SECOND EDITION -
Architectural Digest Magazine

A decade on, a house and its architect meet again

By Jean Strouse

"Make it new," said the apostle of Modernism, Ezra Pound. When the Louisiana-based architect Ken Tate was invited to do major revisions on a large house in the Southeast, he had no trouble imagining how to make it new: He had originally designed it. He divides the story of the process into phase 1 and phase 2.

Phase 1 began in 1996. Tate's clients, a couple with grown children, had bought three lots between a lake and a street, and they wanted a capacious house with French accents that would not overwhelm its site. Tate created a four-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot structure with shifting massing, fine materials and a human scale. He wrapped walls around the entire site and created courtyards for outdoor rooms. He brought in Phillip Watson, a horticulturist based in Atlanta, who filled the courtyards with pernnials (jasmine, gardenias, hydrangeas), annuals for color and trees. Tate calls the gardens "exuberant." Watson says plantings "should always be an extension of architecture."

The front courtyard and doors lead to a wide entrance gallery with a dramatic barrel-vaulted limestone ceiling. Straight ahead, the room has an 18th-century French limestone mantel, antique-chestnut floors, 15-foot ceilings with pickled-oak beams and purlins and three pairs of overscale French doors opening out to a gracious, columned terrace. ("No transoms," says Tate; he wanted all the lines to be vertical.) The terrace runs along the back of the house north to south, and all the principal rooms on two floors look out at the lake.

The work on phase 1 was completed in 2000. In 2005 his clients, private investors, bought the house next door and started phase 2. This time Tate brought on board interior designer Ann Holden, who works out of New Orleans. The new plans called for moving all the guest rooms into the house next door (stripped down to bare studs and reconstructed), connecting the two structures with a gallery, turning the entire second floor of the main house into a master suite, creating a media room downstairs and building a pool pavilion in front of the guesthouse. In all, they would be adding 5,000 square feet to the house. The husband says, "Ken was very open to making all these changes, to redefining our home. It was a great gift." Though the process took longer than expected, the couple never had to move out — just upstairs and down.

Holden worked closely with the wife on the interior spaces. "She wanted a contemporary, sleek look throughout," recalls the designer, "with lots of texture and softness. She knows what she likes and made her decisions very, very quickly. We did the whole house in two months!" The handsome new blue-gray-green media room has a bay of tall French doors facing east to the lake and additional doors opening onto the terrace to the south. A movie screen hides in the cased opening to the bay. The wife, for her part, says, "Ann has style in her DNA!"

The light and airy new master bedroom upstairs in the main house has its own bay of casement doors with views of treetops and the lake. Tate cut into trusses to raise the ceiling and create a coffered vault. The owners have other houses and extremely active lives, and they travel a great deal. Still, says the wife, "I come home from any trip, and nowhwere we've been has views as beautiful as the one from this bedroom. It's my sanctuary space."