Table of contents for Jan/Feb 2021 in Veranda

“Preservation today can be a form of activism and a pathway for equity.” BRENT LEGGS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund 1, shared this eye-opening characterization of preservation with me last fall. I’d called him on the suggestion of my mother-in-law, after mentioning to her that working on an upcoming Veranda issue dedicated to Southern design had stirred my curiosity about preservation of antebellum sites. After all, how can one truly understand Southern style today without exploring its origins—and the ugly, often untold stories that lie therein? Of course, those stories are not just Southern but American, and they’re not limited to antebellum sites, as Leggs was quick to point out. In fact, of the more than 100,000 places on the…

“This shade of yellow is bright enough for a summer day yet full of autumnal warmth to help the room stay cozy all winter.”—DESIGNER CELERIE KEMBLE…

JOY MOYLER: People are taking note of your work. How does it feel to have the spotlight? FLETCHER WILLIAMS III: It’s rewarding and encouraging that a wide range of people are attracted to this work and are part of the conversation, and to shed light on a practice so deeply rooted in the Low Country landscape. My curiosity for my own neighborhood and city, the development of new neighborhoods, and the destruction of old ones has unfolded into a body of work relevant to the conversation regarding social issues. JM: The materials you work with are varied: scrap steel, found wood, marsh grasses, automotive paint. Are they your language? FW: They definitely inform my work. I’m looking out of my window now seeing moss hanging from the trees swaying in…

PRESERVATION AS ACTIVISM This story is the first in a new series produced with the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. ON FEBRUARY 1, 1968, THE streets of Memphis, Tennessee, flowed with rainwater. The downpour overwhelmed sewers, making it all but impossible for sanitation workers to perform their already grueling tasks. Two workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, sought shelter from the storm in the back of their garbage truck. When an electrical switch malfunctioned, they were crushed. Their tragic deaths sparked outrage, but when the Memphis Public Works department refused to compensate their families, the community had had enough. The workers congregated at Clayborn Temple, a stately Romanesque Revival African Methodist Episcopal church that had become the central hub of the Memphis civil rights…

At the relativelyearly age of 33, Willie Morris wrote a seminal memoir of growing up in the South, suggesting with his title, North Towards Home, that only in leaving the South could he fully understand its cruelty and beauty. Like Morris, I spent my 20s and 30s in New York City, and it was there that I developed a more complicated appreciation, and a deeper love, for the land of my birth. I was lucky during those years to be surrounded by other Southerners who felt the push and pull of home. My wife, Keith, had grown up in the Mississippi Delta, and our close friend, the writer Julia Reed, another Mississippian, ran a Southern salon of sorts out of her grand apartment on East 78th Street. Frequent guests at…

Jim Sanders is racing the storm. A late-season hurricane is rolling through the Gulf, set to arc up out of Louisiana in as soon as three days. At the helm of a 50,000-pound picker, Sanders cuts through dense rows of cotton, “good cotton,” he says, crossing into a field where grid lines vanish beneath tangles of thick, snowy bolls. And it is good cotton: long-staple, Upland cotton, highly sought by makers from luxury linen producers to global garment mills. A lengthy rain could affect the harvest, and life along the Arkansas Delta has long relied on good, consistent crops. But in Wilson, where Sanders will keep at it long after dark, they’re flipping the script. Good cotton will depend on life in Wilson. The town’s namesake, R. E. “Lee” Wilson,…

BROWSING LISA FINE’S TEXTILES is like thumbing a well-used passport. Her very titles summon distant ports of call: Cairo, Lahore, Luxor, Mandalay. “Travel and museums have always provided the best inspiration,” says the New York–based designer, who draws two deep traditions together in Zahra, a batik print launching this spring and adapted as an exclusive Veranda scarf. Vivid carnations and pomegranates of Ottoman Turkey mingle with 17th- and 18th-century Iznik patterns in madder reds and indigos reminiscent of historic textiles of Persia, and, again, of India. “Pretty patterns and rich colors are universal,” she notes. Lucky for us, they transcend time as well. lisafinetextiles.com…

A COOL CROCODILE JEWEL, GRAPHIC SWEDISH RUGS, PATTERNED CHINA LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT & MORE! THE FIND • Sabrina Landini’s Freevolle sculpture table lamp, in hand-crafted and finished brass, with a silk shade THE BACKSTORY • “Freevolle is femininity, elegance, stability,” says Italian designer Sabrina Landini, who points to a pantheon of influences for her lithe metal silhouette, with its near-insouciant crossing of legs and gently pleated silk shade (aloft as though a skirt caught in an updraft). Among them, Rose Repetto, the French-Italian designer who pioneered the ballet flat (and put them on Brigitte Bardot for the film And God Created Woman); Line Vautrin, the famed French creator of sculptural mirrors and fashion; master glass artist Max Ingrand; and, not least, “Audrey Hepburn,” she adds. MEET THE MAKER…

“I often use color to remind me of places I’ve been and countries I love. I saw this deep ochre while traveling in Italy and vowed to use it one day.”—DESIGNER SARA BENGUR…

TAWDERY, PIE-SPOTTED, flabby, ragged, lowpriz’d thing call’d Callicoe….” In 17th- and 18th-century England, a plain woven cotton fabric from the East had linen and wool makers reeling. The lightweight painted textile, known in its native India as chintz, had crept across Europe like a plague of climbing roses, and in pamphlets and pleas to government, activists spared no hyperbole in admonishing it. Demand was intense, even sparking a global economy unfamiliar at such a scale. Silk had traveled and traded, of course, but not like this: Chintz was far more democratic, a fashion for the masses. And designs were elaborately catered to English trends of the day. The latter was a shrewd calculation by chintz’s South Asian makers, but it might have clouded what was already a long and vibrant…

The Lost Art of Letter Writing JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS was a master at the art of reception, both ceremonial and among friends, a skill no doubt balanced by the time she found to pen missives to her husband “Jack” and dear confidantes. This famed equilibrium inspired designer Jan Showers’s ladies study just inside the entrance: Her gold Napoleon III–style sofa and a 1960s bronze-and-opaline Maison Jansen coffee table suggest a most welcoming parlor, while a Karl Springer goatskin desk and glass-encased library turn the elegant space into one that functions as well for private moments. Making a (Beautiful) Mess in the Kitchen THINK OF IT AS A CHEF’S HIDEAWAY. Tucked behind Chad Dorsey’s lustrous open kitchen, with its oak, yacht-inspired millwork, chinoiserie-painted mirror (by James Mobley), and hammered brass peninsula,…

RADIO WEAVE MESH WEAVE…

FIERY BARGELLO The flame-stitch motif gets its name from the Florence castle (and former prison) where a set of embroidered chairs were discovered. Excellent palace intrigue… IKAT ALMIGHTY Contemporaneous remnants of the resist-dyed fabric unearthed from Peru to Japan suggest unifying powers—heroic at the dinner table. POTENT DYED SILKS Han Dynasty elite would ply hostile nomads with the ultrafine textiles as a way to weaken their resolve. Indelicate guests might benefit from the same.…

“Different yellows suit different climates and places. Warmer ones are more northern, cooler, more southern.”—DESIGNER ALESSANDRA BRANCA…

AUSTIN, TX “You feel like you’re visiting your great-uncle’s estate. It’s Gatsby-like.” Believe Ken Fulk when he says this about Commodore Perry Estate, an Auberge Resort that opened last year, because he—like an epic poet—is a master at spinning fancy into inhabitable realities. Nearly a century after Austin shipping magnate Edgar Perry fashioned an Italianate mansion and formal gardens on 10 acres just north of the city, Fulk has breathed new wonder into that past to conjure a profoundly welcoming present. A new inn adds 42 guest rooms to the reborn mansion’s 5, and, in both, a bold palette derives from the home’s original tilework (notably a curry hue dubbed “Perry gold”). Meanwhile, vivid Pierre Frey florals and new murals give walls a voice, pieces sourced from Round Top Antiques…

“The unexpected details we put in the house pay homage to classicism and traditional homes. But they’re quirky or have a bit of a twist.”—DESIGNER MELANIE TURNER ARCHITECT YONG PAK, FOUNDING partner of the Atlanta firm Pak Heydt & Associates, has what he calls a three strikes, you’re out rule. “After three large renovations, a house usually doesn’t have much left,” he says. In other words, time for a teardown. That was essentially the advice he gave to a couple who’d acquired a century-old home in Atlanta’s Ansley Park neighborhood, enviably located a short walk from the Midtown Arts District. But the residence had endured multiple major alterations, including being divided into apartments in the 1960s and a conversion back to a single-family home in the ’80s in a heavy,…

INSTANT HEIRLOOM Page 13 Hat box, oil portrait, and wooden box: Chelsea Antiques; chelseaantiques1.com. Leather books: Tricia’s Treasures; 205-871-9779. Archer magnifying glass, letter opener set, and Shagreen paper tray: Aerin; aerin.com. PATTERN PLAY Page 20 Ramie Weave wallpaper: Thibaut; thibautdesign.com Assembled pair of 20th-century brackets: Parc Monceau; 1stdibs.com. Franklin lampshade: Perrotine; perrotine.co. Caron table lamp: Thomas O’Brien for Visual Comfort; circalighting.com. Framed butterfly print, woven basket, tulipiere, and 19th-century Louis Philippe chest: The Nest; 205-870-1264. Framed portraits: Tricia’s Treasures; 205-871-9779. FINER THINGS Page 36 Gold frame and framed portraits: Tricia’s Treasures; 205-871-9779. Hampstead Verdure fabric: Watts of Westminster; watts1874.co.uk. 2021 NEXT LEGENDS Page 55 Hardwood decorative mouldings: White River Hardwoods; whiteriver.com. Crème Extra Alabama marble: AM3 Stone; am3stone.com. 8" cabinet maker picture light: Chapman & Myers for Visual Comfort; circalighting.com. Gold frame: Chelsea Antiques; chelseaantiques1.com.…