Traditional revival Ts a complete makeover
Flooded ’80s home gets a complete makeover
When Lindsey and Chris Henry bought their home in the Energy Corridor in 2014, they knew it needed updating. Its finishes spoke of its 1980 construction date, and previous owners’ updates didn’t get past the late 1990s.
When Hurricane Harvey flooded every home in their neighborhood — Memorial Thicket, which backs up to Terry Hershey Park — Lindsey embraced it as an opportunity to make changes she’d been mulling over for some time.
She’d already done some wallpapering and swapped out backsplash tile, but her earlier efforts were tiny changes. The projects the Henrys tackled during the 18 months they waited it out in a rental apartment were dramatic, touching every room in their home.
Lindsey, 37, is a geologist at an energy company, and Chris, 38, is an eye surgeon at Retina Consultants of Houston. The Minnesota natives came to Houston after five years in Miami, where Chris did his residency and a fellowship and Lindsey taught at the University of Miami.
When Lindsey was pregnant with their son, Heath, who is now 9, she got hooked on design blogs, especially that of Bailey McCarthy, a Houston designer who owns the
Biscuit bedding and homegoods store on Westheimer. She was working on her graduate school dissertation and would put her baby down for naps, using House Beautiful, Architectural Digest and design blogs for creative breaks.
Through them, Lindsey learned what she liked and didn’t like, and when the Henrys found themselves needing a massive renovation after 4 feet of water finally drained and mold remediation was done, Lindsey felt a little bit like a pro.
“Remodeling the house was like having a second job,” Lindsey said of how overwhelming the task felt at times. “I can see now that it’s a full-time career.”
It’s worth noting that the Henrys had flood insurance. Lindsey said she took to heart something a geology professor once told her: “Never build a house in a flood plain.” They may not have built this house, but they understood where it was.
She created a spreadsheet for her home and looked for tile, wallpaper, paint colors and furniture. When in doubt, she leaned on store professionals at places such as Mitchell
Gold + Bob Williams or the Ann Sacks tile showroom for advice and took some cues from her contractor,
Bill Fuller of Fuller Services, too.
“It was about committing and trusting in the decisions and then forgiving myself for things that in retrospect I didn’t love, like the carpet,” Lindsey said of carpet they installed in an upstairs playroom but later replaced with hardwood. “There were sconces that didn’t work in (the powder bathroom) but actually ended up working in (the playroom).”
Her favorite color — green — directed the palette throughout the home, including a light shade of green paint on kitchen cabinets and darker green on study walls. And though many post-flood projects intend to make homes more contemporary, Lindsey wanted hers to stay traditional.
She used classic grasscloth wallpapers in neutral tones in the dining room, primary bedroom and in the back of built-in bookshelves. Not only did they bring style to their surroundings, but they added texture.
A big lesson came in the kitchen and breakfast area, where changes were made to amp up both style and function. Lindsey spent time selecting Benjamin Moore’s Silver Sage paint — a light-green shade — only to find that getting the counters she wanted would be the most difficult part.
She drove from slab yard to slab yard trying to find a brilliant white marble to use on her island and perimeter counters. When she couldn’t find exactly what she wanted, her contractor directed her to manmade quartz, which proved easier to work with for him and more familyfriendly for the Henrys.
A treat for herself is a cute green geometric-print wallpaper she used in her pantry. Not everyone sees it, but it makes her smile every time she opens that door.
Glass-front doors were used on some of the cabinets, so she can display the Johnson Brothers’ Friendly Village dishes she inherited from her grandmother. And, tired of the electric cooktop the home came with, the Henrys had a line trenched to upgrade to gas cooking.
Unlacquered brass hardware and plumbing fixtures were chosen for this part of the home, all the way into the laundry/mud room.
In the nearby breakfast area, shorter windows allowed them to install a built-in banquette, upholstered in family-friendly vinyl that looks remarkably like leather. A small utility desk was redone, though with narrow shelves to display Lindsey’s teacup collection.
Before the flood, Lindsey had wallpapered the laundry/mud room at the back of the home, though everyone else thought she’d chosen a pattern with a too-dark background. This time around she opted for Cole & Son’s Secret Garden on a white background with softer pinks and greens. Cabinets and cubbies help them stay
organized and keep the room from feeling cluttered.
When debating what to do with the home office, they opted to keep it as an office, though neither of them really worked from home then. That’s coming in handy now, as the coronavirus pandemic has put Lindsey in the #WFH crowd.
She used Benjamin Moore’s Louisburg Green, a soft olive green, and had draperies made in a flyingduck pattern with hints of orange. A bound Sisal rug covers a good portion of the floor, and their desk is wood, clad in metal — simply a lighter color than the one that was here before.
The living room was a learning experience, as Lindsey tackled issues of scale in this very large room with cathedral ceilings. She never thought her sofas were big enough for the room, so this time she used painter’s tape on the floor to get a sense of which size to use and how to place them.
A pair of opposite-end, L-shaped leather sofas fit the space, and a huge Oly chandelier looks artful — a large cluster of blown-glass bubbles hanging in the center of the room. Built-in bookshelves were backed with Phillip Jeffries grasscloth wallpaper and filled with mementos such as photos of her grandfather who was a colonel in the Air Force and earned a Silver Star for bravery during the Korean War.
There are fossils and rocks from geology field trips, including a pair of black-and-white bookends made of anhydrite and calcite from the Castile Formation in West Texas. There’s a photo of the Callanish standing stones from a trip to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and an antique bowling pin that represents a college memory for both — playing intramural bowling while they were students at Wheaton College in Illinois.
The primary bedroom suite got a big makeover, with Lindsey finally getting a lifelong wish.
“My whole life I have loved canopy beds. They’re incredibly romantic and Southern, and it was my opportunity to do it,” she said of the headboard draping in Brunschwig & Fils Les Touches pattern in green and bedding from Biscuit. “I give my husband a lot of credit for going along with it.”
They added new tile to the front of their fireplace — green tile they found in a shop in Portugal during a vacation to help Lindsey’s mother celebrate her 60th birthday. She was smitten with European tile she saw, and in one shop she spied this more than 100-year-old tile still in a box and not yet on display. She had to have it, and it’s the perfect complement for adding a bit more of her favorite color to this room.
The suite’s bathroom had to be gutted, another opportunity to move the toilet from being the first thing you see to a corner in the back of the space.
She found a beautiful Ann Sacks marble tile in a geometric pattern for the floor and brought grasscloth in for the backing in some built-in shelves. The toilet area has another wallpaper pattern, a sweet, textured print.
In the upstairs, she added more wallpaper to son Heath’s room, a whimsical pattern based on children’s book illustrator Quentin Blake’s drawings of daredevilish skateboarders. A pattern called “Melville” — yes, it has whales — was installed in the Jackand-Jill bathroom he shares with a guest bedroom.
In that room, the Henrys put their old bedroom furniture but added new bedding from Biscuit, in the Bloomsbury Green pattern, a green floral print that feels fresh but a little vintage.
Most of her pre-flood neighbors are still her neighbors, and they’ve supported one another through cleanup and restoration.
“We do progressive dinners and a holiday caroling night. The year after Harvey, people would go caroling, and at houses people would say, ‘Come in, see what we did,’ ” Lindsey said. “The experience really brought the neighborhood together. Most people moved back, especially the young families. Now being quarantined here, it’s made those relationships even deeper.”