Party time
Couple’s home is designed with casual entertaining in mind
The dining room in the home of Stacy Feltham and Marc Cutler isn’t the kind of formal space you’d see in other homes, but it’s exactly what the couple needs: a place to entertain casually with drinks, hors d’oeuvres and lots of mingling instead of fancy sit-down dinners.
Just inside the front door, the room has a round pedestal table better suited for grazing than for formal place settings, a curved, low-back settee loaded with colorful pillows, a garden stool and a pair of modern leather chairs that work in this room or elsewhere in the house.
A back wall holds a variety of art, some hung on the wall and the other pieces carefully arranged in a way that looks more effortless than it actually is. The styles vary from antique to modern abstract — there’s even a pair of cut paper silhouettes — and they’re all framed differently.
“I have to admit that I didn’t initially love the ledge,” said Audrey Tejauno, who with fellow interior designer Jana Erwin forms the creative team at Nest Design Group. “Then we thought we could make it feel like a Parisian gallery with a mix of styles and even price points. We didn’t want it to look like a formal dining room. We wanted it to feel like a cocktail lounge, and the ledge helped us make it feel that way.”
In one corner of this room is a piano that had belonged to Feltham’s great-grandmother. Its antique look and dark wood didn’t fit with the rest of the décor, so they had it lacquered black. Its new glossy exterior adds a little more shine to the room.
Feltham and Cutler bought their 3,569-square-foot Montrose home at the end of 2019 and moved in January 2020, not long before the pandemic halted life as we knew it.
Both are natives of Newfoundland in eastern Canada and came to Houston for jobs in the oil and gas industry. Feltham, 50, is a lawyer for Woodside Energy, and Cutler, also 50 and a geologist, is coowner and chief operating officer of GT Engineering, an oil field manufacturing company.
Though they married in 2010, they’ve been a couple for more than 20 years and have lived in Newfoundland, Halifax and Calgary in Canada, here in Houston and in London.
They’d lived in a Midtown townhouse for several years, appreciating the lock-and-leave lifestyle that a home without a big outdoor space allowed. When they returned from a two-year stint in London, the couple wanted to find a new home, but a two-and-a-halfyear search left them emptyhanded.
Feltham is on the board of the Stages theater group, and a friend, Mark Folkes, Stages’ former managing director and now the president and CEO at the Hobby Center, reminded her that another mutual friend was selling his house and it could be perfect for them.
That friend was George Lancaster, Stages’ chair emeritus and the senior vice president of corporate communications at Hines. His chic Montrose home was a study in black and white, and Feltham and Cutler immediately knew it was the place for them.
Their style has always been fairly modern, and when they hired Tejauno and Erwin to decorate the home, they asked the women to let the home’s style guide their choices.
Its exterior was dark gray, and they repainted it white, adding pink paint to the front door to lighten it up. The main floor was lined with hardwood flooring that didn’t quite work with the sophisticated style they wanted to inject into the home. Erwin and Tejauno urged them to replace it with 12-inch-by-24-inch black marble with dramatic white veining, a stunning contrast against the Benjamin Moore White Alice walls in much of the home’s first floor.
Across from the dining room is a flex room that others might want to use as a home office. It has a back wall of built-in shelving and a big window that brings in plenty of natural light.
Feltham and Cutler went another direction, asking Tejauno and Erwin to create another room for entertaining, a comfortable place where they could sit and enjoy cocktails or wine with friends.
The room was already painted black — walls, shelving and ceiling — and the couple simply repainted it the same color. Instead of the dramatic black marble flooring, Tejauno and Erwin found another marble floor tile pattern that combines squares of black, gray and white marble for a 3D effect.
A pair of round black cocktail tables anchor the center of the room, and Tejauno had four chairs custom made with fluffy Mongolian sheepskin fur seats dyed periwinkle and the chair backs covered in bright pink velvet.
“Stacy allowed us to see her truest self and let this room reflect it. On her own, she would not have done a room like that,” Erwin said.
Tejauno noted that they understood Feltham’s personality when they looked in her closet and found gorgeous designer clothes, shoes and handbags.
“As soon as I saw her closet, I thought, ‘This is the Stacy we need to have everywhere. You didn’t see it anywhere in her house before,’” Tejauno added. “It was fun to unearth that, and she was so happy to have it unearthed.”
Overhead, a vintage chandelier of dangling glass balls — found on 1stdibs.com — makes it instantly feel like a room ready for a party. A back wall holds another pop of color with a bright teal console underneath a large-format photo by the couple’s neighbor, photographer Julie Soefer.
The couple has two photos by their well-known neighbor and a vast collection of art that ranges from ceramic mosaics to abstract art and a quartet of etchings made from copper plates created by Rembrandt, pieces known as Millenium Impressions.
Art in the wine lounge and dining room is just the beginning of a gallery-like experience throughout the home.
The staircase to the home’s second floor is filled with art, and a powder bathroom — also painted black — has black-andwhite art collected by Cutler.
Coincidentally, at the back of the house where the staircase begins, the couple had a climate-controlled wine room installed to hold the bottles of wine they started collecting during the pandemic. Work on it finished this fall.
The living room sofa, which the couple purchased in the 1990s when it was covered in red leather, was reupholstered in soft gray fabric. The 2022 iteration is sleek and sophisticated, and its matching bench was reupholstered in different fabric for use as a footboard bench in the primary bedroom.
Before the pandemic, the couple used an upstairs bedroom as a cozy TV room. Feltham, though, needed to convert that room into an office to work from home. She’s since gone back to her regular office but maintains the space at home for a hybrid schedule and for important calls that can come at odd hours because the Australian company she works for is in a time zone 13 hours ahead of Houston.
With their TV room gone, they started spending more time in the living room, where their refurbished sofa shares space with a big square coffee table and a pair of custommade barrel-back chairs complemented by black and white pillows by Houston designer Janet Gust.
In a corner sits the baby grand piano, and on the opposite side of the room, a pair of abstract paintings by artist Cicely Taylor were commissioned to fill niches on each side of the fireplace.
Getting the home in order was Feltham’s pandemic project — working with Tejauno and Erwin to make numerous decisions, then wait for everything to arrive — but Cutler shifted his extra time in another direction.
Although an early attempt at bread baking proved unsustainable, he geared up his beer brewing hobby, turning the garage into his brewmaster mancave with brewing and serving refrigerators. He’s even preparing to can some of it now.
Their small backyard and a driveway courtyard gave them places to meet with friends while social distancing early in the pandemic and proved to them that the move to a bigger house was perfect for them.
“We use the backyard and courtyard more than we thought we would,” Cutler said. “We couldn’t entertain like that at the townhouse because it was like living in a fishbowl.”