Georgia couple shifts to modern style, life on Lake Conroe
Russell Bellmor can operate just about everything in his home from his phone. Raise and lower window shades. Turn on lights indoors or outdoors. Adjust the temperature. You name it.
His wife, Ann, though, sometimes wishes she had a simple light switch.
That’s life in transition, as the Bellmors adapt to a new home in a new city.
Longtime residents of the Atlanta-area suburb of Marietta, Ga., the couple moved to the Houston area after their son, Morgan Bellmor, seemed to be settling in here. Morgan graduated from Texas A&M University and returned to earn a law degree at the University of Houston after a stint with the U.S. Marine Corps. He worked in oil and gas, then decided to tackle an MBA at Rice University.
Their eldest son, Justin, died in 2009 at the age of 23 from a brain hemorrhage just weeks before his Georgia Tech University graduation.
Russell, now 72, and Ann,
69, had lived in the Atlanta area for 41 years, loved their jobs and had cultivated a wide circle of friends. She worked for 47 years as a cardiac care nurse while he worked in accounting and database systems on computers. A wall of old computers — dating back to the first McIntosh he bought in 1984 — demonstrates his love for technology.
The tug of family drew them to Texas, and they found a lot in Bentwater Bay Estates on Lake Conroe, then hired architect Jason Drews, a friend of Morgan’s, to design their modern home. They had looked at a number of existing homes but felt they’d all need a lot of remodeling; building from scratch seemed like a better
idea.
In Atlanta, their home was more traditional, but this 4,700square-foot lakefront home, which started construction in March of 2021 and finished this June, is very modern — steel and glass with a stucco exterior and accents of porcelain tile that look like wood.
Overseeing home construction long distance seemed arduous, so Ann quit her job to spend more time here while construction was underway. The home’s punch list is down to a few remaining items — every now and then they notice a wire here or a flaw there — but they’re settling in, making new friends and learning their way around.
They don’t yet call themselves retirees, still contemplating finding part-time jobs to satisfy the side of them that worked full tilt for decades.
Drews urged them to use stacked stone on an interior wall in the main living area, continuing it past a big glass wall to the outdoors. Along the back side of the stone wall — yes, it’s stone on both sides — a gorgeous staircase of steel and glass carries the Bellmors and their guests to the second floor, where there’s a game room and guest bedrooms and bathrooms.
The first-floor study and its big glass walls were tough lessons in navigating Texas summers. The room faces the front driveway and, no matter how much they adjusted the temperature, they just couldn’t keep it cool. A heating and cooling consultant said some of the heat was likely bouncing up from their concrete driveway. They treated those windows with clear ceramic tinting, which was costly but made the room bearable.
The spacious kitchen-diningliving area, all of which looks out to the pool, deck and lake, continues the choice of modern materials. The couple used Cambria quartz throughout the home, and the long kitchen island has a dramatic, veiny pattern installed waterfall style. Their modern, frameless lower cabinets are painted a highgloss blue; uppers are glossy white. The same blue-white combination is repeated in a nearby bar area.
Everything in the home was thoroughly researched by Russell, who took the task of dreaming up a modern home seriously. He spent hours researching every major purchase, down to the four Italamp Muna pendants hanging over the island. They’re showstoppers, hand-blown cylindrical glass dome shades with white inner globe diffusers.
Russell found them online at a price he called “unspeakable.” He shopped around and negotiated with a supplier until he could get them about 30 percent off, then bought all four.
Electrical outlets in the kitchen are hidden, since they didn’t want a pop-up style interrupting the island counter or unsightly boxes disrupting the backsplash. On the front of the island, a row of four electrical outlets has white plug covers to hide what they really are.
They worked with Maggie Grants, a kitchen and bath specialist at Cabinets and Designs in Houston, on the cabinets through much of the home. Grants said that the Bellmors’ home is a great example of how home décor is trending away from traditional style into more contemporary choices.
For example, Shaker-style cabinets have been popular for about a decade — a simpler choice than traditional styles with heavy carving or embellishments. Now, though, homeowners and designers are starting to shift toward Europeanstyle frameless cabinets, such as the cabinets in the Bellmors’ home.
They’re custom made, and the high-gloss finish is perfected in a factory — with better conditions for baking on the finish — as opposed to projects with cabinets built on-site in the home under construction. And while white painted cabinets still dominate, Grants said wood finishes are sneaking back onto the scene, though with straighter, crisper lines, in lighter colors and with quartersawn or rough-sawn oak for a different wood grain pattern than you’d get from traditional plain sawn oak.
The kitchen faucet is worth noting: a slender loop that starts with a rose gold finish and finishes in titanium. Ann first spotted it in a Kohler store when the couple remodeled the primary bathroom in their Georgia home. When they decided to build on Lake Conroe, that faucet was one thing they didn’t have to research, and it inspired them to use titanium faucets in most of the bathrooms, too.
At the back of the home, the primary bedroom suite has more glass walls, and they installed a two-shade automated system. They use one set of blackout shades for when they need darkness to sleep and another set of solar shades for daytime, when they just want to keep the heat out.
This bedroom is smaller than the one in Georgia, but Ann’s happy with it; 400 square feet often felt like wasted space, she said. And now they can enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning while taking in the lake view.
The primary bathroom is a study in texture and pattern, with four big slabs of Cambria quartz — white with dramatic black veins — covering the shower walls. The opposite wall, with cabinets, sinks and mirrors, has more slabs, though with simpler black veining. The toilet area has another type of tile that gives the illusion of 3D boxes, and penny round tile covers the floor.
Their son, Morgan, had a lot to say about the bedroom suite he uses when he visits. He picked out his own furniture and paired green tile with brass hardware and plumbing fixtures.
The Bellmors shopped for furniture at the massive Furnitureland store in Jamestown, N.C., and while most of it has arrived, they’re still waiting on a few things, including patio furniture for the big deck that surrounds their pool.
Now that the house is done and the couple has moved in, they’re enjoying the swimming pool and one more thing they bought for the new house: a frozen margarita machine. They knew they’d miss their favorite Tex-Mex restaurant after they moved, so they looked up the make and model of its margarita machine and bought one for themselves.
“It’s so nice,” Russell grinned. “Yesterday, I was floating around the pool with my frozen margarita.”