St. Louis Magazine October 2024

GREAT HOUSES ARE always worth the wait. It's a philosophy I've subscribed to over the course of writing about them for the past decade. More than a year or so ago, I began gathering ideas for this issue, scouting properties, logging calls to designers, and reaching out to homeowners. I had my eye on one house in particular, but I needed to see the interiors with my own eyes first. I contacted the interior designer, who put me in touch with the homeowners, who texted me to say that the house wasn't quite ready to show. A few months later, I followed up and got a similar reply: There's still more work to do. By the next spring, though, my luck had changed, and I got my first look inside…

THIS IS NOT A STORY about one mural turning a neighborhood around. That's unrealistic in Jeff-Vander-Lou, on the city's near North Side, and specifically at the corner of Compton and Bell, where you can stand and just feel empty space: in the nearby vacant lots, in the brick twofamily with its rear blasted out, in the shuttered community center at the northeast corner. But on a roasting August morning, 23-year-old artist Fatou Kane stood looking up at that center and felt something different: “I hope more art goes up in this area.” Kane had recently finished a swirling, two-story mural there depicting the renowned Black scientist George Washington Carver. It was one of 28 that the city commissioned using nearly $1 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. Each…

FYI Find more design coverage at stlmag.com THE REASONS ST. LOUIS BECAME a brick city are manifold: clay deposits in the earth, innovative brickmakers here in town, European immigrants who knew how to stack and scrape the blocks into elegance. But the reason St. Louis has stayed a brick city is simpler: tuckpointers. Without their attention to the spaces in between bricks, most of the city's building stock would've rotted long ago. The goal of tuckpointing is not just to stabilize but also to keep moisture outside, explains Julian Castillo of Mirelli Tuckpointing in Maplewood. In that sense, the trade hasn't changed much over time—even if it's easy to imagine Castillo's predecessors jealously eyeing his electric grinder and its diamond blade. Castillo began working for John and Cindy Mirelli about…

FYI Sign up for the Design + Home newsletter at stlmag.com/newsletters. ON JULY 20, Suzanne Woodard and Shawn Lipe, the couple behind the ReFind Room in Brentwood, held their second auction in Olivette. More than 40 buyers strolled into the room. It smelled of pine and paint from the stage that Lipe had built for the occasion. Guests sampled mimosas and pastries before settling into scoopy Pollock chairs. Lipe took his place at the front of the room and attempted to sell more than 150 items, primarily artworks. Many buyers in attendance won a bid, but they weren't alone: The auction was streamed online so folks around the world could bid through the platforms Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers, and Bidsquare, all of which sync with the platform that Woodard and Lipe created.…

RHYTHM PRELUDE Althea McNish, “Golden Harvest Textile,” 1959; screen-printed cotton; Saint Louis Art Museum, Richard Brumbaugh Trust in memory of Richard Irving Brumbaugh and Grace Lischer Brumbaugh SCREEN PRINTING—a stencil process in which color is forced onto the material through a mesh screen—was first used to mass-produce posters. But in the mid-1900s, the technique experienced a boom in another field: textile design. Bolts of Color: Printed Textiles after WWII, opening November 8 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, will present a collection of postwar, screen-printed textiles in the Carolyn C. and William A. McDonnell Gallery 100. Since the turn of the 20th century, artists had worked to disassemble the barriers between the art and design worlds, says Genevieve Cortinovis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation associate curator of decorative arts and design…

Stenciling Stencils could be customized depending upon the desired results of the final pattern. The design could be directly applied to the screen with a liquid filler substance such as shellac or glue, a method that designer Althea McNish was known for experimenting with. Stencils could also be cut from lacquer film and adhered to the screen using heat or chemicals. Photo emulsion The photo emulsion screen-printing process usually delivers more detailed images than other stenciling techniques. A layer of light-sensitive emulsion is first “squeegeed” onto the mesh screen and left to dry. Then, a photo is exposed onto the screen, using negative and positive space to prevent light from passing through. Areas left to light exposure then harden, leaving behind the desired design to be printed. Printing with multiple…