Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2022 i DesignSTL

ST. LOUIS NATIVE Frankie Muriel performs close to 200 shows a year. As the lead singer of Dr. Zhivegas, he’s constantly on the road, playing sold-out concerts in venues across the country. When he’s back in town, he needs his home to be a place where he can rest and recharge. “There’s always a half-packed suitcase in the bedroom,” says Muriel. “I spent a lot of the early part of my career living in hotels, going to resorts, and you start thinking, When I come home, I’d love this…” This is Muriel’s second house on The Hill, the historic Italian neighborhood known for its narrow single lots. In 2018, he was in the market to build on a double lot but when that didn’t work out, he settled for one.…

IF YOU WERE sitting next to Jenn Mariani’s family at a restaurant in 2019, you might have wondered what was keeping her daughters, then 4 and 2, entertained as they waited for dinner to be served. The girls were busy with the contents of a small bag—think half makeup kit, half binder—that their mother had filled with hands-on activities intended to limit the need to resort to screens. In June, Mariani launched a subscription-based business inspired by that original bag. Galled Keke Kids (kekekid.com), it’s geared to children ages 3-6. Professionally manufactured, the colorful gender-neutral nylon totes are designed with four custom pouches that can be clipped onto a binder and rotated in and out to suit the child and the need. Here, the entrepreneur, 38, fills us in on…

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…

AFTER SHOOTING WEDDINGS for six years and doing the occasional brand shoot, Emily Broadbent began thinking about opening a studio. “There are plenty of little spaces you can go and bring your own stuff that have good light,” she says, “but if you wanted an in-home or an in-office feel, or a lifestyle feel, there just wasn’t anything.” Having her own studio, she says, “was this weird back-of-the-brain dream.” A former firehouse at the corner of N. 20th and St. Charles in downtown St. Louis made that dream a reality. 20th Street Studios (503 N. 20th) opened for business May 4 as both a lifestyle studio and an all-white space. It’s available to rent to photographers and their clients. Broadbent is also for hire for a brand session or mini…

When the interior designer Wendy Temples-Steinbecker first heard about an unconventional yet promising property on which to build, it hadn’t yet hit the market. The steeply sloped terrain, bordering the Deer Greek watershed, was an untouched wooded lot in an otherwise settled area of Olivette. “I think people were a little scared to build on the site,” says Temples-Steinbecker, co-founder and principal of design firm Temple and Hentz. “A lot of people might have filled it in and then built the house rather than building into the grade, but we wanted [the house] to be part of the natural surroundings.” In other words, Temples-Steinbecker saw potential, and her team leaped at the opportunity for them to create something beautiful together. The designer collaborated with her boyfriend, Matt Cerretti, a homebuilder…

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…

IN DOWNTOWN WEST, construction crews have been hard at work building the new home of professional soccer in St. Louis. But as Centene Stadium takes shape on Market, another crew, at the nearby corner of 18th and Olive, has been realizing a different vision-one that they hope will also be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. The Butler Brothers Building, a city-block-sized behemoth built in 1906 and described by project leaders as the Amazon warehouse of its day, until recently sat dormant. Grime and soot darkened the once vibrant purplish and terracotta-colored brick, and the original hardwood floors had buckled with time. Under the direction of Trivers, a historic renovation and adaptive reuse architecture firm based in St. Louis, the building is being reimagined as a complex with nearly 400…

LOCATION: HOLLY HILLS YEAR BUILT: 1929 ARCHITECT: UNKNOWN In addition to the fairytale turret and brick-and-stone façade, this remarkably well-maintained historic home has a spectacular multihued slate roof. The owner, Steve Larsen, stays on top of things by having the roof inspected each year; he says that he typically needs to replace a couple of tiles. “I guess they don’t have as many of the red ones now, so as time goes on, you see less of the red.” The jumping horse weathervane atop the turret is also original to the home. The narrow stone walk, an original feature of the home, leads from the corner of the property across the expansive lawn. Larsen has had some tuckpointing done on the walk, but otherwise it remains as it was when…