Laura Jean Hocking
Brian and Shannon Dixon are lifelong Memphians. They were high school sweethearts who graduated from Rhodes College and the University of Memphis before getting married in 1994. Thirteen years ago, when their son Max had just turned two, they decided their home on York needed an addition. So Shannon, who served on the Cooper-Young Development Corporation, called her friend Steve Lockwood. “He’s a nonprofit developer,” Shannon says. “I asked him over one day to look at our old house to see if we could expand. We needed another bedroom, another bath. He said, ‘No, just come and buy the house next door to me.’ He had fixed it up for his mother-in-law, but now she couldn’t live in it. And we’d be great neighbors. We came over here and bought the house in an hour.”
The house on Nelson was just the right size for the young family. An addition to the 1925 Midtown bungalow dating from the 1960s added a master suite, and Lockwood’s detail-oriented renovation had added a new pair of closets and an under-window storage space. “We wouldn’t have bought the house without that addition,” says Shannon.
Laura Jean Hocking
The home’s walls are packed with eye-catching art, the vast majority of which was created by local artists. “I think what excites me about our art is, I look around and it’s all people we know — close friends,” says Brian, who is an art director for archer>malmo. “It’s exciting to be a part of a creative culture.”
A large, vertical piece in the living room inscribed with the word “ocean” was created by prominent Memphis artist Hamlett Dobbins. Long before he won the Rome Prize, Dobbins was a friend of the Dixons, and his art is scattered throughout the home. Brian says this particular piece, called Bathysphere for Chan, was the first purchase the couple made as homeowners. “It has turned into the backdrop of our lives,” says Shannon.
The other prominent artist featured on the colorful walls is Kong Wee Pang, with whom Brian frequently collaborates in his job at archer>malmo. Her silhouette portraits of Brian, Shannon, and Max hang over the couch in the living room. “That was something I commissioned her to do a few years ago as a Christmas present to Shannon,” Brian says. “That ended up being so nice that some other people saw it, and Kong Wee ended up doing four or five more for other people.”
Laura Jean Hocking
The couch itself was made by Cooper-Young artisan Wilson Babb, measured carefully to fit the space. Shannon says the locally produced custom furniture cost “just a teenie bit more than you would spend on it at Macy’s.”
Is there a unifying principle behind their design style, which embraces both a dining room table painted gold inspired by the gold leaf on the wall of the Beauty Shop restaurant and a Victorian rocking chair awaiting reupholstering in the office? “The question is, do we like this thing?” Shannon says. “A lot of the antique pieces are from Gary’s Antiques back when it was on Union. We used to go there every weekend, until we filled our house up. Then one day, we went back like six years later, and he said, ‘Where have you guys been?’ I was like, ‘Dude, we filled up our house!’”
Nowhere is the Dixons’ eclecticism more evident than in the kitchen, which they remodeled almost by accident. Brian says it started with an attempt to open up the space by removing the cabinetry soffit, which led to a discovery above the sink. “It was a giant hole, and we were immediately in over our heads. What started out as, ‘Let’s open up the cabinets a little bit,’ turned into, ‘We’ve got to re-do the window.’”
Laura Jean Hocking
Eventually, they completely removed the cabinets, restored the window, added a vent hood above the stove, and installed open shelving to store their kitchen wares. The flooring is bamboo, with an unusual color scheme. “I was just sort of playing around with bamboo samples,” says Shannon, “and put the purple up next to the green, and I thought, ‘Why can’t we do this?’ It just kind of happened, and I love the way it came out.”
In the front of the home is Shannon’s office, the freelance nonprofit consultant’s home base. “I used to work right in front of the window, and I could watch all of the neighbors coming and going. There’s a school on the street, the Natural Learning Center, and the kids will come up to our Little Library and line up, put books in, and take books out. It’s one of my favorite things to watch.”
The couple recently decided to put their longtime house on the market in favor of a house with more space for offices, but Cooper-Young will always be in their hearts. “So many of our friends have moved away to other countries and other cities, and they’re always reminding us of how lucky we are, with this tight-knit group of friends we have. Really, we chose our family, some in high school, more in college. I feel like Memphis is a city where you can — and it might sound trite or cliché — but you can make a difference here.”
