Sometimes a house speaks for itself. “This house has a big voice,” says New York–based designer Charlotte Moss, a house whisperer of the first order.
Indeed the Tudor manse in Houston’s tony River Oaks neighborhood boasts a Texas-sized accent, full of flourish and distinction, where Moss raised and lowered the volume, with decor decibels ranging from hushed pink in a tea paper-cloaked entryway to fully amplified garden room and formal living and entertaining spaces.
“The home is beautifully scaled in an elegant, old-world way. It has nice proportions so the furniture reflects the architecture—all very classic,” says Moss, her Southern accent still recognizable despite decades of living in New York.
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Her clients, Texas natives, had long had their eye on this landmark property surrounded by magnificent oaks, and when the husband first floated the idea to buy it, his wife countered with a suggestion of her own. She pointed to a copy of Moss’s book A Flair for Living and suggested they give the renowned decorator a call.
Moss happily agreed and quickly discovered a splendid synergy with her new clients. “They wanted an elegant vibe but with great ease and a sense of invitation,” says Moss, a native Virginian whose refined hand embodies just that. “Plus it’s not often that a husband takes a day to sit through seven hours of a decorating presentation. Getting to see them react to ideas and discuss them together made our meetings fun.”
But before the decorating could commence, the late 1920s home needed tweaking to revive its original American country house grandeur. “It’d been fiddle-faddled with over the years,” says Bill Curtis of Houston-based Curtis & Windham Architects. Curtis edited “the rather dated hodgepodge of additions, taking off two-thirds and putting two-thirds back on again,” he says.
But he kept the heart of the house—the grand entry hall with its original travertine and antique brass Deco stair railing and spacious living and dining rooms. Additions included extra bedrooms, a garden room connecting the two wings, and modern updates, like a butler’s pantry and gym, plus a library for the husband’s serious book collection. “We had clients who thought big,” Curtis says. “They weren’t shrinking violets; they knew what they wanted while also respecting the house.”
Case in point: the husband’s black and white marble bath inspired by those at Claridge’s in London, along with a tented dressing room and coffee bar that speak to his love of Africa with Empire Moroccan furniture and a collection of African animal photos by Thomas Bossard. And yet it was a trip to a Kentshire auction together, says Moss, “that set us off on a course that established the look.”
There they found a Georgian breakfront for the dining room, a beautiful George III library table and chairs, and a circa 1740 Piedmontese secretaire for the living room. She then balanced that room’s silk curtains and velvet sofa with chintz chairs that appear older, as if they could be heirlooms. “It’s about a genteel luxuriousness, classic and enduring but fresh and informed,” says Moss, who framed the back wall with two large capriccio-style landscapes by New York artist Anne Harris, which “capture the story and scale” of the imaginative genre of paintings.
Tour This Houston Tudor Designed by Charlotte Moss
Similarly Moss commissioned a “Birds of Texas” painting series from Savannah, Georgia, decorative painter Bob Christian to perch along the stairway, in varying sizes and frames “so it looks like it sort of happened,” she says. “What grounds this house is a personal connection between people and their things, a true expression of their interests.”
And thus the library. Here the story, or volumes of stories housed on mahogany shelves designed by Curtis, is a personal ode to a dedicated bibliophile. “I’ve done a lot of libraries, but this is a library,” says Moss, characterizing the husband’s book collection as “absolutely stunning.” Of note, she created a table to fit the husband’s elephant folios and had Jamb in London carve the Ashburton marble mantel, “the single largest mantel I’ve ever done.”
While Curtis’s architectural reconfiguring uncovered “the soul of a house that had been added to a million times,” Moss articulated that soulfulness through nuanced layering of antiques and custom touches, like the “to-die-for” Bonacina wicker in the garden room, where a hand-needlepointed ottoman took months for artists to create.
“But it’s a showstopper, absolutely worth the wait. It’s so energizing to toss an idea out there and have the client not only say yes but to be so enthusiastic about it,” she says. Stitch by painstaking stitch, tile by hand-painted Portuguese tile, as Moss knows, in a big house with a big voice, it’s often the little things that have the most to say.
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Featured in our May/June 2023 issue. Interior Design by Charlotte Moss; Architecture by Bill Curtis; Photography by Trevor Tondro; Styling by Rachael Burrow; Written by Stephanie Hunt.
