Tomball renovation sparks new career in interior design
Matt Moore looks at photos of his home from the day he and his wife bought it and wonders out loud why he ever let her persuade him to buy.
“It was so ugly,” Ashley
Moore said of their home in Tomball. “Now, though, we look at it and think it was the best move.”
The Moores were living in a 2,300-square-foot home in Nottingham Forest on Houston’s west side, and their two small children were eating up every inch of available space. They didn’t have a guest bedroom, so Ashley’s parents had no place to stay when they visited from her hometown of Crandall, a small town southeast of Dallas.
Ashley feels more at home in a country setting and with casual, rustic décor.
When they found the house in Tomball, she loved the location — and it was 6,000 square feet, plenty of room for their children and yellow Labrador retriever, Rebel, to run and play.
The home had lots of dark rooms, though, with faux paint finishes and ornate detailing. The dining room had a bronze faux finish on the ceilng and all four walls, with lots of dark trim. Despite its big windows, the room felt like a cave.
The master bedroom and bathroom had more faux finishes, in gold on the walls and a darker color inside the tray ceiling. Elsewhere, walls were beige with dark-stained trim. Much of the home had oak flooring, but some was tiled in big squares of beige.
The kitchen had rust-colored walls, arched windows and dark speckled granite counters.
For the Moores’ taste, it was too dark — and way overdone.
That didn’t scare Ashley, even though she wasn’t yet an interior designer.
Before opening her interior design firm, she had been a teacher, first in Cy-Fair and then in Spring Branch, teaching seventh-grade language arts and history. That’s how she met Matt; she worked with his cousin, and several of the teachers would occasionally go to a happy hour for drinks after work. Matt started showing up, too, and one day he asked her out.
After two months of dating, Matt proposed, and the couple recently celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary.
Ashley left teaching when their first child was born; daughter Emma is now 8, and son Brady is 6. They bought their Tomball home in 2015 and started fixing what they didn’t like in phases.
First came what it would take to move in: a new kitchen, painting the entire interior and adding wood flooring where there was tile.
They discovered a leak in the master bathroom, so they remodeled it, taking out a makeup vanity Ashley didn’t use to enlarge her closet.
Their large mudroom/laundry room got a makeover, too, adding cubbies to keep the kids’ school things organized and a long desk for homework. They converted a built-in desk to a kennel fit for the king of dogs.
Upstairs bathrooms were made more functional, their style updated to be in synch with the rest of the house.
Moore had grown up in a relaxed home filled with antiques and a distinct Texas flair, and that’s how Ashley wanted her own home to feel.
“My dad’s mom had a very stuffy house — we couldn’t even take water into the living room. There were a lot of rules,” she said. “My mom wasn’t like that, and her mother wasn’t either. I wanted a house like theirs, where you could have chocolate on your hands and no one yelled at you.”
Her mother was good at blending an eclectic mix into a comfortable home.
“My mom is the flea-market queen,” she said. “I grew up going to the Canton. As a kid, I hated it because my mom would trek us through the fields in the summer, and it was so hot. But she taught me how to see good lines and good bones.”
From the outside, the Moores’ home looks classic and upscale, but inside it’s more relaxed than one might expect.
Rustic beams and shiplap in several rooms and reclaimed wood in the study help the home feel like a modern farmhouse, and Ashley has sprinkled vintage and antique pieces throughout, too.
“I love classic style, and anything that was here 100 years ago is classic to me,” she said. “I want our house to be livable; I don’t want you to think you can’t put your feet up on the coffee table. We want you to relax and your worries to go away when you walk in the
door.”
At the front of the home, Moore has completely transformed a study into a Texasmodern place to get work done. She covered one wall in old barn siding and allowed her outdoorsy husband to hang deer trophies here. (They were a nonstarter in the Nottingham Forest house.) Gray paint replaced beige tones, and the trim is all bright white.
The former cavelike dining room is barely recognizable as the same space. Ashley brought in a rustic table and chairs and installed a simpler, country-style chandelier. A traditional china cabinet holds her growing collection of milk glass, and an assembly of silver platters and pitchers is organized on top.
In the formal living room, a sisal rug organizes a white sofa, a wood cart converted into a coffee table and a pair of chairs that come with a story. Despite Ashley’s comments about propping your feet up, this white sofa is the one thing she tells her children not to sit on.
“This is my favorite place in this house. It’s the place where I sit with Matt at the end of the day,” she said. “It’s our decompress-and-catch-up-from-the-day space.”
Moore found those chairs at the Canton flea market for just $10 each. She found an upholsterer to recover them for about $100 each.
The family room is where the Moores do most of their living, and there’s a stone-covered fireplace and white built-in cabinets that hold a TV and family mementos. She opted for a brown leather sofa that she knew could take a beating.
“When we moved here, I said we’ll get a leather sofa and it will have to last until they go to college,” she said.
The master bathroom and kitchen got major makeovers, transforming both into very contemporary rooms.
Geometry rules in the kitchen now, with rectangular windows and island, cabinets painted light gray and complemented by white macabus quartzite, a white natural stone with gray veins that’s a much tougher alternative to marble.
White shiplap and rustic beams instantly made the bathroom feel more like the Moores’ style, and a freestanding bathtub replaced the stodgy garden tub the house came with. Instead of his-and-hers sinks on separate walls, they’re now grouped together side by side and take up less counter space.
The couple cleaned up their outdoor space with a big seating area and simpler space around their pool, and added a little playhouse for Emma that Ashley designed and her dad built.
There’s just one more room to be remodeled, a pool bathroom that needs to be more functional.
“My husband said if I quit doing projects here we might buy a house in Colorado,” Ashley said with a little laugh that indicated she’d rather have the nice pool bath.
If having a completely updated house isn’t enough, there’s another upside to this sizable project: It got Ashley Moore a whole new career.
Friends saw the work she was doing on her own home and asked for help. Before she knew it, she had her own business — Moore House Interiors.