Newlyweds create a chic, modern haven in Houston
Chris Gilliland and
John Field didn’t want or need a lot of square footage, but what they did have, they wanted to be comfortable and stylish.
They already had a weekend haven in Round Top, a more relaxed, farmlike atmosphere where they can get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. In Houston, though, they needed help shifting from a small apartment into a 1,500square-foot condo in Highland Tower in the Galleria area about a year ago.
Their new home would be clean and simple, a low-maintenance, turnkey lifestyle so they could head to the country each weekend without worries. Their condo had only one prior owner, and since the space was finished nicely, they didn’t need to do messy work such as changing flooring or remodeling the kitchen or bathrooms.
They both already liked modern and midcenturymodern style and knew they wanted color, so they didn’t need help picking furniture. But they did turn to interior designer Mary Patton of Mary Patton Design — on a recommendation from one of John’s colleagues — for help filling in the gaps and applying finishing touches.
The condo’s walls had faded, so they freshened them up with paint, and the kitchen cabinets were still a deep reddish-brown wood tone, so they painted those, too, and added new hardware.
Despite the large windows in the condo, the rooms somehow felt dark and secluded, partly from the existing heavy draperies that blocked light everywhere.
Patton’s answer was
new sheer drapery panels paired with motorized window shades in the living room and new draperies in the primary bedroom and the guest bedroom, which the couple uses as a TV room.
Field, who has stronger opinions on home design, had been warned about the sticker shock of custom draperies. But Patton assured that their price tags don’t have to be outrageous.
“I can’t control labor prices, but I can control fabric prices,” Patton said of the cost of custom draperies. “There are a lot of good fabrics that are $20 a yard, and that’s a way to make the price more reasonable. We don’t need to spend $300 a yard when they’ve got tall ceilings and we need a lot of fabric.
“I am hyper-aware that hiring a designer is a luxury, a big deal in itself. A good, creative challenge is to find things that are
not astronomically expensive but are still beautiful,” she said.
The two men met in
Los Angeles in 2016 and married in Houston in July 2021. They already had some nice things, and they’d done the purge of duplicate furnishings when they moved in together with their 11-yearold rescue dog Maggie.
After they met in LA, Chris moved to Houston and John went to New York for different jobs. They maintained their relationship long distance. Tired of that commute, John joined Chris in Houston in February 2020, just before the pandemic set in.
Field, 43 and originally from Lubbock, works in marketing for Phillips 66 and Gilliland, 43 and a native of the Oklahoma City area, works for the same company in alternative energy.
Gilliland was grateful for Patton’s guiding hand
on things that sound simple but aren’t, such as choosing paint colors.
“It was helpful having a way to get a vision realized. It’s amazing how different all these shades of white are,” he said. “The number of color options of white and how complicated they are, I’d never experienced that.”
Their main living area has a small dining spot, where they have a round table with a cluster of chairs, and their living room has an emerald green velvet sofa with two midcentury-style chairs, one a Wassily chair covered in brown-and-white cowhide and the other a white leather chair.
“Mary was very good at
saying, ‘I like this. Let’s do this with that’ and adding a couple of things here and there,” Field said. “She could take our things and make them work.”
To finish this area, Patton recommended a new coffee table and side table, both Warren Platner designs from Knoll, plus a variety of decorative pillows.
Since Field and Gilliland didn’t need a guest bedroom, they converted it into a TV salon. Patton usually likes to use darker colors — deep grays, blues or greens — in a media room, but since they already had white furniture, they opted for monochromatic white in this room.
She found a white chandelier through Janet Wiebe, a former Houston antiques dealer who now lives in Italy and finds European antiques for all sorts of clients through her online shop, Sourced by Janet Wiebe. Wiebe also sells her antiques inventory at Round Top’s antique shows, and that’s where Patton found the chandelier.
It pairs perfectly with the white armchairs that sit on a leather rug pieced together in a herringbone pattern.
In the primary bedroom, new draperies had a big impact. They also added new nightstands, art, a rug and lamps. When they met, the two men bonded over a shared admiration of aviation, so a retro-style piece of art with a Pan Am aircraft placed over a small cabinet makes a statement about both of them.
“We both appreciate flying and aircraft, and while I never flew Pan Am, that (represents) the golden age of aviation. It means something to us,” Gilliland said.
While some of Field and Gilliland’s midcentury furnishings are original or new licensed pieces, some of them aren’t — and that’s OK, said Patton, since many people appreciate the styles without being collectors of often costly original goods.
“There’s a way to do it and not be a snob. Most of my clients don’t care about who the designer is,” Patton said.