Texas native Josh Pickering doesn’t always ask himself, “What would Bunny Williams do?” But when a retired couple bought a new home in downtown Dallas and hired him to design it, he realized that conjuring the voice of his former employer would serve him well with this particular project. “My time with Bunny honed my eye for effortless, eclectic mixing,” he says about living and working for her in New York. “These clients had lots of their own pieces that they wanted to incorporate.”
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“Tight spaces like these need drama and style,” Pickering says about the entry. For a layered effect with exaggerated scale, he opened the client’s screen flat against the wall and created contrast with white lamps and ceramic Foo Dogs. Maidenhair ferns bring the outside in.
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In the kitchen dining nook, botanical wallpaper creates a shady grove. The chandelier is Circa Lighting, and the banquette is filled with Uzbek embroidered pillows that mimic the colors in framed Guatemalan worry dolls.
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Pickering found the dining room’s botanical paper artwork in an antiques shop in La Jolla. The faux-bois dining chairs were a Chairish find; the client already owned the sideboard and set of chairs flanking it, but “she refinished them herself once we settled on the perfect green hues,” Pickering says. He chose custom lavender striped silk shades for the Circa Lighting chandelier.
Stephen KarlischThe two-bedroom apartment is in a 1950s building overlooking Turtle Creek, a small tributary of the Trinity River that runs through northern Dallas. The location was a huge draw for the couple, who’d lived on Turtle Creek in a different building years ago. Early in their conversations, Pickering noticed the clients made lots of nature references, and responded enthusiastically to patterns and pieces featuring various shades of green. A direction evolved: He’d bring as much green into their living space as he could.
Choosing what type of green was “a bit of a learning curve,” Pickering says. “I’m drawn to gray-blue greens, while the client likes leafy, ochre-y greens.” Once he could determine the difference, they were off to the races.
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“The client loved a lavender dining room that they had in a previous home, so I tried to tune into that memory with the silvery lavender color,” says Pickering, who used Destiny by Sherwin Williams. Family china fills the built-ins; a window overlooking the terrace is an unexpected surprise at the center.
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Handmade by the client’s mother, who’d hand-cut and hand-painted every petal from old plates used to print newspapers, this metal floral bouquet wasn’t on display in the client’s previous home. Pickering found a brown-and-white vase to hold them, and placed it in the best view of the house, overlooking the park towards downtown.
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In order to give each space its own unique sensibility, in some rooms, the green appears on the walls—such as the dark green in the cozy study—while in others, the presence of green is limited to art or upholstery. In the living room, the velvet sofa is a rich, earthy evergreen, while fresh shades of grass-green, olive, and khaki appear on the patterned armchair, ottoman, and throw pillows.
“Every room has a bit of old, and a bit new,” Pickering says. “It was all about finding a way to take the client’s history and make it fresh again.”
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Pickering gave new life to a tired space by painting the existing bookcases a deep, inviting green (Garden Gate by Sherwin Williams), and adding artworks and display lighting. He made the pale multi-media collage himself, and hung it with a multi-media triptych from the client’s collection.
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The clients requested that the mossy green linen curtains in the bedroom not be heavily lined, so they could wake with the sun. “In a world where most people want to black out the bedroom, I found it to be a refreshing request,” he says.
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With views on two sides, the light-filled bedroom “is a cream puff—crisp and light and creamy. It definitely did not need to be over-decorated,” Pickering says. He draped the bed with a one-of-a-kind Suzani whose embroidery picks up the green of the curtains. The lamp is from Circa Lighting with a woven paper shade from Newport Lamp & Shade Company.
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