Elegant Refusal
Interior designer Jimmy Stanton and his partner, Patrick Greco, were looking for an Old South retreat from their hectic New South life in Atlanta. "We'd been thinking about buying a cottage on the beach, but that felt too far away for weekends," says Stanton. Then, the couple happened to stop for lunch in Madison, Georgia, on the way back from visiting Stanton's parents. "We walked around and fell in love with the place," he says.
The particular house that Stanton fixed on, however, wasn't one of the area's painstakingly cared-for mansions. The wildly overgrown property resembled "something out of Grey Gardens," Stanton recalls. "I loved it."
In this photo: Stanton shopped Stanton Home Furnishings, his own home-goods store, for the living room's corduroy-upholstered wing chairs, fern-print pillows, and antique demijohns. The drum-shaped ottomans are by Lee Industries; the oil portrait dates to the 1860s. The wall is painted Burlap by Ralph Lauren.
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The 1818 home laid claim to being the oldest brick structure in town: "Every doorway had crooked angles," Stanton says, "and the doors had these teeny, Hobbit-like handles." On Stanton's desire to fix the place up, Greco recalls: "I thought Jimmy was nuts."
As with any renovation, surprises lurked—though, in this case, many qualified as happy ones. When Greco scraped off the paint over the front door, he discovered a long-hidden transom, which took the house's entryway (pictured here) from dark and drab to light-flooded and inviting.
In this photo: A wall's worth of wildflowers (no fewer than 40!), pressed by a local artist, enlivens the center hall. Beneath, a salvaged church pew hosts pillows sewn from turn-of-the-century grain sacks. The walls are painted Writer's Parchment by Ralph Lauren.
As Stanton was adding beadboard to the dining-room ceiling, the whole thing buckled...only to reveal the original beadboard above. After stripping away those layers, the couple hesitated to furnish the space in the heavy period style one might expect to find in an antebellum manse. "We always intended to do a renovation—not a restoration," Stanton clarifies. So instead of damask window treatments and patterned rugs, he and Greco opted for a neutral palette of muted solids, mostly grays, brown, and creams.
In this photo: New oak-and-rush chairs surround an antique Belgian dining table, all from Stanton Home Furnishings. To fashion the wall display, Stanton liberated a few pewter plates from the china cabinet, made of reclaimed wood. The cast-iron pheasant was an eBay purchase.
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