Furniture and lighting double as art in the creve coeur home of Susan Bower and Stephen Leet.
The small but striking Midcentury Modern home of architect Susan Bower, principal of Bower Leet Design, and her husband, architect and Washington University professor Stephen Leet, was built in 1955. It was designed by architect Nolan Stinson as his own family residence. Bower and Leet purchased the house in 1996 from Stinson himself, updating such key areas as the bathrooms and kitchen while preserving the home’s unique original details, including rich wood paneling and ceiling beams.
Stinson, who worked for prominent St. Louis architect Frederick Dunn, was inspired by the easy living enabled by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes. This house, which sits at an angle on a wooded lot, includes walls of plate glass windows designed to bring the outdoors in. “When we saw it,” Bower says, “we knew it was the one.”
This story is from the January/February 2019 edition of DesignSTL.
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This story is from the January/February 2019 edition of DesignSTL.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Cut from the Same Cloth
“Turkey Tracks” is a 19th-century quiltmaking pattern that has the appearance of little wandering feet. Patterns like the tracks, and their traditions and myths, have been passed down through the generations, from their frontier beginnings to today, where a generation of makers has embraced the material as a means of creating something new. Olivia Jondle is one such designer. Here, she’s taken an early turkey track-pattern quilt, cut it into various shapes, and stitched the pieces together, adding calico and other fabric remnants as needed. The result is a trench coat she calls the Pale Calico Coat. Her designs are for sale at The Rusty Bolt, Jondle’s small-batch fashion company based in St. Louis. —SAMANTHA STEVENSON
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