My husband, Sid, and I have lived in many homes—too many, to be honest—some by choice, some by circ*mstance. Our current house in Atlanta, though, feels like the culmination of all of them. This is the house of my childhood imagination, even as I couldn’t have imagined back then exactly what that would look like.
Growing up, my family moved every two years or so, going from one Midwestern ranch-style house to the next. The best was a tri-level, when I was in sixth grade, that looked like something out of The Brady Bunch. That year, we took the requisite family trip to Washington, D.C., and I found myself standing in the rotunda of the National Gallery of Art. It was pretty unbelievable. The smallness I felt in that soaring space, surrounded by the Ionic columns and the quiet of the massive gallery that fed into it…I wanted to live there. Nobody had told me that a room could make you feel like that.
A pair of sun-faded pink George Sherlock sofas embody lived-in elegance.
Paul Costello
And that is how I feel in our home today: like I live in a museum. High ceilings, bare floors, grand architectural details. The millwork arch in the front hall mimics the same passageway from that rotunda. There is a fantastic pediment above the fireplace, and beautiful carved waves going up the stairway. Corinthian columns flank the front door, with scrolls and pineapples above, and a pair of eagles. It may be a fraction of the scale, but the feeling is the same for me. I want to live here.
A Moooi pendant and Saarinen tulip tables are fresh counterpoints to the house’s classical architecture.
Paul Costello
Mashburn, pictured, is framed by an elegant arched doorway.
Paul Costello
Vintage chairs from Scott Antique Markets, a favorite of Mashburn’s, in the sitting room.
Paul Costello
Sid and I are clothing designers, not architects or decorators, and have made plenty of mistakes in the places we’ve lived in over the years. But somehow, in this house, all our experiments with style have come together. Our collected furnishings and objects seem to have flown into the rooms and settled in. It is as if they were meant to be here all along. Even the mistakes.
There are the big, fat pink George Sherlock couches in the living room that were purchased over the telephone in 2001 after I saw them in the Styles section of the New York Times in the home of someone cool. (Maybe Bryan Ferry?) I didn’t have a great sense of the scale when I purchased two of them! They’ve been squeezed into three other living rooms, but here they can finally breathe. The sunshine has turned the solid pink into a kind of Rorschach test of faded splotches. The drum set in the corner is a bit of wasted space—another sitting area would be more practical—but it was a sentimental Christmas gift to Sid, who had grown up playing the drums but never owned a set himself.
Arne Jacobsen Series Seven chairs for Fritz Hansen mingle with Louis XVI caned chairs around a modern marble-top table. A Serge Mouille-style three-arm floor lamp adds sculptural contrast to the otherwise subdued space.
Paul Costello
Our dining table was purchased in a hurry: I loved the legs, but never liked the paneled top that screamed “reproduction.” It’s now covered with a regulation blue ping-pong topper…and looks better that way. We use it more, too. The Calderesque mobile above it, from Volta Paris, was a must-have since I have deemed myself a museum dweller (although it’s more MoMA gift shop than gallery piece).
A ping-pong table topper and Volta mobile are playful additions to the dining room; miniature dachshund Fanny guards the ball.
Paul Costello
“A museum is filled with beautiful art and objects: the evidence of lives lived, and of things created. You could say the same about this house.”
ANN MASHBURN
Mashburn found this vintage canopy bed, now in her daughter’s room, at an estate sale; the settee was a hand-me-down from a friend and the light fixture is from IKEA.
Paul Costello
And like in many museums, the modern looks amazing mixed in with the old. Sid’s and my first big acquisition together was a Warren Platner coffee table purchased when we were in our early 20s from a Knoll warehouse sale in Long Island City. We had no idea what it was, but man, it looked cool. Our oldest daughter would learn to walk around it, leaving fingerprints on the glass top in our first apartment as a family of three on lower Fifth Avenue. Like the couches, it has lived in a dozen rooms since then, but has never looked happier than it does here.
People who love houses speak of living in them as a guest: The house is permanent, but you are not. This one is mine for now, and each room tells a story, not only through the structure, but the kooky, funny things inside of it.
An antique chinoiserie bed in another daughter’s room is dressed in Matouk linens.
Paul Costello
A Knoll Bertoia Diamond Chair and antique sofa create a seating area on the upstairs landing.
Paul Costello
We bought this house in 2022 when we were still wrapping our heads around the sort of place that would work for our nontraditional, multigenerational living arrangement. We have five grown daughters, and we will share our home with two of them forever as they have a recently diagnosed progressive motor neuron disease. It is a new phase of life for all of us, and a bit of a creative puzzle. There is a garden-level floor for them that allows us to live together but separately, with a wonderfully light-filled stairwell connecting the two parts of the house—or maybe, rather, the two wings of our little museum.
A museum is filled with beautiful art and objects: the evidence of lives lived, and of things created. You could say the same about this house. Though we don’t close on Mondays.
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 13 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
