By Deborah Mann Lake
Houston Post Design Editor
Returning from last summer’s vacation, Marsha Recknagel started telling the cab driver everything. About how she had left her all-white house in the hands of interior designer Kelly Gale Amen and about how she was incredibly nervous about all the color she was about to see. About how her furniture went off in a truck to be re-upholstered and what if she hated it?
She took a deep breath and opened the door to the Montrose-area home. “I walked in and thought, ‘I’ll never leave again,'” she said.
Amen had replaced her white upholstery and walls (which were turning gray, she admitted) with shades of green, gray and purple. Upholstery patterns became a rich mix of florals and stripes. A once-hidden David Marsh dining room table had its legs cut down to coffee table size. And the drapes were cascades of iridescent fabric that threw off light from a new opened up (with French doors) back wall.
“I still walk around and count all the colors,” said Recknagle, who teaches literature at Rice. “I feel so blessed waking up in this house.”
In a sense, the house was part of growing up. Her former decor had been more on the funky, off-beat, lighthearted track. There is still that sense of humor — Amen’s “dice” square pillows on the little romantic settee, for example, give it a twist. But this house is more elegant, richer. Ant that fits Recknagel’s changing life.
About to finish her first novel, a collection of stories about her colorful Southern family (she grew up in Shreveport, La.), Recknagel felt a bit unsettled — as though she needed a change. She had been accepted to a summer, month-long writer’s workshop, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, in Montauk, Long Island. Initially she called Amen, a friend, for some ideas on color.
“He came over a couple of weeks before I left,” Recknagel said. “I wanted a color scheme for the future. He came over with an entire design scheme. And the next day he came back with all the fabric samples. We just clicked with our mental images.” Before she knew it, Recknagel was on her way to Long Island and Amen had the run of the house.
“I was at a point in my life where I was going to have a geographic change or a face lift or something,” Recknagel said. “I needed a change and it was easier to change my setting and that resulted in a changed perspective. I was about to complete my novel and I didn’t want to come back to the same environment. Kelly revealed my dream house to me. I felt like I walked into a place where I had always been.”
The living room is a focal point of the house. Its’ filled with a textured tone-on-tone overstuffed sofa, the romantic sette, an antique chair (with front and back upholstered in different fabrics) and a wingback chair that Amen reshaped by overstuffing it to “give it more elegance,” he said.
Amen’s suggestion of cutting French doors in one wall for additional light made the entire room airier. “I wanted a continuum with the outside and the inside,” Amen said.
Walls were painted gray above the chair rail and a gray-green below it. The ceiling in this room, mottled in lavender, gold, green and other colors by artist Barbara Biel, ties together the shades throughout the rest of the downstairs. The entry hall is lavender, the dining room is a moss green. And her study, where she spends time writing, is now a rich cherry red. It was the last room to be done and originally she didn’t want to touch it.
“That’s my sacred space. What if I came back and hated it and had writer’s block?,” she said. It was finished a month ago and, as with all the color, she loves it. Large windows trimmed in white with white lacy curtains give relief to the red. New built-in bookshelves allow more books to be shelved, giving the room a cleaner appearance.
Recknagel said she entertains more now and even had her first dinner party there recently. She likes to see where people site and “how it gets arranged,” she said. “I wanted a place where you’re not afraid to move things around.”
One of the books she uses in her literature classes is Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty and Recknagel said her house now resembles the one described in the book.
“Being a Southerner, everything you do writes (tells about) yourself,” Recknagel said. “This house has that sense of place. If people don’t understand the house, they don’t understand me.”
