CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME

THE Forget everything you know about Southern interiors. In the hands of a globetrotting designer, a historic Louisville house reflects the true colors of its philanthropic owners.

- JASON KYLE HOWARD

In the dining room of a Victorian home in Louisville’s bohemian Highlands neighborhood, Stephen Reily is surrounded by art. A slender man who speaks with graceful authority, he is pointing out the room’s playful baroque, goth wallpaper. Handtinted in watercolor by artist Francesca Gabbiani, it features whiskey bottles, vultures, and cigarette packs. Beside him looms a stack of resin boxes designed by the North Carolina native Sam Stewart, 15 in all. Each one backlit by the midafternoon sun, they grow smaller in their climb toward the ceiling.

With its vertiginous walls and strange proportions, the whimsical home of Reily and the nonfiction author Emily Bingham has what he describes as an “Alice in Wonderland effect.” To cross its threshold is to enter a madcap maze that gets curiouser and curiouser with every step, where 13-foot-tall walls dare visitors to always look up and reconsider their relationship to space. When they bought the 1871 house in 1995, Bingham and Reily embraced their responsibility as caretakers of a precious slice of local real estate just a block from the bustle of a trendy commercial corridor. They were surprised it would also become an extension of their civic engagement, philanthropy, and commitment to social justice. “The work on the house prefigured, in an unexpected way, the turns our lives would be taking,” Reily says.