Indian Bean is a nonworking farm in rural Kentucky, surrounded by tobacco fields and studded with copses of high-domed catalpa trees that lend the property its name. It’s not an especially fancy part of the Kentucky countryside, but a region best known for its hats and horses and high-stakes socializing. That’s why our clients—a surprising, thoughtful, deeply engaged couple who we’ve worked with now on three houses—fell in love with.
By the time we started work at the farm, we’d been collaborating for some years on the family’s house in Louisville, developing a rapport and mutual trust in one another’s interests and perspectives. Our close, almost filial bond allowed us to develop a shorthand through which we could experiment and explore together. We already knew very well what kind of pillows they liked, for instance, exactly the sort of basic but essential detail you learn the first time you work with someone. Here, we could make bigger moves, take bigger risks, build bigger dreams.
If memory serves, I actually visited Indian Bean long before we started working on the project together. On my first visit to Kentucky to meet the clients, before I even saw the Louisville house that I would eventually be hired to redesign, they brought me out to this very farm, which they’ve owned since the late 1990s. It was an unusual “interview,” if you can even call it that, more like an opportunity to feel out our compatibility, a chance to start our relationship with a friendship rather than a transaction. All to say, I knew the property well when I started working on it, and was familiar with the changes the family had made over the years—like the former feedlot they’d turned into a generous kitchen garden anchored by corrugated-metal sheds, natural cabanas for the nearby swimming pool.
One of the first significant interventions we made together was inviting the American artist Roy McMakin to collaborate. Pulling an artist into the mix is, from my point of view, less about achieving a specific end and more about inviting new ideas and inspirations. Roy in particular brings an inimitable combination of earnestness and irony, of sincere transparency and mischievous subterfuge. As we walked around the property—the farm, garden, barn, and house—Roy, in a stroke of genius, suggested that we create an outdoor dining room just off the kitchen. No walls, no roof, just a table and chairs with maybe a breakfront for a buffet and to display buckets of freshly cut flowers. Far more than a covered patio or a table under a gazebo ever could, this space connects to the landscape. The deck, level with the clipped grass, feels like a picnic blanket thrown across the lawn. Chickens cluck happily at our feet. Eggs taste fresher here.
There are moments like this throughout Indian Bean, moments of deep humor and wit, narratives that we invented together to lend texture and weight to our decisions. Classic pieces of Italian modernism that we scattered throughout the project became, in our imaginations, family heirlooms inherited from a Turin-born stepfather whose taste in design lasted longer in the family than he had. The idea started as a joke, but it ultimately became a real justification for our outré choice to install a vintage Tawayara Boxing Ring by Masanori Umeda—a rare and iconic work of early Memphis design—in a Kentucky barn, right next to a wood-burning fireplace with expansive views over rolling fields.
There is a measure of folly and delight in that room. It is also an undeniably cozy spot to read a book or talk for hours with friends. Design is not about perfection —at least not for us. It’s about engagement and pleasure, which is another way to say relationships. It’s rare to find clients who are interested in working toward something more than curating a highly “correct” but utterly spiritless cluster of handsome rooms. Speeding past the received rules of “good taste” has allowed us to rush headlong into deeper emotional and aesthetic territory. Adherence to tradition may be the most direct route to familiarity—you’re sure to recognize a room, after all, if you’ve seen it many times before—but it’s certainly not the only one.
