Brantley Ellzey and Jim Renfrow outside their Midtown home. The couple decorate extensively for Christmas from their huge decoration collection. “I want our house to look like Bing Crosby … might walk out and start singing,” Ellzey says.
All photographs by Jamie Harmon.
"Architecture is essentially a Fine Art," wrote M.H. Furbringer in the foreword to his 1916 book, Domestic Architecture. The firm of Jones & Furbringer designed hundreds of structures in Memphis during the opening years of the twentieth century, beautifying the city’s initial housing stock expansion. “People are no longer content with a house," Furbringer went on. Rather, "they demand that environment which creates the atmosphere of ‘home,’ with the result that, at least in the larger cities, there are a great many homes possessing real architectural merit.”
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The wooden Santa was made in 1957 by the Leonard Brynof Johnson company. Founded in the 1930s in a Pennsylvania pharmacy, it is known as America’s first Christmas store.
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The reindeer lights date to the1940s. “We always cheer when we plug them in and they still work,” says Ellzey.
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Icicle lights illuminate the hallway, with the living room Christmas tree in the distance.
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The djinn lamps, found at an estate sale, date from the 1940s.
Brantley Ellzey is also an architect and fine artist. He and his husband, Jim Renfrow, live in a Jones & Furbringer home in Midtown. Combining their last names, the couple has dubbed the home Ellfrow. “It’s a shingle-style house,” says Ellzey. “It sort of has features of a Victorian house, like the high ceilings, but it’s like a bungalow, in that it has an open plan. You walk right into the living room. There’s no entrance hall, or those kinds of Victorian things. It sits in between the Victorian era and the Arts and Crafts bungalow era. It’s a little unusual.
“According to my research, the house was built around 1907 for a lumberman named D.S. Watrous,” says Ellzey. “The exterior is clad in cedar shakes in an alternating ribbon-band pattern. There are many custom-milled wood details, both inside and out, that one can attribute to the business of the original owner. Our favorite part of the house is the expansive front porch whose generous size allows it to act as an outdoor double parlor. The porch wraps around the east side of the house to form a more intimate loggia. The floor plan has essentially remained the same, other than alterations for a more expansive kitchen.”
If Furbringer’s mission was to create homey spaces, he certainly succeeded here. “We’ve enjoyed living in our home for almost 30 years,” says Ellzey. “It’s filled with accumulations, collections, much laughter and, thankfully, few tears.”
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The Christmas tree lights up the living room in Ellfrow. The 1907 house was built by lumberman D.S. Watrous.
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The kitchen is the only room in the house that has been significantly altered since its construction. Here, the Christmas lights stay up all year.
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The library shows off some of the home’s lustrous dark wood interior.
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Ellzey found these dolls at a Memphis estate sale. “I thought about just buying the little maharaja but then decided that they obviously needed to stay together,” he says.
It’s around the holidays that Ellfrow shines, thanks to its inhabitants’ most charming collection obsessions — among them, vintage Christmas decorations. “We counted at one point, and we have 40 boxes of Christmas decorations — and these are big boxes,” says Renfrow. “We now keep them in storage at my studio, thankfully, but they were all up in our attic,” says Ellzey.
It would be an understatement to say the couple is serious about decking the halls. “The decorations in the house are kind of like an art installation,” says Ellzey. “We try to do something a little different every year. There’s something fun about things that you only live with for, in our case, about a month. We don’t put them up until after Thanksgiving, and we usually take them down the first week or so of January.”
This set of mugs depicting Santa in various stages of sleepiness dates from the 1960s.
Ellzey says when it comes to Christmas decorations, they don’t make ’em like they used to. “I love the Fifties and Sixties, but I also really love the Thirties and Forties. Those things are harder to find, but the icicles are real metal, and the Christmas ornaments were made in Germany, for the most part.”
When the decorations come out, the house comes alive. “I think it’s at its prettiest at Christmas time,” says Ellzey. “It’s such a warm and cozy house that the Christmas decorations just kind of reinforce that feeling of warmth and coziness. The front room is interesting, in that it’s all glass for the most part. Two walls are all windows, and there are French doors on either side of the fireplace. Then, on the inside, there’s a glass door to the hallway, and there are big glass doors to the dining room. So it’s kind of a glass box, which is nice at Christmas time, because it reflects all the light, and it really sparkles.”
When it comes time to decorate, the front of the house is the initial focus. “I’ll always say the living room and the dining room would get the most attention,” says Renfrow.
LED snow flakes show off the reflection in the glass-fronted living room.
The centerpiece is, of course, the tree. But it’s not easy to find a live tree that fits the space’s 11-foot ceilings. “We need to have a big tree, which is harder to find and more expensive than they used to be,” says Renfrow.
Ellzey says the tree must also be big enough to accommodate the wealth of ornaments it will be called on to display. “I really feel like our Christmas is not so much about being tasteful as it is about being warm and homey. I think Jim and I try to recreate the Christmas we knew as kids. Our tree has all different kinds and ages of ornaments. I have a cookie I made in the fourth grade that, miraculously, is still around. It’s in rather grotesque shape, but we still put it on the tree! And then we have things that we collect if we’re on a trip, and we see something. Usually, it’s not like a commemorative ornament, but it might be a little toy or something. I consider our Christmas tree sort of a collage of our lives.”
The crowded Christmas tree is a collection of keepsakes and souvenirs from Ellzey and Renfrow’s life and travels together.
Their tree may not be color coordinated by a designer, but that doesn’t mean there is no method to its decoration, says Ellzey. “I have a very specific way that I like to decorate the tree, and Jim has gone along with it. I put small lights on the inside of the tree, then larger lights on the outside.”
All together, putting the tree up is usually a two-day process. “It’s a challenge logistically — and providing electricity to all of these lights can also be a challenge — but we always do it,” says Refrow.
Ellzey says they favor larger, C7 bulbs for their Christmas lights, which enhances the atmosphere of old-fashioned Christmas. Multicolored lights, instead of the periodically trendy white lights, are definitely the way to go in the lustrous, dark wood environment. “Everyone looks beautiful in Christmas lights.”
The big bulbs aren’t the only elements that create the tree’s vintage flavor. “We have an electric train set under the tree that goes around it,” says Ellzey. “There’s a village and trucks and all kinds of toys under there, plus the rest of the animals. This was inspired by my aunt and uncle. They called it their snow village — and this is before Department 56. This is when you either built your own thing or, in their case, just collected a bunch of little miscellaneous figurines and houses. Another thing we have is a little Christmas fence. They were these little metal, miniature fences that were popular in the 1940s you put around the bottom of your tree. I think they started in Victorian times.”
Having a big tree with lots of ornaments is not without its dangers. “One year, we had gotten everything up. It was looking beautiful in the room,” Ellzey says. “Jim had gone to the complete opposite end of the house. I had one more ornament in my hand. I put it on the tree, and stood back about three feet. I saw everything kind of move, just very slightly — and then the entire thing fell on top of me! An 11-foot tree came crashing down. There must be very few sounds as bad as glass ornaments breaking on a hardwood floor as a Christmas tree falls. So every year now, we wire the tree to a door frame to keep that from happening. In the event of a Christmas earthquake, that tree will not go anywhere.”
With a collection that big, the decorations don’t stop at the tree. While things change from year to year, one piece has a place of honor reserved. Over the fireplace is a jolly-looking Santa Claus. “That’s one of the oldest Santas that we have,” says Ellzey. “I think he’s actually celluloid, because he’s backed with very heavy cardboard. I think he’s probably from the late Thirties or early Forties. It’s one of my favorite decorations, and the placement of it is, to me, very Christmasy.”
The hallway leading to the kitchen is a winter wonderland. Among all the vintage decorations is a low-cost DIY touch: paper chains hanging from the ceiling.
“Those were actually inspired by a woman in my hometown who would make advent calendars for little kids out of Christmas wrapping paper,” says Ellzey. “She did them in the form of paper chains, and each link would have a little number on it. As Christmas approached, the chain got smaller and smaller until you reached the top. Then you knew it was Christmas time.”
If the interior is for the home’s inhabitants and their party guests, the exterior is for Memphis. “I used to tell Jim I wanted our house to look like Bing Crosby might live here at Christmas time, like he might walk out and start singing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …”
Flanking the front entrance are two, 17-foot holly bushes. “Each one of them takes 12 strings of the big Christmas lights.”
The four red bells, each more than three feet tall, hanging from the front eaves once graced the entrance to a department store. Another set of bells, smaller and more numerous, weave in and out of the garland. They belonged to Ellzey’s grandmother, and once tolled Christmas carols. On the porch are a pair of lovingly painted wooden panels.
“When I was growing up, my uncle had a medical practice and they had this entire collection of those things — the nativity, Santa’s workshop, and Santa and all his reindeer,” says Ellzey. “The only thing left by the time my uncle passed away was the Santa Claus and the reindeer. So those are quite old, from the late Forties, early Fifties. He’s like a family heirloom, I guess you would say.”
An Ellzey and Renfrow Christmas card from 2018.
Once the house is decorated, the holiday priority turns to Christmas cards. Ellzey and Renfrow create their own custom design. Now, they design them in Photoshop and have the cards professionally printed. But in the pre-digital era, they put them together by hand, glueing the images to each card. “Then we’d have to go back and address the envelopes, so it became kind of a big production line,” says Renfrow. “We’ve always sent out a lot. I think last year we sent out 300 cards. So the technology has certainly made it easier.”
The cards are an important part of the Christmas tradition that helps create community, says Ellzey. “We do have a few friends who have gotten all of the cards over the years. It’s always great to go into their house and see them as Christmas tree ornaments. It’s neat that a lot of people have chosen to keep them over the years.”
Once the season is over, there’s the inevitable letdown of de-decorating. But the change of season doesn’t have to be such a bummer, says Ellzey. “It is kind of sad when you take everything down. But one of the things Jim and I have done for the past 15 years or so is, we take real pride in labeling and packing everything very neatly. It somehow makes putting it away less depressing, because we have a goal.
“When we open it next year, everything will be right there where we need it to be. It’s like a little gift from your past self. We leave little notes for ourselves, like one I got last year that said, ‘Be careful, Brantley. This string of beads is broken.’ Thank you, Past Brantley, for warning Future Brantley about the broken beads!”
