A Renovated Houston Home Acquires English Accents
Felipe Segovia Construction reworked the existing stone on the exterior, while David Alvarez Sheet Metal installed the reclaimed Ludowici roof tile from The Roof Tile & Slate Company; Insight Structures, Inc. handled the home’s structural engineering. New stone coping by QTS updates the pond, as do the plantings supplied by Pond Pros of Houston. McDugald-Steele oversaw the landscape design. Exterior lighting is by Stirling Electric.
What would Edwin Lutyens do?” is a question architect Virginia Kelsey, joined by interior designer Cathy Chapman, raised more than once during the renovation of a Houston house.
Invoking the spirit of the esteemed 20th-century British architect and her personal hero, Kelsey transformed a stone structure built in the 1990s into a meticulously crafted home worthy of the English countryside.
According to Kelsey, Lutyens was known for both his attention to materials and a willingness to mix design genres. Following his lead, she introduced a fireplace mantel from a French monastery in the great room and continued the oh la la with a carved antique fireplace surround and floors from a French chateau in the master bath.
The historic nods continue throughout the home with refined coffered ceilings in the great room and a rustic, vaulted ceiling in the morning room. The staircase features a balustrade intended to mimic Lutyens’ stair design at Great Dixter, the family home of British gardener Christopher Lloyd.
“There was talk about a metal staircase, but I felt the staircase had to balance out the heaviness of the rest of the house,” says Kelsey, who assembled a full-scale paper mock-up to make her point. “It’s what Lutyens would have done.”
To play up the architectural details, Chapman incorporated furnishings and antiques with global style, such as a set of carved Swedish chairs for the breakfast nook and 19th-century octagonal French mirrors for the hallways.
Today, the estate is not only reminiscent of an English country manor; it boasts a layout suitable to their clients’ modern lives.