Couple doubles down on office space in new house
Steve Smith is a happy guy. He and his family are in their new Spring Valley home, one that allows him his own office and a garage he can actually park his car in.
“This is my office — it was a big factor for us — we both work from home, and we wanted two offices on opposite sides of the house because I’m so loud,” he said as his wife, Tricia, nodded in agreement.
Masculine and dark, his office is a stark contrast to the rest of the home, filled with light colors.
“I wanted to make sure it was done really well because it’s the first thing you see when you walk into the entry,” Tricia said.
The room’s tall ceilings allowed their interior designer, Lauren Haskett of Lauren Haskett Fine Design, to use Farrow & Ball paint in Down Pipe, a dark gray with blue-green undertones, on the walls, woodwork and built-in cabinets. A modernrustic wood-grain desk blends with the wood floors and a light rug with a geometric design.
There’s a reproduction metal, fur-trimmed barbarian helmet that seems a little out of place until you ask its ebullient owner about it. Steve works at Sysco Systems Software, and when someone in his area closes a really big deal they’re given a helmet as a trophy. He keeps it on the shelf right behind him so co-workers who make video calls are reminded that there’s a warrior in the room.
The Smiths built their new home in part because of their prior home’s limitations. In addition to Steve’s issues with the office situation and the lack of garage space, the house didn’t have the square footage they needed or an open-concept living area.
They were living in an older home in Briargrove, where many neighbors had enclosed their garages to convert them into more living space, parking their cars outside or in a porte cochère. A previous owner had enclosed the garage, using the new space for a mother-in-law suite. The Smiths used it as a joint office.
So building their 4,182-squarefoot home in Spring Valley in August 2019 was partly to send their kids — 13-year-old Grayson and 9-year-old Reagan — to Spring Branch schools but also to be in a home that better suited their needs.
Existing homes in their price range needed remodeling, and Steve no longer had an appetite for living amid ongoing work. Friends had just built a home with Frankel Building Group, and after meeting with Scott and Kevin Frankel, they chose that firm and its BuildFBG program over others they talked to.
One bonus was a projectmanagement app that provided a running diary of the construction process. Steve still went to the job site occasionally to see progress, but he and Tricia could monitor everything through the app, seeing pictures the Frankel team had uploaded and getting updates on what came next along the way.
Kevin Frankel said he starts with a general concept, shifting walls for different room sizes or even moving rooms around to fit the lifestyle of the home’s owners or family. For the Smiths, that meant a media room downstairs — not up — and a single dining area plus barstools at an island counter in the kitchen. For their kids, it meant their daughter no longer has to share a bathroom with her teenaged brother.
“The view from 30,000 feet up is that any home you see around here is going to have a formal dining room if it’s 5 years old or older. That room takes up space and moves everything else back, taking up part of the backyard,” Frankel said. “Clients are asking us to create a dining space for a lifestyle that is less formal, more casual and more fluid.”
In the Smiths’ main living area, a generous family room shares space with a large kitchen and a dining table that can easily seat eight. Four barstools at the island are for casual meals or for the kids to do homework. And it all has a nice view of the backyard, where a future project will likely involve expanding the outdoor kitchen and adding a swimming pool.
Tricia knows what she likes, and she likes beautiful things.
But the idea of working full time, raising two children, building a home and picking out virtually all new furnishings was beyond her reach, she said.
Haskett stepped in to help select finishes, partnering with the Frankels’ in-house design showroom and their options for counters, tile, lighting and colors in addition to helping furnish the home.
“I love to mix. When you mix metals, finishes, counters and paint colors, it makes a home look that much more custom for the client. It adds a layer that is unexpected,” Haskett said.
In the living room, a sisal rug is topped with another wool rug with brown and cream stripes, and a large off-white sofa, a pair of rattan chairs in a green ikat print and a pair of light-gray club chairs fill the space.
Both the kitchen and family room have gold accents, in brass floor lamps, vintage-style plumbing fixtures and a pair of metal shelves that frame the range hood, which is also rimmed in brass. Their four bedrooms are all upstairs, and the master suite got a spalike bathroom and furniture that suits the Smiths perfectly.
When Tricia showed Haskett pictures of bedrooms she loved, every one of them had a fourposter bed. One looked startlingly familiar — it was from the Henry Howard Hotel in New Orleans, where both the Smiths and Haskett had visited.
One wall holds a beautiful Chinese watercolor that Tricia’s parents gave her, and another wall has a pair of large-format pieces of Susan Hable art made for Soicher Marin. Haskett found a pair of lamps in the fields in Round Top during Texas Antiques Week, texting pictures of them to Tricia while shopping. The architectural antiques once were used as balusters, now transformed into table lamps.
The master bathroom has the same quartz counters as the kitchen island, and gray-green tile lines the shower and a short wall around a free-standing bathtub. Tricia was adamant that she didn’t want anything whimsical — her style is more masculine — but she caved when it came to the stunning Palacek chandelier over the tub and Kelly Ventura wallpaper in the powder bathroom.
Ventura’s “Meadow” wallpaper — dark-pinkish-red flowers on a black background — is masculine enough and looks great with a Carrara marble wallmounted counter.
“It was different (than what I wanted), but the more I mulled it over, I realized that’s why I have Lauren — to get me out of my comfort zone so it doesn’t look like every room is exactly the same,” Tricia said. “Everyone loves this bathroom.”
“Clients are asking us to create a dining space for a lifestyle that is less formal, more casual and more fluid.”
Kevin Frankel, Frankel Building Group