A COLLECTOR'S NEXT CHAPTER

In New Orleans, Richard Keith Langham discovers the upside to downsizing, designing a richly colorful canvas for his longtime client's most beloved pieces-and personality-to shine.

- Richard Keith Langham

LIKE AN OLD MARRIED COUPLE, New York designer Richard Keith Langham and his New Orleans client, Allison Kendrick, "almost finish each other's sentences," Langham says.

This means, of course, that they also fuss.

"Are you sure you don't want some chintz in this room?" Langham may ask.

"Yes, I'm sure I don't want some chintz," Kendrick may reply. ...Like that. But it's all in good humor, says the designer. "Honestly, it's a joy to work this way because of how our creative juices flow together," he says. And when the pair coalesce, as they have over the past 30 years and now on their fifth project together, the result is an eloquent and superlative expression of them both.

If living spaces mark chapters in lives, Kendrick's have been many and varied, from New England to Northern California to New Orleans. Now with her children grown, she moved from the imposing Italianate manse she formerly occupied in the Garden District to a smaller, 19th-century side-hall house nestled on a narrow, leafy lot a few blocks away. Exquisitely edited from a lifetime of collecting art, traveling the world, and honing her eye, the result is colorful, richly layered, artful, art-filled, and quintessentially her.

"The great punctuation is the paintings and how masterfully they are hung," says Langham, generous with credit to his longtime friend. "It takes the rooms to another level. My part is the 'fluff and stuff.' Hers is the gravitas, personality, and depth." Kendrick returns the compliment: "I've had a good teacher."