A light and fresh twist on traditional
Couple fills out large new home with cozy yet sophisticated furnishings and décor fit for guests
Moving to a new city with a husband, two children and two dogs, Lauren Long was at a disadvantage.
She and her husband, Jason, had purchased a fairly new home in Memorial when they moved here a year ago from Abilene for Jason’s job at WaterBridge, a midstream-energy company. They didn’t have a lot of time to hire someone to design and build a home — their timetable was move right now or wait a year.
They picked “right now” and found a 9,000-square-foot, newly built spec home with nice finishes that wouldn’t need any remodeling. But their Abilene home was significantly smaller than their new one in Houston, so even though they brought everything they had, they needed much more.
“I knew that I’d have a full plate getting adjusted to the city, getting our kids adjusted to a new school, new friends and all of that,” Lauren said. “I didn’t want a large-scale project.”
But she still had a home to fill, and though she knew what she liked, she had a firm grasp of the boundaries of her knowledge of home design and the homefurnishings shopping scene here.
“I wanted a certain look in the dining room, and I might say something like, ‘I want a floral wallpaper’ or something along those lines, but I’m not going to get one designer term right,” Lauren said of getting started with her interior designer, Paloma Contreras of Paloma Contreras Interior Design. “I was very transparent that I am not educated in design.”
The Longs wanted a large house — and this one has six bedrooms, six full bathrooms and three half bathrooms — because, except for Lauren’s sister who lives here, their families are all back in Abilene.
“It was definitely important to us to have a couple of guest rooms. All of our family would be coming to Houston to visit,” Lauren said. “We wanted a couple of bedrooms and to have a room leftover that we could put a home gym in. It fit our needs and a little more.”
Lauren and Jason were high school sweethearts who went to different colleges — she at the University of Texas and he at Texas Christian University — and after graduation moved to Dallas and got married. When their first daughter, Isla, now in fourth grade, was born, they moved back to Abilene, where they stayed until their recent move to Houston. They also have a younger daughter, Ava, who is in first grade.
Somewhere along the way, Lauren discovered Contreras on Instagram and through her La Dolce Vita blog, which the designer launched more than a decade ago as she was easing out of a teaching job and into the world of design.
“I’d been following Paloma for years. I just really admired everything she posted, her aesthetic. I liked the way she put things together,” Lauren said. “When we finally had a meeting where she presented options, there might have been one fabric swatch that I wanted to switch, and that is not an exaggeration. She nailed every single thing.”
The Longs wanted classic traditional style that felt fresh and young, with things that could stand up to younger children and pets. They didn’t need to change the flooring or paint, but Contreras swapped out a good deal of the lighting and added wallpaper to several rooms, including a delicate chinoiserie in the dining room, a soft blue floral in one bathroom, a pink floral with a vintage feel to another and a silvery-gray wallpaper to a third.
Though the dining room is a little-used space in many homes, Lauren wanted hers to be special, for family dinners and holiday get-togethers.
“I hosted Thanksgiving at my house for the first time last fall. It was fun,” Lauren said of back-toback dinners in which she and Jason hosted her family one day and his the next. “I consider myself still low on the totem pole when it comes to cooking. My mother, grandmother and mother-in-law are fantastic cooks, and they were all there helping.”
When Contreras learned that Lauren loved chinoiserie, the designer turned to the Madame de Pompadour mural that legendary designer Miles Redd created for Schumacher. Its alabaster background with bursts of pink flowers and blue-green foliage is a picturesque foundation for the gold-and-crystal chandelier, gilt-framed Italian antique mirror, Asian-style blueand-white ginger jars and upolstered chairs in the room. The ceiling there began with rustic beams, which Contreras toned down by encasing them in plaster and painting them white.
“Chinoiserie is one of those things that’s been around for so long, but it’s having a moment,” Contreras said. “You can’t help but look at it and feel happy. It’s a hallmark of my personal aesthetic, and I like to use it when I can because it feels fresh and current and has a real timelessness to it.”
The breakfast area has a similar sweet treatment, a large-scale pedestal table with an upholstered banquette and four rattan chairs with seat cushions, all in laminated fabric that can withstand any spill. A large pendant with a pleated fabric shade and gold trim hangs overhead, and a nearby buffet holds two more tall Asian-style porcelain jars on each side of a series of nine framed intaglios.
Rooms where the family gathers to eat are all about togetherness, but it was also important to Contreras to give the family a great space to welcome visitors. Their large foyer includes a sweeping curved staircase, so the goal was to add some punch here since much of the rest of the home has a soft color palette.
A white painted Louis XVIstyle chest holds a Bunny Williams lamp marked with rings of blue, a stack of coffee-table books and more blue-and-white porcelain. French-style chairs are finished with soft blue upholstery, and a big abstract painting by artist Erin McIntosh brings in plenty more blue, plus shades of gray, pink and red.
The family room — open to the kitchen and breakfast area — repeats the color scheme with a big white sectional sofa in kidfriendly indoor-outdoor fabric, finished with pillows in blue-andwhite prints. The kitchen, with white cabinets and gray-veiny stone, didn’t need any changes, except for a pair of large lanternstyle chandeliers Contreras brought in to hang over the long island.
The Longs’ builder installed nice, white oak flooring and on-trend tile and counters, so Contreras didn’t need to reinvent much. But she said lighting is a common element that needs to be addressed.
“For me, nine times out of 10, I change the lighting,” Contreras said. “Often it’s the wrong scale or wrong type of lighting for the application. Sometimes it boils down to stylistic differences, and that’s a pretty easy fix.”
The real challenge was to the living room, a double-width space with a large fireplace and a two-story wall of windows. Contreras needed to fill the space in a way that was functional and uncluttered and yet cozy, too.
Contreras designed a twosided sofa in a pale, watery blue to anchor the room.
“There are elements for symmetry, but I treated each side of the sofa differently. Near the fireplace there are wingback chairs, floor lamps and a coffee table, and the opposite side has a console, table lamps, slipper chairs and a big painting,” she said. “It creates an opportunity to have a very large space feel smaller.”
In the master bedroom, it’s evident that Jason has resigned himself to being surrounded by women. Soft colors that include a pink, bullion-trimmed footboard sofa and a tufted pink ottoman, calm the space. White nightstands each have panels of handpainted chinoiserie, framed and hung over them.
“Paloma understood my vision and taste and what I wanted,” Lauren said. “She took a really big house and made it feel like our new home where we can live in a beautiful space.”