Totaling a cool 10,000 square feet, the original plans for one Dallas couple’s new home in the city’s Highland Park neighborhood embodied that old saying about everything being bigger in Texas. But unlike oil fields, football franchises, and pit-smoked brisket, bigger isn’t always better: A residence that dwarfs its residents just isn’t going to feel, well, homey. Which is why designer Tom Scheerer and Alex Eskenasy of Eskenasy Ferguson Architecture convinced their clients to downsize before even a stitch of linen was selected. “We had to streamline the architecture a little bit in order to humanize the house,” says the New York–based Scheerer. Not that the resulting homestead is anything to shake a stick at: The gracefully grand footprint that Eskenasy and Scheerer devised still boasts 7,500 square feet.

Of course, that kind of grace doesn’t grow on trees, even in the fertile Lone Star State. To keep things elegant even on a large scale and avoid the lifeless zones that can be the byproduct of building with such a formidable scope—that is, cold theater sets that no one ever walks into—Eskenasy had to become something of a traffic cop. He organized an H-shaped floor plan that made the living room and ancillary spaces, like the library, into requisite byways that must be passed through to reach functional environs like the primary bedroom or kitchen. “Harmony, scale, and proportion had to be part of the overall composition,” says Eskenasy. “It needed a sophisticated but comfortable aesthetic.”

Scheerer was more than up to the challenge. “The living room is the big, pale, serene center of the house,” he says. From this luminous command center you can see into the entry hall, kitchen, dining room, and the aforementioned library—all of which are furnished for style and comfort and invite lingering. “I weighted it in several directions by making the spaces that spool off of it warm and richly colored,” says the designer. It more than lived up to Eskenasy’s brief: “Every day, the client wakes up and has to walk through the most beautiful room we could build in order to get their morning coffee,” he says.

The setup created a secondary challenge, though: Each space had to stand fully on its own as well as blend in with its surroundings and sight lines. Scheerer went for gold. “The house is kind of an encyclopedia of great decorating moments,” he says of the legendary repertoire he referenced and reinterpreted with aplomb. Take the ethereal, parchment-like walls in the living room. “It’s a light-handed version of Jean-Michel Frank,” he says. “It’s faux—painted by Brian Leaver in alternating rectangles of strié that gives a bit of subtle interest to the walls without being overbearing.”

The lofty front hall, with its rusticated paneling, checked greige-and-beige floors in tumbled stone, and soaring staircase, was inspired by English country houses crossed with a hint of Continental chic. “It’s a little Robert Adam with a splash of that great front hall Henri Samuel did for Susan Gutfreund in Paris,” Scheerer explains. On the upper story, above the paneling, he installed a whimsical wallpaper printed with blocks of etched clouds that “references Piero Fornasetti’s cloud wallpaper without being literal.” The shimmering library, cloaked in deep ocher lacquer and embellished with pops of tortoiseshell and leopard, pulls from a like-minded room that Valerian Rybar designed for São Schlumberger in Paris. “It’s for hanging out in after dinner,” says Scheerer. “At night, it has an incredibly warm, rich glow.”

If this all sounds a bit highfalutin’, the finished result is anything but: Scheerer is renowned for his understated subtlety. To lend cohesion to seemingly disparate rooms that coexist in close quarters, he wove in nuanced through lines: The rusticated foyer paneling quietly mirrors the decorative finish on the living room walls; the kitchen’s white oak cabinetry is matched in tone and tenor by the lime-washed coffered ceilings in the adjoining sunroom. Throughout, a calibrated balancing act ensures nothing ever feels too froufrou. That grand staircase? It’s floored in plainspoken rush matting. Two sinuous, Verner Panton-esque chairs in the library and a stunning Betty Parsons abstract painting keep bouillon fringe and tendril-filled floral upholstery in check. The primary bedroom’s grand gesture—an evocative and painterly wall mural that’s actually a digital print of a textile blown up to totemic proportions and installed with exacting attention to detail—is tempered by simple upholstery, plain curtains, and strict reverse pleats on the back of the bed canopy. “Everything else is pared down,” says Scheerer, neatly encapsulating his recipe for success. For decorating to be truly great, the trick is knowing when to say when.

See More of This Elegant Texas Home

This story originally appeared in volume 8 of frederic. Click here to subscribe!