DesignSTL September/October 2022

I’VE EXPERIENCED A few waves of nostalgia in the course of editing this issue. Our biggest story this month is the Most Beautiful Homes in St. Louis package, which in 2015 was my first assignment for the magazine—then titled At Home. Reporting this story always coincides with the start of summer, and when my kids were younger they would often join me on outings, jotting down addresses and snapping photos from the backseat of the car as I searched for the year’s lineup of houses. On some occasions, as the photo here shows, the kids were invited to visit houses with me. One very special home, which we’ve now photographed twice for the magazine, sits on the bank of the Missouri River. I don’t recall exactly how I found the…

JULIA NAVARRO HAS never formally studied fashion. After high school, she enrolled in the Grabber School of Hair Design. She then worked as a hairstylist and makeup artist for weddings, photo shoots, and MAC Cosmetics for 10 years before launching her clothing label, wear cOLor out loud, which she designs at her home in Affton. In addition to creating fashion in her colorful, expressive style, Navarro also joins forces with her sister, personal injury attorney Christine Navarro, to produce a weekly podcast, titled What Did They Mean By That? The sisters explore the meanings behind song lyrics in the weekly 1-hour show. In fact, it was a sisterly brainstorm during one of their many road trips together that resulted in the name of Julia’s brand. Here, Julia shares more about…

SELF-CARE IS a buzzy term—and a multibillion-dollar industry. But for Kennedi Brown, self-care is also a passion, one she’s working to make accessible to all through her wellness brand, Herbaura. The collection of products and packages, along with the brand’s multimedia arm, The Self-Care Collective, are the young entrepreneur’s way of introducing the self-care products and strategies that have worked for her to others. “It all came about because I needed something in my life that made me feel like I had a purpose,” she says. “Every Thursday, I would get together with my friends or my family, or sometimes just by myself, and I would find ways to take care of myself, either through affirmations or making DIY skin care or aromatherapy or making myself some tea and just…

HAVING ART AS a full-time career is a challenge, but local artist Carol Carter has made it work for 45 years. “I’ve never had another job, other than tiny little fill-in jobs here or there,” she says, sitting in her corner studio on Shenandoah. Carter has painted in acrylics for much of her career, but her first love has always been watercolor—the medium she uses exclusively now. All of those years she spent painting large-scale acrylics, she says, “showed me that I could take a tiny mousy medium and make [my paintings] large and make them have impact.” There’s little doubt about that when you’re standing in front of a herd of her zebras or one of her 5-foot-tall florals: Her work demands attention. “Years ago, after graduate school, I…

HINTS ABOUT SAM MELÉNDEZ’S process can be gleaned from what’s visible on the artist’s canvases—and what isn’t. “I sketch everything with charcoal and make notes to myself on the canvas,” says the 47-year-old self-taught painter. Then, he either develops the idea or simply dusts away the charcoal and moves on. This desire to share traces of his progress on canvas took hold after Meléndez captured one photo of a painting with the markings, another one without them, and realized how much he preferred the first. “I loved it,” he says. “I like to see the process, including the notes that I make to myself.” By making his progression public, the artist offers up a dialogue with the viewer, revealing the evolution of his ideas and creating works that are honest…

AUTHOR VIVIAN GIBSON lives less than a mile from the site of her first childhood home, a three-room shotgun-style house in the former Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. A casualty of one of the city’s “urban renewal” developments, the house—and surrounding homes—were torn down in 1959 to pave the way for the construction of U.S. Highway 40 (now Interstate 64) and, more specifically, the Jefferson offramp. That vibrant but segregated working-class Black neighborhood is now gone, but Gibson keeps its memory alive in her elegant home: A black-and-white image of the house hangs on the living room wall. “It was part of our makeup to make things beautiful,” says Gibson, 73, who shared the Mill Creek house with extended family. “My mother was an artist, so even though our house was…