This Historic Nashville Home Is Full of Books, Dogs and Visitors

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2014 issue of ELLE DECOR. For more stories from our archive, subscribe to ELLE DECOR All Access.

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It was meant to be a regular real estate tour, a regular exercise, and part of a conversation that Keith and Jon Meacham have had for 10 years: What if we leave Manhattan? What if the children could grow up in a real house? What if we decided on Nashville? Talk intensified at the beginning of each school year, when they closed their summer camp in Sewanee, Tennessee (where Jon attended college and now teaches), and moved back into the apartment of they of the Upper East Side (where sisters Mary and Maggie shared a room and brother Sam slept in the little girl’s room off the kitchen).

But in 2011, the conversation took a turn for the better. They liked the first house they saw and proposed within a week. “Our kids didn’t have schools to go to, and we hadn’t even put our apartment on the market or visited our co-workers,” says Keith. we say, still amazed at the courage of all these things. “We were closer to those things than we were when we started talking about it ten years before. The house overshadowed everything.”

By entering; Circa-1820 settee upholstered in horsehair, pendant lamp by Urban Electric Co., and wallpaper by Adelphi Paper Hangings.

A beautiful brick Georgian, on a hill in leafy Belle Meade, had an attic that could have served as a children’s living room and surrounded -surrounded by five acres of land—both of which are highly marketable. “In the city, we had to go down the elevator, into the lobby, and across three main roads,” says Keith, who has completed his teaching career and recently helped start the reading program. so that we can reach the grass. Study with Homer. The fact that the house needed work was fine, too—while the kids were finishing the school year in New York, there was time to work out the details of the move and plan a thoughtful renovation.

Jon’s office has a circa-1890 chesterfield, two Edwardian chairs, and a circa-1830 English foot table; the walls are painted to match the curtains, in Holland & Sherry wool with Samuel & Sons trim, and the rug is antique.

In Nashville, that meant hiring architect Ridley Wills and the Manhattan interior design team of Bill Brockschmidt and Courtney Coleman. Wills is from Nashville and had known the house growing up; the designers had a different kind of knowledge. There were torn pages of the duo’s work in a wish list folder Keith had kept since the house discussion began, and Coleman grew up in Keith’s hometown of Mississippi.

Since Jon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and executive vice president at Random House, had preordained that there would be no additions to the footprint, the first order of business was to find high performance from every room. To create the large kitchen that Keith had always dreamed of, Wills stole space from the once large dining room. The new circular dining room can still seat twelve people, while the kitchen is now the bustling center of family life, with a stunning cabinetry by a local blacksmith. which Brockschmidt likens to a fireplace.

The sun room off the living room was turned into a library and Jon’s office with a coat of dark blue paint and matching woolen curtains that balance the wall of bookshelves without blocking the view. Jon’s collection of historic paintings is cleverly hung from brass chains on the room’s existing columns.

Blue is an example of designers’ clever use of color, which is one of the things that attracted Keith to them. For example, early 19th-century Adelphi wallpaper was common in colors including bold orange and provided an unexpectedly perfect background for modern maps and portraits. on the walls. The warm color of the thick egg-yolk dining room was inspired by the renovated dining room at Monticello, where Jon – a recent writer, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power-was a frequent visitor.

Keith Meacham in the back yard.

Keith jokes that since he was overseeing the project from afar, “my natural impatience, the source of many decorating mistakes, was never allowed to take over. “Since we didn’t live there, I was never pressured to do everything at once.” It also meant that he, Coleman and Brockschmidt had “a lot of fun” doing “thoughtful shopping” for the season, as the contents of the Manhattan apartment filled the space. of the third floor roof and not much else.

The result is a charming collection of unique rooms that flow easily and are always in high demand. The kitchen, filled with books and dogs, children and arriving guests, is the place everyone was hoping for. Jon, whose only requests were a leather chesterfield sofa and spring spaniels, got three.

“Keith’s spirit is very evident in the house,” says Coleman. “It’s really personal, from acres of books to Southern art to Jon’s collection of political memorabilia.” Most importantly, the residents of that house thrive in their assigned city—and there’s plenty of grass outside the door.

This story originally appeared in the July/August 2014 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE