Southside Place home gets streamlined reboot with updated color scheme
Melissa and Jon Byers chose their Southside Place home for the extra space it provided their growing family, its central location and its shady, tree-lined streets.
When they moved from their Rice Village-area townhouse in 2011, they had three boys, and now they have four, ages 7, 12, 14 and 16. Their new home — with 4,800 square feet and built in 1995 — gave them room to spread.
They always knew, though, that they’d remodel the kitchen, change things in their primary bathroom and buy nicer furniture when they were less worried about sticky hands, rambunctious boys and their energetic chocolate lab, Bailey.
After living in the house for eight years, they could make decisions more quickly and more easily, since they knew what they did and didn’t like. The dramatic first-floor renovations made that space feel like a brand-new home, plus, the upstairs primary bedroom suite and other upstairs bathrooms were redone.
“We want to have a beautiful home, but we don’t want to be afraid to live in it. We can’t have interesting trinkets sitting around — we’ve got backpacks and school books to deal with,” Melissa said.
The family of six packed up their whole house and moved into a rental in June 2019, then moved back in seven baker months later, not long before the COVID shutdown in 2020. Jon, 44, is a finance executive in the energy industry; Melissa,
45, is a former investment banker who opted to stay home with her kids, and now she’s on the Southside Place City Council.
Their timing was perfect, so they had plenty of room when everyone was home trying to work and attend school.
“We did science projects in the backyard. One was shooting rubber bands to measure the distance, and another was rolling out toilet paper and showing where each planet in the solar system was,” Melissa said. “It was funny, considering the toilet paper situation early in the pandemic.”
They assembled a designconstruction team of Madera Fine Homes, Matthew Mitchell Architecture and Stacy Andell of Luxe Living Interiors to reimagine a first floor that had uneven doorways leading from the front piano room to the dining room and the kitchen. A realignment, thought through by the whole team, streamlined doorways to be at a consistent height and style, as well as consistent placement from room to room.
An awkward kitchen had an angled peninsula that created a pass-through and only allowed for a small island with a cooktop. They opened it up so that one corner created a small bar with a display cabinet for their crystal barwar; this provided room for a 12-foot island, over which they hung three pendants made of pewter and hewn brass. The reconfigured kitchen placed a large, 48-inch range on the back wall and shifted the sink — now a pretty black granite vessel — in the island.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, houses were often built with appliance garages, a space with a roll-down door to hide coffee makers, toasters and other small appliances that were deemed unsightly. Those spaces went out of fashion, and homeowners have either bought fancy coffee makers that are better to look at or they’ve banished them to the butler’s pantry.
The new iteration of those appliance garages appears in the Byerses’ home. It’s a spot that looks exactly like a cabinet, except that the doors, when opened, tuck inside the cabinet cavity to reveal a coffee station with extra shelves or pull-out drawers for appliances, such as blenders or stand mixers, that you might not use every day.
Mitchell and Andell also suggested that some of the shelves be open, and it took Melissa Byers a bit to decide on that.
“When they brought up the idea of open shelves, I thought, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous.’ Now, the top two shelves have cake plates and things we don’t use every day, and the bottom two shelves are for everyday things. I’m a big baker, so I can reach those things,” she said of glass canisters of sugar, flower and other baking ingredients.
A plaster treatment applied to the range hood was repeated on the fireplace at the end of the breakfast nook. Before the renovation, the breakfast nook was divided into two areas, a smaller area that could accommodate a round table, plus a small space at the back of the house with bookshelves and window seats and walls that blocked it off by a few feet.
Mitchell’s recommendation was to straighten it all out, removing angled walls, pillars and an arched doorway. Even a small, angled wall that had a door to the backyard was straightened, placing the doorway in the breakfast area instead of a point where the family room, kitchen and breakfast room met. The new space feels longer, and it can accommodate a larger, rectangular table — a simple RH table paired with indoor-outdoor chairs from JANUS et Cie — while leaving plenty of room to keep the sweet window seats.
Dark furniture, paint colors, brick and flooring all got a lighter treatment, too. Yellow paint in some of the rooms and deep red paint in the dining room all were replaced by Benjamin Moore’s “White Dove.” Dark green floor tile that covered the kitchen and living room was replaced with neutral Texas limestone that extends into the backyard.
That backyard wasn’t user friendly before, Melissa said. A big shade tree made it hard to grow and keep grass. When it died after the winter storm of 2021, they decided to install artificial turf. (Jon trained Bailey to use a spot off to the side.)
The boys have a tether ball pole plus a pingpong table that they can roll out. It’s perfect for the four busy boys who, between them, play baseball, volleyball, wrestling, lacrosse, football, tennis, take art and writing classes, attend Boy Scout meetings, as well as piano and trombone lessons.
In the dining room, iconic Wishbone chairs by Carl Hanson & Sons surround a modern-style table made of walnut, and a pair of Apparatus Arrow triangular chandeliers — one with a black finish and one in aged brass — hang overhead. A black sideboard with a Carrara marble top is by Egg Collective for Design Within Reach.
The plain powder bathroom got a sweet treatment, with white subway tile and a black pencil liner on the lower walls, with black and white Cole and Sons wallpaper featuring tall, thin trees. The room has black sconces that look like tree branches, a simple black framed mirror and a black wall-mount cabinet with a soapstone counter.
Many might think adding a new rail to a staircase wouldn’t make much of a difference, but in this case, it was a significant part of the first floor’s more transitional look. The original Craftsman-style, heavily stained wood was replaced with a thinner profile in black steel.
Upstairs, the boys’ bathrooms got full refreshes, and the primary bathroom has a new freestanding bathtub in place of a garden tub. Everything in the room was replaced with new Carrara marble, Visual Comfort lighting, polished nickel plumbing fixtures and hardware.