Interior designer April Jensen lives in a 150-year-old home in Glendale, a white Federal farmhouse with elegant Italianate details set at the end of a long driveway. Its rambling beauty is made for the movies: four terraces, a wide front porch with a haint-blue ceiling, and the original red barn— now a pool house—in the backyard.
Five years ago—on the day she and her husband, Jason; their children, Lily, Julien, and Tallulah; and a gaggle of dogs moved in—the pipes burst in their youngest daughter’s bathroom, sending a torrent of water from the second floor through the built-in bookcases in Jason’s office below and on into the basement. “‘Well, that sucks,’” Jensen says, recalling the couple’s initial reaction.
But the family was too excited about living in the house to let one bout of bad luck ruin their day. Instead, they turned the experience into an opportunity to renovate: updating the lighting, adding a new thermostat and audiovisual system, and painting the whole house white, helping highlight its fine details and original woodwork. “I’m calm under pressure,” Jensen says. “When it’s over I’ll typically fall apart,” she adds, laughing, “but then it passes. Life is short.”
This story is from the September/October 2019 edition of DesignSTL.
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This story is from the September/October 2019 edition of DesignSTL.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Cut from the Same Cloth
“Turkey Tracks” is a 19th-century quiltmaking pattern that has the appearance of little wandering feet. Patterns like the tracks, and their traditions and myths, have been passed down through the generations, from their frontier beginnings to today, where a generation of makers has embraced the material as a means of creating something new. Olivia Jondle is one such designer. Here, she’s taken an early turkey track-pattern quilt, cut it into various shapes, and stitched the pieces together, adding calico and other fabric remnants as needed. The result is a trench coat she calls the Pale Calico Coat. Her designs are for sale at The Rusty Bolt, Jondle’s small-batch fashion company based in St. Louis. —SAMANTHA STEVENSON
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