Louisville is a small city placed at the lush green junction of the Midwest and the South, where the mighty Ohio River measures a mile across and the Kentucky Derby is proudly run the first weekend each May. It is a pretty, charming, definitively American town populated by warm, welcoming eccentrics—the kind of people the term “regular folk” was invented to describe. Over the course of almost forty years, beginning in 1891, the great Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm designed seventeen individual parks connected by six parkways here—the largest of four such urban park systems created by the father of American landscape design—including the undulant sweep of Cherokee Park.
A century ago, when the park was young, it sat near the city’s eastern limits, in a posh suburb of leafy streets and graceful homes. A little over a decade ago, I was invited to work on one of these historic houses and was immediately besotted with its idiosyncratic, almost mannerist, proportions: tall and slender and half hidden by towering old trees. It reminded me of the Victorian Gothic Addams Family compound or the sinister playfulness of Edward Gorey, at once quaint and a bit spooky. The clients, who would soon become intimate friends and with whom I would later collaborate on two other projects, had already lived in the house for many years. They knew what worked well and what didn’t and wanted to update the space to better reflect their needs—and their personalities.
The moment I’m invited to work on a new project, I set out to learn as much about its setting as I can. I am a born flâneur, so this process often involves long strolls through surrounding streets, allowing me to absorb the character of a neighborhood, district, or city. I can’t understate the importance of looking beyond a project’s immediate four walls. A sense of place—history, atmosphere, all the things that come together to make that ineffable thing we call “culture”—helps to create a kind of scaffolding that supports a project as it grows. Sometimes, however, as the project takes on a life of its own, that structure will buckle, splinter, and break.
Those are the moments that excite me most. I’m no historicist, so, as much as I love house museums, those marvelous windows into someone else’s past, I can’t imagine wanting to actually live in a period piece, hamstrung by the strictures of what was or was not strictly “accurate” for a given era. I am a firm adherent to the notion of Accidentism, first described in a 1958 manifesto of the same name written by the Austrian-Swedish designer Josef Frank toward the end of his successful career in architecture and design. Rejecting the tedium imposed by the development of an international “style,” Frank wrote that “we should design our surroundings as if they originated by chance.” It’s an idea that manifests itself constantly in our work, particularly in contexts where objects and choices end up making a strange kind of sense precisely because they don’t.
At Cherokee Road, for instance, a pair Madeleine Castaing–inspired settees flank a Delft-tiled hearth, their cushions studded with hundreds of button tufts upholstered in a camouflage fabric that breaks the room’s inherent pull toward formality. Clustered seating areas feature a nineteenth-century Swedish sofa, Italian rattan chairs from the 1950s, a pair of Jean Royère Petit Oeuf chairs, a Carlo Bugatti cabinet made around the turn of the twentieth century, and a violet cast-aluminum mirror from the contemporary American designer Misha Kahn. But somehow, it’s not nearly as discordant as it sounds. These improbable juxtapositions reflect, at least to my mind, the warm and vibrant social world of a city populated by “folks” from many walks of life. It’s an approach to the idea of creating a vernacular that looks beyond navel-gazing materiality and form and addresses instead the spirit of a place, which is always defined by the people who live there. Today, bright colors peer through the windows of that forbidding façade, a wink and a welcome to draw visitors in. Old houses need fresh ideas. Sometimes those emanate from history, but historic properties must evolve, reflect authentic contemporary lives lived within. Because what else, in the end, is a house for?
