Memorial home is a little French, a little Italian and all classic
Early in their 29-year marriage, Althea and Henry Lee traveled to Europe and soaked in the elegance of French design and the sleekness of Italian style.
Henry’s a radiologist but has a background in and love of art history, so he was as engaged as Althea was when it came time to start renovating — in phases — the 4,800-square-foot home they bought in Memorial.
They called on interior designer Julie Dodson of Dodson Interiors, who had helped them when they built another home in Memorial a bit earlier for the Lees and their children, Natalie, now 22 and a recent University of Texas graduate, Nathan, a student at Trinity Classical School and their angel daughter, Nicole, who died 12 years ago from brain cancer when she was just 7.
After Nicole’s death, Althea dedicated her time to volunteer work, and she’s now the director of the Houston chapter of The Cure Starts Now, a nonprofit that raises money for hospitals that do research in pediatric brain cancer. The Houston chapter has raised $500,000 in five years.
Both Henry and Althea are first-generation Americans. Althea’s parents were born in Hong Kong and came to the U.S. as college students. Just a month before she was born, they moved to Houston, where her dad worked in the energy industry. Althea occasionally works in commercial acting — you may have seen her in a Methodist Hospital commercial, portraying a mother seeking online care.
Henry’s family moved from Taiwan to the U.S., settling in Chicago. His father was a nuclear engineer, and Henry is the
first doctor in the family, though his siblings all work in medicine, too. (His twin brother is a teaching pharmacist, another brother is a doctor and his sister is an optometrist.)
Their goal was to make their house a comfortable, elegant home that could handle a family with children as well as their Siberian husky, Suki, a stray they found wandering around a church they used to attend.
“I love that Julie isn’t completely traditional or modern. She uses a nice mix of pieces, so it doesn’t feel stale. It’s a great balance of both fun and whimsical,” Althea said.
Early on, they gutted the kitchen and used space from the back of the house to create a kennel area for Suki and a new powder bathroom with blackand-white Schumacher’s Chenonceau wallpaper and black marble floor tile.
They reconfigured the kitchen to be more functional and to eliminate the odd, pie-shaped island that had a stove in the middle of it. Althea didn’t like the placement of the sink or the refrigerator, either, and she felt like she had very little workspace for preparing family meals. The new design, which expanded the room by 6 feet, added 20 linear feet of work area.
Having a great kitchen was important to the Lees, as Althea cooks a lot and the space is the hub of the house. She likes to work from here when her son is doing homework
White marble replaced mottled brown-black granite counters and several of their upper cabinets now have glass-front doors to display pretty white dishes. The wood beams on the coffered ceiling were painted the same shade of pale gray as the cabinets.
The showstopper in the room, though, is the antique backsplash tile that Dodson found at Chateau Domingue, a Houston business that specializes in architectural antiques and salvaged antique European building materials, much of which dates back centuries. These kitchen tiles, in a graycream palette with a chic circlesquare pattern, was once used as floor tile in a home in a French village sometime in the mid to late 19th century, according to Ruth Gay, who owns Chateau Domingue.
The nearby breakfast area includes a table and chairs from their prior home, but they opted to reupholster the chairs, with pretty blue and white fabric for the back and vinylized white fabric for the seats, so they can stand up to spills.
“I love traditional and I love transitional style — and I love putting that puzzle together, finding the right pieces and mixing things you wouldn’t think would work together,” Dodson said.
A blue linen wall treatment gives the dining room a dramatic new look, as Dodson used yards of fabric to upholster walls — similar to wallpaper but with a whole new look and feel. That fabric was used again in the family room, in draperies hung along big windows.
The dining chairs got a new treatment here, too, with Galbraith & Paul fabric with circles in subdued blues and grays and white vinyl for the seats. More Galbraith & Paul fabric comes into play in draperies in its delicate Sumi pattern, birds, tree branches and paper lanterns in a a blue-gray colorway.
And an antique mirror they found for their prior home worked perfectly here, too.
“We were able to repurpose a lot from their previous home, it was a matter of reupholstering and adding new things and changing some things,” Dodson said. “Some people buy things and worry about whether they can use it again if they move. When you purchase classic, good-quality pieces, you can always repurpose them, as long as the scale isn’t completely different.”
The family room got a makeover, too, bringing in a sectional sofa with a rounded chaise on one end, to replace white slipcover sofas they gave to their daughter, and adding a swivel chair in a stripy print plus an antique-style chair that was recovered in an ikat print pattern. For fun, they added a pair of Made Goods stools surrounded by floor-length fringe. They might seem like a trendy piece elsewhere, but they’ll be forever popular in Texas.
“Fringe ottomans, they are so sassy,” Althea exclaimed. “It feels like a dress you want to start shaking. It feels like high fashion with those in there.”