Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1376329
Houston designer Mary Groves to help me refresh the original cottage that we planned to turn into a guest house. For the new larger primary farm house, we hired two of my design idols, Curtis & Windham Architects in Houston and Miles Redd with Redd Kaihoi in NYC. We had worked with Bill Curtis on our house in Houston and adored him and I was a devoted Miles Redd fan for years – working with him and his business partner David Kaihoi was a dream. (For design details on the big house, see page 57.) The new house was completed in June 2018, and we immediately put it to the test, hosting 22 adults and 19 children — all under the age of 8 — for Labor Day. Every bed in both houses, plus Trailer Swift (the vintage Spartan trailer we rehabbed and installed on one side of the lawn), was full. We swam, we played, we cooked, we lit fireworks — we lit it all up! As Miles Redd said about the experience of working with us: "Bailey and Pete are like a live-action Wes Anderson film, and we wanted a certain cinematic mise en scène that is essential to any retreat. But, at the end of the day, it is simply a backdrop. It really boils down to how someone lives in a house. Pete and Bailey should give a master class in this dying art." I don't know that anyone needs to be taking lessons from Pete and me on anything, but we do know how to really live in a house. Part of that is because I need to have my people, and people are messy. If something gets stained, I consider it another layer of patina. After all, antique collectors will tell you that provenance is imperative — and what could be more valuable than to imbue our surroundings with the markings of our own happy history? I'm all about keeping it fancy, not formal. I think this perspective is one of the reasons friends feel comfortable staying with us, which in turn means we frequently get to enjoy a house full of friends. When quarantine began, Pete and I moved our family out to the