DREAM HOME
COUPLE DISCOVERS IT’S ALL ABOUT COMPROMISE — BALANCING PERFECT AND PRACTICAL
Josh Oren likes a home that’s sophisticated and tightly edited.
His wife, Lisa Oren, surveys their four children — 2 to 15 years old — and wonders if that’s possible.
He’s an energy industry executive; she’s a stay-home mom who’s always busy with their kids and all of the activities they’re involved in. They have friends over, they throw their stuff around and they eat, well, not always at a table.
So when they finally nabbed the lot they wanted in Oak Estates — a small neighborhood just north of Highland Village — they built a home to suit their family of six, and Lisa, who once had her own business designing luxury window treatments, filled it with furniture.
But the home never seemed to be “done.” Four years after they moved in, Lisa still had a lengthy to-do list. That’s when she reached out to Laura Umansky, whose Laura U Interior Design firm had decorated a home for a friend.
“My husband is very opinionated, so together we are a good combo,” said Lisa, 42. “He’s like, ‘I want a library, a sanctuary. And I want my own garage and a workshop and my own closet.’ I want it to be comfortable and livable and make my husband very happy, and that’s what Laura did.”
Josh, 45, also remembered growing up with a nice bedroom and a big bathroom and closet — not a room that would only suit a
child — and he wanted the same for his own kids. They might be young now, he thought, but they won’t be forever.
Lisa has a practical side, too — actually, she calls herself a “cheapskate” — and it comes from having no sentimentality about a home or what’s in it. Her own parents divorced when she was 5, and her mother was a successful Realtor in the Denver area. She’d see a home with potential, buy it, fix it up and sell it the next year. She was a home flipper before anyone called them that.
“I probably lived in 20 houses before I went to college,” said Lisa, a Denver native. “And I had a garage sale every year of my life growing up, too. My mom would say ‘have a garage sale and you can keep the money if you sell this stuff.’ I would always make $500 to $1,000, and I was in high school.”
Early in their marriage — they lived in Dallas for a year and then Denver for a year before moving to Houston 17 years ago — she had one in Houston.
“Josh and I were married three years, and I decided to have a garage sale,” she said. “I was out hanging signs at 6 a.m. and all of these crazy garage sale people were showing up early. I’m like ‘get out of bed.’ He walks out and can’t believe all these people are in his driveway at 7 a.m.”
A man approached her with a $3 item and offered $2. “I said ‘hmmm, I can’t take less than $2.50. My husband throws up his hands and walks away,” she said, mimicking his reaction. “He likes to tell the story that it was $1 and a guy offered me 50 cents, but it really did happen. It’s not about the sale, it’s about the bargaining.”
In July, the couple — they met as students at Southern Methodist University when she was an undergrad and he was in grad school — will celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary. In those years, they’ve assembled an impressive art collection that dazzles in every room full of beautiful new furnishings.
There’s a Rashid Johnson painting in their foyer and two John Gibson paintings in the family room. Their breakfast room has a large Philip Buller painting, and a whimsical Mauro Perucchetti will make you smile when you pass through a hallway to the family room.
They have two Hunt Slonem paintings, and Lisa has a funny story about those, too.
A dozen or so years ago, a Houston woman called her about getting window treatments. Lisa wasn’t really still in the business, but agreed as a favor for a friend. She went to the woman’s home and it was filled with at least 30 Hunt Slonem paintings. The woman’s husband had been Slonem’s roommate in New York, and he commented that his friend was just starting to get noticed.
Lisa asked if they’d be willing to sell any. The husband said “no.” The wife said “yes, anything you want.”
She bought a couple of them, and a few years later, when the couple divorced, the woman called Lisa: “I got some of them in the divorce, do you want to buy any more?” she asked.
Each year, Lisa’s mother and stepfather give them art as gifts, and their collection is varied, ranging from traditional framed paintings to Slonem butterflies and birds to Gibson’s still-life paintings of balls to Johnson’s abstract paintings.
In all of it, choices were about compromise. Their taste in art differs, but they agree on everything they buy.
That’s how Umansky delivered a home they both love. She started with the art, found classic contemporary furnishings — much of which was made at the House + Town custom furniture company that she and her husband own — and made sure they could stand up to the wear and tear of a family of six.
The process was collaborative, with lots of ideas from Umansky and texts from Lisa with pictures of things she saw in stores. Josh couldn’t always see a piece of furniture and envision what it would look like with different fabric, but Lisa could.
Their family room rug is striking, and its stripe-y gray pattern looks like it could hide any number of stains. The super tough commercial-grade fabric on the giant, 12-foot by 12-foot sectional sofa is one the whole family can pile onto, and if drinks or snacks get spilled, you’d never know it.
“I don’t want to be the mom who’s like, ‘Stop, don’t mess up my house.’ I want a livable house,” Lisa said.
Wallpaper was added to a number of rooms: the bar, the powder room, the foyer, a hallway and 2-year-old Stella’s nursery. In fact, the nursery wallpaper is something Lisa has loved for years. When her eldest, Lilly, was younger, Lisa bought some of it to frame and use as art. Now, when they can afford a whole room of it, Stella gets the full treatment.
Not that Lilly, now 15, has gotten slighted. Her spacious bedroom sits on top of a twocar garage and in addition to her glamorous black upholstered bed and black-and-white spotty rug, she has a sleeper sofa for when friends stay over. And pops of bright pink come in window treatments, draperies and furry pillows.
Sons Jack, 13, and Jeb, 9, have more masculine spaces. Jack’s room also has a lot of black and white, and his bed has preppy monogrammed pillows. Jeb gets a chalkboard door, tall, tufted leatherette headboards and benches at the foot of each of two queen-size beds.
While the home is nearly 8,000 square feet, it has neither a formal living room or formal dining room. There’s a breakfast room that has a leather sofa that son Jeb likes to hang out on after school. He pushes its back down flat and he and his friends sprawl.
There’s a bar off of the family room and its glass-front lighted cabinets are backed with pretty geometric wallpaper that blends with the silk-like look of the gray-blue wallcovering in the room itself.
The Saarinen table and midcentury-modern chairs that used to be their dining set moved to the upstairs kids’ game room, partly because they needed a bigger table and partly because Josh hated those chairs. They were plain and plastic and one of them was cracked. Somehow, at dinnertime, he ended up in that cracked chair every night. One night he got a Sharpie and wrote his name on the back of one of the intact chairs so he wouldn’t get stuck with the dud again.
Now they have a quartztopped table with nice leather chairs, and three vivid blue barstools share space with a baby seat for times when the kids eat at the island.
In the kitchen, gray cabinets were painted white and brass hardware replaced the original stainless pieces. A new vent hood was fashioned, and two pieces of art that sat on each side of the hood were removed, and Umansky had to find a solution for a sticky problem.
When that wall was tiled, Lisa told her contractor not to put tile in those spots because she knew she’d hang art there. That tile, though, was no longer available — and it was so pretty that no one wanted to have to re-tile the wall. So Umansky created custom mirrors the same size, and had shelves put at the bottom of each to hold oils and seasonings.
The Orens have a second home in Aspen, Colo., and the family spends much of the summer there. In 2017, Umansky’s crew spent summer months on renovations and installation and the Orens came home to what looked like a whole new place.
“When we came home, Josh loved that everything was so edited and nicely done and that boxes of my personal tchotchkes were stacked up,” Lisa said, laughing. “Everything she’s done is wonderful.”