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It took more than a year to transform this period Village home into a showplace, courtesy of a sympatico team — architect, contractor, interior designer, and landscaper — working alongside homeowners who knew exactly what they wanted.
Oscar and Lale Adams bought their East Memphis home in The Village in 2007. It is built on a beautiful, large corner lot, almost an acre in size. But as their family expanded with two children, son Shattuck and daughter Mary Kirk, the parents decided that they needed more room. Consequently, they undertook a major renovation in 2014 that doubled the size of the original house and required them to move out for more than a year while the work was being completed.
Even though he was busy with his day job as a fixed income trader, Oscar viewed renovating this house as a true labor of love. Clearly, he played a major role in the redesign of the home. As we talked, I couldn’t help thinking of a 1948 film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, titled Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, that centered around the joys, perils, and inevitable setbacks involved with building a home. The Adams family understands; Oscar, whose middle name is Polk, today says his house could be named “Polk’s Folly.”
Oscar offers this advice to people wanting to pursue renovations: Find someone with vision to handle the design, along with a good builder whose judgement you trust, and have a very flexible budget. Costs can overrun during the building process, but his attitude was always, “We started this, and we’re going to do it right.”
You can see, even at night, that he did just that. Handmade in the French Quarter, the Bevelo gas lamps on the exterior are a perfect example of doing things right. The addition of such aesthetic details was important, even those that may not have been in the original plan. Oscar likes to joke that the same people who tell you they hit their budget remodeling a home are the same ones that tell you they ‘broke even’ at the casino.
For Oscar in particular, the home is meant to be reminiscent of his boyhood home in the Mississippi Delta town of Rosedale, 19 miles northwest of Cleveland. His uncle still farms in the area, and Oscar himself owns a small piece of property he visits often. He speaks lovingly of its eccentric inhabitants and the natural beauty of the alluvial plain. His stories seem drawn right out of the pages of Dispatches from Pluto by Richard Grant, the true and colorful story of an adventure writer who set his sights not on a distant land but on the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Adams would heartily agree with Grant that this has been a culture “where contradictions hung in the air like swamp gas, and eccentricity was as natural as rain.”
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The new family room, with its fireplace and shiplap walls, is the comfortable heart of the renovated home.
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Photographs and mementos adorn the wall in the bar area, demonstrating the importance of family history to the Adamses.
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Oscar and Lale Adams have the highest of praise for Rick Collins, their builder; Wil Hunt who drew the plans; Missy Steffens of M. Steffens Interiors, the interior designer; Lamar Gibson of Memphis Home Theater, who handled audio/video installation; and landscaper Tony Chapman. “We all connected with the same mindset,” Lale says. In fact, she says that her favorite part of many a morning was “having coffee with Rick.” Oscar agrees and praises Collins as “a contractor with a very creative side.”
For Oscar Adams, the architect interview was key to the whole process, and he noted that Wil Hunt had designed a home in their area which he had admired. What’s more, Hunt’s grandmother lived in the Gamwyn Park district of Greenville, Mississippi, and they both shared a love of the style of homes there. In this connection, Adams told me he was a dedicated fan of the renowned late twentieth-century Louisiana architect A. Hays Town, who incorporated Creole, Spanish, and French styles into his own distinctive style. One of his trademarks was using vintage building materials that add texture to new construction, and Adams knew of his homes in Greenville. Proportion and symmetry are important to Adams, and he spoke of “the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence,” mathematical rules for use in architecture to achieve what is pleasing to the eye. Trust me, I learned a lot in this interview!
Lale Adams is a busy dentist, and while her husband with his creative personality loved the process every step of the way, she tributes Missy Steffens with “helping her breathe” through the renovations. Steffens’ classic style is a careful blending of the old with the new, which made it the perfect fit for the Adams family sensibility. Lale loves the color and pattern of wallpaper and admits if it was up to her, she would use it in every room; ultimately, it was used only in the entrance hall and powder room. She also loves majolica pottery and says the collection in the entrance hall makes her happy.
The four-bedroom, five-bath home is now a mixture of the old part of the house, with its lower ceilings, and modern new additions, which the Adams family feels gives them the best of both worlds. The family room was added and is now the heart of the home with its fireplace and shiplap walls. While that room is light and airy with walls painted Benjamin Moore’s Cloud White, the intention was to make it feel old by using reclaimed materials including pine and brick.
Oscar’s parents, who still live in the Delta, gave them the clever idea to feature a handsome wooden ladder in the adjacent open-plan kitchen to reach the Byler custom cabinets, while Lale’s father, Gunes Ozyurt, gave them their wonderful dining table as a house-warming present.
Family is clearly very important to this couple, and paintings by Oscar’s great-grandmother, Mary Kirk Adams, hang on the walls. The family also has three paintings by Chesley Pearman, another native son of Mississippi. Family memorabilia, including photographs and diplomas, hang in the bar area.
As to the landscaping out back, there are hollies and boxwoods, a raised vegetable bed, and bee hives. (Oscar Adams says one night he went out for mint and “couldn’t find it in the dark”— a labor of love in the cause of making mint juleps!) A small exercise room outside connects to the garage.
The Adams family loves The Village neighborhood and finds it a wonderful place to raise children. Established in the late 1930s, this subdivision with its gently curving streets (all lined with a canopy of trees) feels like the country in the heart of East Memphis. In fact, Oscar’s grandmother confided in him, “I know you picked this home for the property’s mature magnolia and pecan trees.” No doubt they played a part in the Adamses’ decision.
All the original homes in The Village were based on a similar model (three bedrooms and one bathroom), and the architecture was colonial-revival inspired. Many of the residents have lived here for years, though time marches on, and slowly but surely a new generation of young families are taking their place and updating their homes. In fact, happily Cooper and Caroline Hopkins, cousins of the Adamses, have just moved in across the street. How perfect is that?
