Feature: The Luxe (and Lived-In) Life

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The Luxe Life

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Jenny’s boys (Joe, 13; Sam, 12; and Campbell, nine) are playing basketball outside with six of their neighborhood pals, her husband Joe is at work, and she’s spinning tales of decorating and design in her husky-edged Nashville accent. All the while, random pre-teens scoot in and out, all diligently trailed by Maggie, the family’s ambling Golden.

“This,” says Jenny of the three-story brick Georgian on South Battery, “is my Father of the Bride house. I love that movie—my husband jokes that I watch it 10 times a year—and when I first saw this place, it had that same feeling. The way it’s oriented on the lot, the yard, the neighborhood….It was my dream house, and I could just see our kids running through it.”

And run through it they do. Though the part-time designer and full-time mom has filled the 70-year-old-plus house top to bottom with a showplace mix of antiques, haute lighting, French and Belgian imports, orchids, gilt-framed prints, and delicious fabrics, it’s a family home first and foremost. Telltale signs, like the climbing boards nailed to a sturdy front-yard tree and the fleet of bikes strewn across the lawn, underscore the point even from the curbside vantage.

But due to Jenny’s philosophy—“Keep it simple and clean”—the house’s style and its residents are hardly at odds. Rather, she strikes a balance that’s all about comfort and practicality with sink-into-it furniture (in quality but not priceless fabrics); floors of cement and hardwood covered with the occasional humble sisal rug; and counters topped with zinc, marble, tile, and dare-to-be-bare unfinished wood. Suffice to say, Jenny doesn’t do “fussy” and sticks with materials that can bear the use dished out by three boys, two adults, and a roving dog.

As for the other half of her philosophy—the clean part—its meaning is twofold. In design-speak, Jenny gravitates toward a clean, neutral palette of solid whites, flax, burlap, gray, and pale French blue, infused with touches of gold or apple green. Furthering that look, she introduces patterns only sparingly, with throw pillows, through artwork, or via textures like chipped paint finishes and weathered wood grains.

But in this house, “clean” also carries its roll-up-your sleeves meaning: Jenny’s got to be able to hose down the living room floor if she needs to (alert: red wine accident), toss a slipcover in the wash as called for (warning: popsicle stick residue), and sometimes even use a screwdriver as a furniture scraper (siren: rogue gum wad).

So how does someone with an obvious flair for decorating keep a sense of humor about the inevitable wear and tear? To begin with, she’s a roll-with-it gal who doesn’t take herself too seriously. When things go awry, like the time a hawk flew in her house and relieved itself on a chair and sofa, or when one of her sons (accidentally) launched the perfect football spiral into the bar from the backyard, knocking a drink out of her husband’s hand and nearly giving a guest a black eye, Jenny sees it as Lucille Ball-meets-true-life-territory and fodder for a good story.

And too, over the years Jenny’s learned going with the flow is the essential edict when it comes to redoing houses—it’s something she picked up on early in her marriage. She and Joe were new parents living in Atlanta, and Jenny’s “sort of” job was buying little houses and renovating them, acting virtually as her own contractor. Back then, everything was trial and error, and she racked up a fair share of knowledge and patience, like when she got a pair of chairs covered wrong-side-out because she didn’t know to specify the fabric’s orientation. Over time, Jenny’s Buckhead friends saw her talents blossom and manifest, and they began enlisting her design help. “My friends told their friends, ‘Call Jenny, she’ll help you work with what you have.’” She started with kids’ bedrooms before graduating to “grown-up rooms” and then moved on to entire houses.

Eventually, Atlanta’s expanse and lifestyle began to wear the Millers out, and Joe, a Columbia native, suggested a move to Charleston. Days after they relocated to the Holy City, Jenny says she knew she’d never want to leave. Still in the fixer-upper mode, the couple rented and bought houses downtown, in the Old Village, and in Riverland Terrace before settling into their South-of-Broad dream in late 2005.

To accommodate their lively crew, Jenny and Joe decided they’d need professional hard-hatters and hired architect Randolph Martz and a team of dedicated contractors headed up by Stocky Cabe of Omni Services. Her “second family,” as she refers to them, converted the garage into a family room, the attic into a two-bedroom suite, and an old study into a sunroom. They lifted the door frames, added an office and bath, lightly reconfigured the first-level floor plan, and rewired the entire place for surround-sound music. The overhaul took about two years to complete, but as for the finishing touches, Jenny says it’s only been in the last six months that the house finally gelled.

“One night, I got the last chair in place and saw that suddenly, everything was working,” she says. “You hear about people saying they moved and they can’t figure out where to put the furniture. Well, we can, it just takes us a while.”

“And aside from a handful of things, these are all pieces we had before, things that fit in our last 2,400-square-foot rental, with its seven-foot, 10-inch ceilings. That, for example,” says Jenny, pointing to a bureau topped with glass shelves, “we inherited from Joe’s great, great grandfather. You can see where the glass broke when Joe hit it with a Frisbee when he was six. You just bring something like that in and work everything else around it.”

A herd of boys interrupts her train of thought as they bolt in through the front door and clamber up the stairs to the attic suite. Jenny grins, switches gears, and marvels at the family’s new lifestyle, how the kids can walk to school and play with friends within biking distance or closer, and how the gentlemen-to-be hop on their scooters to get to Society Hall for Cotillion rehearsal on Wednesdays. Needless to say, moving has left the Millers’ repertoire for now. Like the chair that finally slips into the right place, Jenny, her husband, and her brood seem to have found the right fit. It sounds like an ending made for the movies.