Miles Redd Gives His Childhood Home a Clever Facelift
The request came in a pleading phone call from my father: "Would you please help your mama? This house is getting a little long in the tooth." Indeed, he was right. Mom had commandeered the dining room table as her desk, so when you walked in the front door, you were greeted by an explosion of correspondence, which is a nice way of saying the room was a disaster.
I have been trying to revamp my childhood home since, well, childhood. My mother is one of the sweetest people on earth, but in 1987, when it came time to redo our house in Atlanta, she wasn't taking advice from her 14-year-old son, no matter how artfully I had arranged my personal quarters. Instead, she turned to Susan Wilcox, a notable Atlanta decorator who completely understood her requests for symmetry, unfussiness, and happy chintzes.
My mother grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and has a love of what I call "brown furniture." She likes 18th-century austerity infused with the occasional saturated color. This, of course, caused me to champion the Baroque and Rococo. (We all exhibit some version of rebellion; mine came in the form of maximal decorating.) Now, decades into my career, I can appreciate her sense of reserve. And she, at age 78, finally trusts me enough to let me freshen the place up.
I agreed, on one condition - that I would have total control.
Because the house is, in truth, already pretty beautiful, we spent two days making tiny tweaks with B-I-G impact. Like most people, my mother had scattered pictures all around. So my colleague David Kaihoi rehung them in groupings, which instantly transformed the space. We moved a table that was way too large for the dining room to an unused library in the back of the house that makes the perfect office for Mom, with emerald-glazed walls and a garden view to boot. I skirted the table in an old-fashioned chintz to provide a secret hiding place for her stationery fetish.
In the dining room, we traded that behemoth table for a smaller round one - it's much more inviting and boosts dinner-table conversation - and added a breakfront found at auction and painted chalky green. Botanical prints act as a foil to the peppy yellow-and-white stripes. Simple straw mats in the entrance hall now relieve the severity of the plain wood floors.
My father had endlessly complained that the master bedroom was too dark, so we brought in swing-arm reading lamps. I swapped the window's plantation shutters, which always felt cold to me, for rich taffeta curtains under a Venetian-inspired valance. We replaced the scatter rugs with soft wall-to-wall carpeting, which makes a bedroom cozy. They say they have never slept better.
Mom was delighted with it all. "I love walking around this house I've lived in for decades and don't even recognize!" she said, laughing. "It's good to have a decorator in the family."
See more photos of this lovely home here »
This story originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of House Beautiful.
