumed—a three-day process in which the room was sealed off and gassed with ammonia to achieve its unique honey-tinged hue.

Traditional Neutral Exterior with Chinese Sculpture

An existing sculpture of a Chinese goddess stands outside the master bedroom on the pool terrace, where landscape designer Ange Harvey created a sophisticated courtyard with a pool by Northwest Pools. The same limestone flooring and columns from inside were carried outside to create a seamless transition.

Traditional

The antique Chinese Coromandel screen behind the sofa in the great room was repurposed from what used to be doors leading into the dining room at the wife’s former house. The existing sofa and chair were re-covered in velvet by Gretchen Bellinger and yellow damask by Scalamandré respectively.

Traditional Cream Gallery Wall with Framed Paintings

A distinctive piano anchors a gallery wall in the great room’s bar area, where the Lee Jofa print makes another appearance on the card table chairs and nearby throw pillows. The fabric’s greens and yellows are emphasized in the surrounding furniture’s upholstery. Artwork was acquired throughout the years.

Traditional Pink Dining Room with Blue Leather Chairs

Lee Jofa’s hand-blocked Chinese Lantern textile, seen on the dining room draperies, sets the palette for the home’s public spaces. Minton called out a different color from the pattern in each room; here it was with a pink Farrow & Ball hue on the walls and pearlized blue leather on the chairs.

Traditional Cream Gallery Hall with Flower Paintings

Artist James Blake’s flower paintings had been hung in different areas of the wife’s former house. Minton combined them for greater effect in the new home’s east gallery hall, which looks out to the pool. He also revived the existing furnishings with crisp white Coraggio fabric.

Traditional Cream Entry Hall with Barrel-Vaulted Ceiling

The juxtaposition between late architect Jack Schutts’ predilection for modern design and interior designer Joseph Minton’s classical aesthetic is beautifully expressed in this Fort Worth home’s entry hall, which runs from the front door to the back terrace seen here. Custom steel-framed Hope’s windows and doors alongside a barrel-vaulted ceiling, 10-foot-high Doric columns and Lueders limestone flooring laid in a diamond pattern contribute to this notion.

Traditional Cream Gallery with Ample Artwork

Interior designer Joseph Minton and the late architect Jack Schutts designed wide galleries to connect the three wings of the house, which not only provide ample space for artwork but easy circulation for guests at the couple’s many events and parties, with the columns delineating the large public rooms that come off those galleries.

Traditional Cream Gallery Hall with Limestone Columns

Limestone columns and moldings give visual heft to the home’s open-plan galleries and public spaces, where much of the wife’s art collection is on display. Minton then crowned the columns with plaster triglyphs, decoratively painted to match the limestone.

Second marriages often necessitate a blending of two established households, but when the husband and wife are each coming from large estates, and both are avid art collectors, a more comprehensive approach is often in order. For one such Fort Worth couple, each widowed and in their 80s, the decision to build a new house that they could together call their own could not be complete without the guidance of their longtime mutual friends: interior designer Joseph Minton and the late architect Jack Schutts. “I knew all of them, which made it more interesting,” Minton says, noting that he had decorated the wife’s previous house with her first husband, and Minton’s business partner had designed the husband’s previous home with his first wife.

This new project, which was to be among Schutts’ last, “was a dream job as far as the team we assembled,” Minton says. The home’s clean U-shaped layout set around a central courtyard and pool, with a soaring barrel-vaulted entry hall and sleek metal-framed windows, speaks to Schutts’ prowess with the modern international style. Minton then stepped in to handle the interior architecture, dressing the home in such classical details as 10-foot-high columns set under a triglyph-ornamented frieze, a library swathed in cerused quarter-sawn white-oak paneling, and hand-painted silk wallcovering in the master bedroom. “This project was definitely a mix of different styles coming together,” builder Joseph Gearheart says. “Every phase 
of the job went through everyone’s filter.”

Minton and Schutts designed wide galleries to connect the three wings of the house, which not only provide ample space for artwork but easy circulation for guests at the couple’s many events and parties, with the columns delineating the large public rooms that come off those galleries. “They had to have the columns in order to break up the spaces yet make them relate to each other,” says Minton, who had to convince his clients by rigging up huge cardboard tubes during construction so that they could get a sense of what the columns would look like. Gearheart’s crew installed 16 columns in all, made from Lueders limestone and purchased through Continental Cut Stone, hollowing them out to lessen the load on the floor structure.

The project, however, had to start with a few decisions on the couple’s part, especially the wife, who had to choose what she would take with her from a house significantly larger than the one they were building on the site of her late mother’s home, which was demolished. Providing a balance of comfort, beauty and art was a top priority. “By this stage in my life, I had collected a lot,” she says, from works by Picasso and noted Texas artists the likes of James Blake, Bill Bomar and Kelly Fearing to precious oriental sculptures of jade, porcelain and rose quartz. The wife also took with her a granite bar top, which her late husband had embedded with crowns of the world—silver coins collected from different countries—and which now resides in the great room’s bar area. “All of the pieces that were important to us now have pride of place in the new home,” says the wife.

Minton then helped the owners edit the furnishings down to just their favorites. “We had to decide what to use, what not to use, and where to use it,” he says. “There’s very little new furniture—if any—in the new house. Everything was either re-covered or repurposed.” Because the wife loves the combination of yellow, green and coral, the designer found a Lee Jofa floral print that captured all of those hues—and that pattern would dictate the color scheme throughout the house. The great room, for example, emphasizes the greens and yellows, while the dining room is suffused with coral, and the master bedroom is dressed with a hand-painted yellow silk, with all of the furnishings re-covered to complement the new palette. After living with the same furniture for 46 years, the wife now feels as if it all seems new again. “The textures of the fabrics and the colors give it new meaning,” she says.

Outside the house, landscape designer Ange Harvey laid out an elegant courtyard and pool that form the 
heart of the house. “All of the main rooms look out onto this space, so we wanted it to be a beautiful focal point,” Harvey says. The pool, which the wife uses almost daily, is capped with a low fountain wall surrounded by plantings. “It punctuates the end of the pool and creates a soothing sound inside the house when the doors or windows are open,” Harvey says. The limestone terrace and loggia also allow parties to spill outside from the home’s galleries and adjoining rooms. And though the wife approved razing her mother’s house to make way for the new home, she did ask Harvey to preserve several live oak and red oak trees that her mother once enjoyed—like so many other elements in this house, a fitting blend of old and new.

—Jennifer Sergent