This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue of Architectural Digest.

Throwing lavish parties used to be the raison d’être of Houston interior designer J. Randall Powers . Cocktails for 175 of his nearest and dearest were common, while Christmastime meant fêtes for dozens more. Eventually, however, the madding crowd began to pall. So did the coolly elegant house—decorated with stainless-steel mantels, Cy Twombly drawings, and Han-dynasty jars on Lucite plinths—that he and investor William L. Caudell had occupied for a few years.

“It felt more like consumption than collecting,” Powers recalls of those splendid surroundings. “We had five Poillerat floor lamps, but I loved only one of them. And how many Jansen tables can I find and use?” He and Caudell also agreed their swimming pool was an unnecessary extravagance; after all, they summer in Vermont. And did they really need a lawn? “We wanted something a little more user-friendly,” the designer says. “More of a home than an entertaining palace, a place we could lock and leave.”

For a while that was a cherished daydream, but one day a Powers client, an enthusiastic admirer of the decorator’s chic abode, proposed buying it, largely furnished. The offer was too good to refuse, and suddenly Caudell and Powers were launched on an urgent mission to find a new address.

As luck would have it, salvation was just a few blocks away, in a lively, luxe neighborhood known as Greater Uptown, where the men discovered a 5,200-square-foot redbrick house built by a developer in the late 1990s. One of four vaguely Georgian-style structures facing a shared courtyard in a tidy gated complex, the three-story, five-bedroom property thankfully had virtually no land to maintain. Caudell disliked its humdrum interior details, but the couple desperately needed a place to live. Powers was game: “I love to take a house and tear it up.” Extensive renovations were required because “everything was ludicrously out of scale or off-center or just not correct,” the designer explains, noting that spec houses typically lack architectural finesse. “Builders often hire interior designers, who can technically do the floor plans, and then get an engineer to oversee the construction.”

Some 14 months after the men took possession (they lived in a rental in the interim), the once aesthetically ordinary dwelling had been made remarkably sophisticated. Though the layout of the ground floor remained intact, the second floor was rethought. One bedroom is now an office, while another serves as a television room that Caudell and Powers, confirmed Anglophiles, call the upper lounge. The adjoining his-and-her baths off the original master suite were combined into a gracious master bath and dressing area for Powers, while Caudell got a handsome suite of his own down the hall, complete with a neoclassical-style bleached-oak canopy bed and zesty checked carpeting. “I go to sleep early, and Bill likes to watch TV until midnight,” Powers says, adding that to muffle the after-hours din, he upholstered the walls of the lounge, which abuts his bedroom, in a boldly scaled cotton plaid. There is also a guest suite on the dormered third floor, accessed via an elevator.

Ennobling refinements to the architectural details take things up a considerable stylistic notch. Upstairs and down, new floors of French white oak have been crisply ebonized and given a patent-leather gleam, with Georgian-style doors made on-site and lacquered to match. Paneling and cove cornices—all the millwork was designed by Caudell, an architect manqué—provide an hôtel particulier atmosphere that Powers has loosened up with a bracing assortment of contemporary art, Navajo-inspired rugs, and swaggering English and French gilt-wood antiques. Nondescript mantels were replaced with richly veined marble slabs or striking stone examples carved in largely traditional French styles. He also commissioned bespoke Chinese Chippendale–style screen doors.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here