Brandon Fontenot Brings Houston Home’s Art Collection to Life with Inspired Renovation

Fontenot had other feelings in mind. “When you enter, there’s maybe a five foot stance where the door is, and then it triangles out. And then the house is centered around a triangle courtyard too,” he says. “So the house is, like, triangle, triangle, triangle.” Ample windows create framed views of the woodsy exteriors. A walkway traces the angles which comprise the interior, which is largely open-plan. “It felt a little bit like an art fair to me,” Fontenot says of the procession of spaces, airy but potentially anonymous. The couple wanted to keep things open. “So instead of having walls the divide the rooms, we brought in wing walls to identify the spaces more.” These clearly mark zones for work and play, while cleverly referencing art fair booths. And those impulses operated simultaneously, as the design of the house came together alongside the striking painting, photography, sculpture, and antique furnishings he and art advisor Katherine Barthelme helped the couple collect.

The collection includes an Italian travertine table from the 1970s, with a fluted base left unfilled. “It’s like there are chunks out of the fluting, because of the natural porousness of the material,” he says. “It’s really beautiful to see with a wall of windows behind it.” Not to mention the Donald Judd tabletop piece he mounted to the wall, which also finds geometric relation to an 18^th century Italian cabinet from Tuscany. A curvy Pierre Augustin Rose sofa in soft chenille joins a nubby pair of Otto Shultz lounge chairs as a welcome into the living and dining area. Spirits rise when a pair of brass pocket doors swing open to reveal a marble bar, while a 15^th century Thai bust seems to pull up a chair at the dining room table. About those chairs: Fontenot found them at an auction, repaired them, then covered them in a Pierre Frey fabric. “It’s just about the only pattern in the house,” he says. “Apart from the rug in the family room.”

That space is just downstairs. “In Houston, we have a lot of flooding,” he says. Indeed, a previous iteration of the house had, unfortunately, flooded; its previous owners raised the structure while more or less gutting the interior. Thus, the family room is the only space on the original grade. A Franco Albini chair and ottoman sit near a Michel Frank sofa, which is upholstered in burnt umber corduroy as if bathed in the glow of the cold-rolled steel fireplace—or of the Fortuny floor lamp. “Probably ten years, I saw one of these lamps in the window of the Row in LA,” he says. “This was even before I started my firm. The shade was completely dry rotted, and just falling apart. It was the most amazing thing. So purposefully, with this shade, I put it out in the sun for just a little decay, which is beautiful.” To stave off any unwanted decay in case of another flood, the family room’s floors are Tanzanian limestone and are sloped towards the exterior, with drains for any water to exit. A photograph by John Baldessari offers a hand, while the figure in a painting by Katherine Bradford seems to wade through some water in wait.

Paint escapes any canvas and covers the walls of the powder room, in the form of a delicate mural by his friend, Jaime Loera, an artist and art teacher at a public school in the Houston. “He paints in acrylic, with a slight wash on the walls, so it feels like the florals are fading into it,” Fontenot says. It was one of the last details to be finished, and among his favorite. As is the primary bedroom’s custom take on Jean Royere daybed, gold-leafed and enlarged to bed-size, with a bedside storage in oak and parchment.

To further cozy up the vast expanse of the house, Fontenot made some strategic adjustments to room heights, lowering ceilings in the primary bathroom and kitchen. The study—the only room in the house which received new full walls to enclose it—benefited particularly from lower ceilings, which transformed it into cozy treasure box of art Philip Gustson and Davina Semo artwork and ancient Bactrian weights and alabaster icons. “It’s a living gallery,” he says, “with space around the objects so they can breath and be themselves. People always talk about the mix, like an antique and contemporary piece with a tension between them. But I don’t subscribe to that as much. I like them to feel like they came from the same period, even though they’re from different periods.” All part of the family, in other words.

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