San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Homes that are dressed for the holidays.
Mother and daughter designers explore trends in their new book
The mother-daughter design team of Patricia Hart McMillan and Katharine Kaye McMillan say home decorating for Christmas 2018 is a combination of emphasizing the personal while pushing boundaries into the nontraditional.
That means placing cherished ornaments or other treasures you’ve collected yourself or inherited from relatives around the house. But it also means breaking free of the staid red-green-gold holiday palette and experimenting with a whole crayon’s box worth of colors.
The McMillans explore these and other trends in their new book, “Christmas by Design: Private Homes Decorated by Leading Designers” (Schiffer Publishing, $45). The sumptuous, 250-page coffee-table tome gives readers up-close tours of more than two dozen abodes all gussied up for the holidays.
The homes run the spectrum from grand to cozy, hacienda to high-rise, modern to traditional. And because the McMillans are based in San Antonio, nine are owned by San Antonians.
After paging though the book, what’s most obvious is that these homes are definitely not decorated with the kind of stereotypical, even impersonal scenes found on your dentist’s Christmas cards. Instead, the houses seem warm and lived in, with as many meaningful touches as possible.
“Those highly stylized show windows are devoid of feeling,” Patricia said. “But it’s the personal, multigenerational things that draw you in ... It’s the difference between decorating a home and simply staging one.”
For example, Leland Stone, founder of the high-end Stone Standard hardware store, decorates the neoclassical home he shares with partner Neil Schneuker (a renovated library building on the near South Side) with plaster ornaments made from wood molds dating from 19thcentury Europe. Their Christmas tree holds a bouquet of fondant flowers preserved from Stone’s mother’s wedding cake. And the toy bear at the base once belonged to his father.
While Meredith and Mike Howard have one whimsical tree decorated in pinks, purples, yellows and greens in their Terrell Hills home, they set up a second one they call their “memory tree” decorated with both cherished ornaments from their own childhoods and their children’s more recent handmade art.
Cheri Stith of Feather, Fluff and Flings, which does seasonal decorating and interior design, crowns the tree in her Alamo Heights home with the tiara she wore and the scepter she carried as a duchess during Corpus Christi’s Buccaneer Days. And her tree skirt was repurposed from the train her daughter later wore when she was in Buccaneer Days.
It’s also obvious from the book that, when it comes to color, San Antonians have no trouble eschewing tradition.
For example, Karlos Anzoate-
gui’s 1920s Moorish-style
Mahncke Park home was awash in ribbon, painted branches, various baubles and even faux poinsettias all in eggshell blue, often called Tiffany Blue for the color of the jewelry store’s boxes.
“I asked myself, wouldn’t everyone want to find a Tiffany box under the tree?” said Anzoategui, affectionately known to his friends as “Karlos with a K.” “I change my color every year. I’ve done purple and pink and contrasting colors like purple and red.”
This year, he took inspiration from the peacock’s tail and decorated with celery green, dark blue and turquoise.
“In San Antonio, we see a lot of people decorating with Fiesta colors, which is kind of unexpected,” Katharine said. “This year I decorated my tree entirely with Fiesta medals. They already have the hooks. It’s adorable.”
Sometimes decorating can be a way of sharing. About five years ago, businessman Robert “Dick” Tips and his wife, Kristin, became concerned about the cars speeding by their Terrell Hills home. So the father of young children created a public space outside decorated with poinsettias, lights, even two wooden sleighs where people come to take family photos and selfies.
“Now people slow down to look or stop to take pictures,” he said of the house on Terrell Road. There’s even a mailbox where little ones can post their letters to Santa.
The McMillans concede that most people don’t have the means to decorate their homes as extravagantly as those in the book. But, they say, don’t dis- count the aspirational aspect.
“So maybe you don’t have a crown or a tiara from when you were a member of a Fiesta court,” Patricia said. “But maybe you have a crown or tiara from one of your child’s school pageants. Put that on top of the tree. Maybe you don’t have a collection of Christopher Radko ornaments, but you have a few pieces from your grandmother or somebody else that carry nostalgia. Put those on. They mean something.”
If you can’t afford a second tree, decorate the one you do have with your children’s art, they said. Or decorate with an inexpensive string of colorful chile peppers or ribbon. Collect and paint branches from your yard, spray paint them and use them as part of your table centerpiece.
“The thing to do is look at the photos and don’t focus on the grandiose,” Patricia said. “Instead, pick out individual items you like and can replicate yourself.”
It’s something of a Christmas miracle that the McMillans’ book is even made it to the stores.
It was about this same time last year when, hot on the success of their previous decorating book, “Christmas at Designers Homes Across America,” they received a call from their publisher: Could they do another? And have it ready for the 2018 holiday season?
“We had to arrange to have 29 homes around the country decorated and photographed, write the text and submit it all by the end of January,” said Patricia McMillan. “We had about two months total.”
This new book gives each home at least a half-dozen glossy pages containing plenty of fourcolor photos of the decorations.
Patricia is by training an interior designer and has been an editor at several design magazines and the (Newark) StarLedger. Katharine is a design consultant and worked as a journalist in New York and Florida. Together, they’ve co-authored several design and decor books, including “Home Decorating for Dummies,” which has been in print since 1998 — a “lifetime” for design books, according to Patricia.
The idea for “Christmas by Design” and its predecessors emerged from the McMillans’ experience several years ago while covering Mueble Paris, an international furniture exhibition.
“At the time there was a big to-do that religion is dying in America and around the world,” said Patricia. “So while we were in Paris we decided to attend worship service in Notre Dame. Standing room only. And this was in January, not the tourist season.”
A Wednesday night service they attended at Sacré-Coeur was also SRO.
“So we said, we don’t think religion is dead, and we think it’s time to do a Christmas book.”
So have yourself a merry little — and beautifully decorated — Christmas.