Perfecting Imperfection
At Karla Winchester’s house in Boonville, architectural salvage and one-of-a-kind pieces spell out the meaning of “home.”
As visitors enter the Boonville home of Karla Winchester, owner of the recently opened Columbia store Grace, “A Place of Restoration,” a refined and welcoming facade greets them. A formally balanced fenestration punctuated with green shuttered windows contrasts against the painted white-brick veneer. For lovers of architectural detail, which most assuredly includes this homeowner, the exterior focal point is a highly decorative wrought iron Juliet balcony centered above the front door and supported by three equally ornate angle brackets. A wreath of hydrangeas adds softness to the colonial-style front door, is flanked by fluted pilasters and pairs of carriage lamps, lions, urns and topiary.
Once a visitor steps inside Winchester’s home, however, most of that formally balanced design disappears.
Not so matchy-matchy
Not one to buy complete furniture sets, Winchester admits, “I don’t like a matchy-matchy kind of look, but I particularly like antique chairs.” Seated in a one-of-a-kind red needlepoint chair pulled up next to the fireplace in her combination music room/office entrance, she favors the flexibility chairs and ottomans provide over the more typical large sofa seating solution.
With a degree in communications from the University of Missouri in the ‘80s and married to an MU football player, Winchester worked as an interior decorator during the next 20 years in the St. Louis/Chesterfield area and built her business slowly, partly because of the birth of her three children: Brandon Milla, 24; Taylore Milla, 22; and Kathryn Milla, 14. During that time she decorated in Mediterranean and modern styles while living in suburban subdivisions where all the houses looked alike.
“My mother is an interior decorator in Kansas City, and that’s where most of my family lives and where I grew up,” she says. Looking for a change in direction after divorcing in 2003, she began looking for an historic home in mid-Missouri. She moved to Boonville in 2004 where the selection was good. Finding a corporate job with benefits also fit the bill.
In her first Boonville home, located near the Kemper Military Academy campus, she painted the walls and ceilings in a Godiva chocolate brown. Winchester still had aspirations to buy and renovate an aging Italianate beauty nearby into a bed-and-breakfast, but the deal fell through. She is grateful that in the end she wound up on Morgan Street. “An older home is not for everyone; you can definitely be biting off more than you can chew,” she says.
Instead, in 2007, she purchased a two-story German classic 1860s vintage home. Originally this house had only four rooms: two upstairs and two downstairs. An addition to the back of the house increased its size to about 1,400 square feet to accommodate a larger family. “The people who owned the home were the people who started the SteinHaus Restaurant,” Winchester says, which was on Main Street in downtown Boonville. They raised five children in this house and had a perennial garden in the back — mostly known for its daylily collection.
“The house is definitely eclectic,” she says. “Friends and family were shocked when they first visited me in this home because this was not a style I’d ever done before. Because I’m alone, it was a new, fresh look. I think it was the style of the house and the charm of the backyard … it just called for it. When I walked in, it was more of that sort of cottage-y feeling. It’s more different than what I’ve ever had. I’ve never had a house that was as neutral as this. I’m enjoying it a lot.”
The thrill of the hunt
By 2009, Winchester made another life-altering decision — to quit the corporate world and open her store, Grace, “A Place of Restoration,” in Rocheport. It specializes in architectural accents, antiquities, salvaged décor and one-of-a-kind repurposed creations.
“To me, it’s the thrill of the hunt,” she says. “I do a lot of architectural salvage at my store, so this is the first home that I’ve done that really lent itself to a cottage-y feel.” Examples of her favorite decorating element, architectural salvage, show up in every room. Next to a new door that allows light and leads into the garden stands a rustic white painted column found in the New Orleans area, and there are more of them standing at attention in other rooms. Above the door is a cornice with dentil molding, another architectural salvage weakness of Winchester’s. Still another favorite is an architectural frame with a wall clock mounted inside that came from an estate sale. It hangs adjacent to a 100-year-old Steinway grand piano, a family heirloom and gift from her parents when she turned 14 that she and her children continue to play. A reproduction wire candle chandelier softens the 10-foot ceiling in the front room and adds a touch of black, one of Winchester’s design mantras. Original yellow pine flooring, plaster walls, a converted gas fireplace and lots of shelving filled with family photos, which give the room its lived-in look, encompass what Winchester calls her “pass-through” room.
Spending most of her time in what would have been the original dining room, Winchester prefers to call it her front sitting room. White slipcovers on the love seat can be switched out with the seasons, just as the botanical prints that hang above it can also be easily removed and exchanged for a different look. “I’m not an oak person,” Winchester says, explaining why she painted the oak dining table nestled in the corner. She prefers to use it as a workspace but notes that it, too, is flexible should she need it for a dinner party.
Burlap window treatments add texture to the tall south-facing windows in the front of the house without costing a bundle and can easily be replaced once they become sun-damaged. Like all homes, this one is a work in progress, and Winchester hopes to replace the single-pane original windows eventually as well as install colonial-style half shutters. In the meantime, “I’m trying to keep the integrity of the house,” she says.
If a lot of her furniture in her home and store appear to have a lighter palette, there is a reason. Although Winchester has no particular paint-brand affinity, she does use mostly Sherwin-Williams paint on her walls because she likes the way it covers. For her furniture painting projects, however, she uses probably 70 percent of the Walmart brand’s “Country White.”
“The power of paint is unbelievable,” she says. “The joke in our family is that I would have painted my kids if they had stood still. I’m not big on getting rid of pieces; I like to repurpose them. If a piece of furniture doesn’t work anymore, I’ll chop it up, use the legs, make a headboard out of a door. Whatever it is, the challenge is to repurpose it. Most of my things I already had, or they were flea-market finds.”
Return to her roots
Moving to the middle room between the front room and the kitchen where stairs lead to two bedrooms, Winchester stresses: “I have paneled the walls with doors with the knobs on them. I did that because I wanted to. My last name is Winchester, and I took that name; it was my great-grandma’s last name. So when I got divorced, I decided to go back to my maiden name, which is Reardon, but then I hyphenated and chose Winchester. My parents had always talked about the Winchester Mansion in San Francisco (named after the man who invented the Winchester rifle) and whose heiress was basically a crazy woman.” She believed in ghosts, and when her husband died, she felt that anyone who had died at the hands of a Winchester rifle would haunt her if she did not continuously build on to the mansion. “There are doors there that go nowhere. When my parents came to visit they said, ‘You’re just like the Winchester lady with doors that go nowhere.’”
Without realizing that her paneled doors would remind her of her roots, she left them pretty much like she found them — rustic. In this middle room where the big TV hangs above a sideboard in an area converted from a closet, she white washed the hardwood floors, installed a pair of rustic columns to separate it from the kitchen and added pine beams on the ceiling to make the space appear wider.
The layout of the kitchen is virtually unchanged, with another original brick fireplace, also converted to gas, nestled in the corner. Although granite countertops were not in the budget and cabinets had only the doors replaced, Winchester splurged on recessed lighting and a Gothic-shaped chandelier found in the catalog Shades of Light. While visiting her parents in Kansas City, she found a super deal on a floor display commercial 48-inch gas/convection Heartland range from Canada at a Home Goods store. Open shelving with corbels beneath holds dishes, and decorative items hang next to the door to the laundry room that leads out to the garden.
Just above the sink a Gothic window frame fits perfectly in front of the window covered in ivy on the outside. “I try to use things I love,” Winchester says. “I love pediments. Love birdcages. I love doing something unusual. I particularly favor Palladian windows and Gothic windows. Gothic windows are very difficult to find. I’ll pay a little more for a gothic window just because I love them. I’m fascinated with religious relics. I’ve always liked that shape. … It truly works as a focal point.”
In her upstairs master bedroom, which has a black-and-white theme, more personal photos and artwork of her children are displayed. “I miss my children horribly, so it comforts me to see them,” Winchester says. A four-poster bed, left by the previous owner, is graced by an unexpected sock monkey.
“This is my whimsical,” Winchester says. “I never had a sock monkey. I got it for Christmas, and I like having it on my bed. I think every room should have something whimsical. I think it is a reminder to myself not to take life so seriously.”
