Frances and Ed Mayes decided to leave the San Francisco Bay area and return to the South where Frances had grown up and where she retained strong ties with friends and family. Their first thought was to find a home that reflected the region’s Southern vernacular architecture. They chose the Triangle area of North Carolina — rather than Frances’ native state of Georgia — because the author’s best friend from her Randolph-Macon College days lives in Chapel Hill. And because the location provided easy access to the renowned High Point Furniture Market in High Point where, in 2003, Frances — in cooperation with Drexel Heritage Furniture Company — introduced a successful line of furnishings based on her decades-long love affair with Italian life and design.
Under the banner Frances Mayes: At Home in Tuscany, the furniture and fabrics created by Drexel Heritage were soon joined by a line of outdoor furniture by Laneventure and lamps produced by Wildwood. As her business flourished, so did her need for more frequent trips to the East Coast, and the relocation became inevitable. They and their daughter and grandson were soon house hunting in Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Hillsborough.
“We had just completed the renovation of a 12th-century hermitage in the mountains above Cortona, not far from Bramasole,” says Frances, referring to the setting for her best-selling novel and the subsequent movie Under the Tuscan Sun. “The hermitage was built by followers of Saint Francis of Assisi and required three years of constant attention,” she recalls. “So after looking at numerous historic houses that would require restoration or refurbishing, we found we just wanted to move into something already done.”
The Mayes family finally settled on a house in northern Durham County, a traditional residence of pink brick with paired columns and decorative ironwork.
“What Southern girl ever gives up her dream of Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind?” says Frances.
The World At Home
As the tall double doors swing open to frame a long entrance hall leading to the living room, and a spacious terrace beyond, the refinement of Frances’ educated eye and her familiarity with many cultures are apparent. Tribal rugs, some family pieces and others purchased in Istanbul from a rug merchant — who has become a friend and frequent visitor to Bramasole — provide much of the pattern in the décor, contrasting nicely with the home’s Brazilian cherry floors. To the left of the entry, a metal angel with a trumpet, once a shop sign, heralds our entrance. An ornately embroidered child’s dress with intricate metal emblems hangs casually from a tall-backed arm chair, the Palazzo Chair from her Drexel Heritage line. Frances describes the garment as a Turkish circumcision dress that she purchased in an Istanbul bazaar during a stopover en route to a sailing and hiking expedition of southern Turkey. (The trip is chronicled in her most recent travel book, A Year in the World, published in 2006.)
From a balustrade above the entrance hall, a fall of lusciously striped fabric cascades — one of many lovely pieces of fabric, a number of them antique, that Frances uses for color and texture in table covers, throws, pillow slips and window dressings throughout the house. She admits to being fabric obsessed, the result of her upbringing as the child of a family who owned textile mills in the small town of Fitzgerald, GA.
The living room is filled with light through tall, arched windows that reveal the brick terrace and the tranquil, almost pastoral, view beyond. With a copse of slender trees in the foreground of a rolling greensward, the setting seems more English countryside than suburban golf course. In this spacious room, the variety of her own designs, and a few of the antiques from which she drew them, are shown to full advantage amidst her collections of fabrics, folk art and objects d’art, which often provide an unexpected twist. An octagonal table from her Drexel Heritage Collection displays antique silver candlesticks along with shards of pottery and a gracefully extended carved hand incised with numerals. A slender wooden figure stands supported by a triangular platform and another occupies a table top and appears to be encircled by a hoop skirt of wire.
“Those are old religious figures, saints, which often appeared fully wigged and garbed in Italian churches,” says Frances. “I removed the gowns and wigs to reveal their simple form and the gorgeous antique paint that makes them more art than religious artifacts.”
Distinctive Style
The living room exemplifies Frances’ distinctive style, which might be described as a complex layering of beautiful and unusual things. The wall behind the loose-cushioned sofa, a piece from her California days, invitingly upholstered in a substantial silk with sensuous fringe, is the backdrop for an 18th century antique bookcase from Italy. Filled with books and assorted bibelots, the open-shelved cabinet was the inspiration for a centerpiece hutch in the Drexel Heritage Collection. The mellow tones of the original’s chestnut wood were meticulously reproduced as one choice of finishes for the prospective purchaser. On the opposite wall, above the fireplace, a Murano glass mirror with edges of gilt and soft tones of pink inset with jet details commands the eye. In the dining room, over a painted console Frances collected in an outdoor market in San Francisco when still a graduate student, another Murano mirror gleams with gilt and silver.
Frances recalls, “When I purchased the living room mirror, the shop owners gave me this second mirror. It is so typical of the generosity of spirit one finds in the Italians.”
All of the colors in the splendid living room can be found in the faded antique stucco walls of Frances’ beloved Bramasole — pale peach, lemon yellow, buttercream and the omnipresent glow of apricot reminiscent of a summer’s twilight. The subtle tone of a clear pink church drapery thrown over a circular side table with an aqua urn-shaped lamp plays well with the antique blue of the carved figures of saints. Frances notes that there is, indeed, a Southern gene for good taste. She individualizes hers by choosing things that nobody else has and being sure to add something quirky, like the bare wooden figures of the saints.
“It’s like Wallace Stevens saying that a poem must always include one rough, ugly word,” she laughs.
Three rooms adjacent to the living room — the breakfast room, kitchen and sun room — are the family area. The breakfast room is set with an oval-shaped painted table, purchased years ago when Frances was collecting the Italian furniture line Patina. The table and matching chairs are close to the efficient kitchen where Ed is preparing an onion soup for dinner on the Viking range. His work space is surrounded by an island covered in creamy colored travertine. The countertop of the island gives space for drinking cappuccino while conversing with Ed, who perfects many of the recipes that appear in the couple’s coffee table books Living in Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. The sun room is filled with her favorite Drexel Heritage armchair, covered in a plaid silk with upholstered bench, and a nicely scaled loveseat with dressmaker’s detailing in a creamy white fabric with rows of raised diamonds. The painted armadio that hold Frances’ extensive cookbook collection is another find from her San Francisco days when she was the chairman of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
Bedding Down
As befits the Italian culture, the bed chosen by the betrothed pair is expected to last a lifetime. Thus all the sleeping rooms in the Mayes home have elaborately designed and sumptuously dressed beds. The master bedroom features a painted four-poster by Patina. The pale, slender columns are carved with delicate flora patterns in an ivory-on-ivory tone and covered with a Florentine silk coverlet that echoes the bed’s paint scheme. The room is home to one of Frances’ favorite Italian antiques, a painted bookcase cabinet.
“We chose the faded patina of the blue paint on this bookcase as a finish for the pieces in the At Home in Tuscany line,” says Frances. “It absolutely goes with every color scheme.”
A friend’s painting of three perfect peaches is displayed adjacent to a plump loveseat in a yellow silk, and silk window treatments in a faint yellow and apricot stripe complete the scene.
The guest room has temporarily become Frances’ office and study. The ornate bed is covered in a luxurious tufted silk duvet that Frances designed. The night table, one of three in the house, is also Frances’ design and extra tall to suit the bed. She carefully selected painted scenes of fruit to show to the furniture maker who executed the tables in an antique finish and hand painted the scenes on the table tops.
“Somehow I got a religious vignette instead of my fruit on one of them, but the colors and finishes are just right,” she notes.
The Bramasole bed, named for the curvilinear wave pattern that Frances used in a stencil in the villa, occupies pride of place in the second guest bedroom. It is executed in dark wood, the favorite choice for an Italian room. Frances says the traditional Italian room contains dark wood, some ironwork, a painted piece and something of stone. This second guest room will no doubt some day include a proper stone accessory. For now, the room will make do with another of Frances’ quirky selections, a French bonnet cupboard, which, due to its vertical lines and narrow span, is called the “Dead Man Standing.”
How fortunate to live so fully in the world as have Frances and Ed Mayes. And, how fortunate for us all they have come to call North Carolina home.
Design By Alexander Julian And Wife Meagan:
PRESERVATION HOMES UNVEILS BUNGALOW STYLE HOMES WITH A DIFFERENCE
by Diane Lea
Alexander Julian — a 30-year veteran of clothing and home furnishing design — and wife Meagan Julian have teamed with Preservation Homes, a Raleigh-based custom home builder, to create a new Alexander Julian collection of bungalow-style homes. Unveiled at the September opening of South Lakes, a new 750-home community in Fuquay-Varina, the residential designs offer a dozen bungalow house plans, with three to five exterior variations.
Tom Bland, of Preservation Homes, is a huge fan of historic architecture. When he approached Alexander and Meagan Julian about the project more than a year ago, he won their collaboration with his comprehensive approach to designing, building and marketing custom homes with historic appeal. The work of Alexander and Meagan Julian redefines home design for medium-sized homes and includes quality features including cedar shake siding, customized shingles, gracious porches, handsome decorative brackets, columns and stonework. The 1500- to 3000-square-foot homes range in price from the low $200,000s to $400,000 with a median price of $275,000. The Julians re-created period moldings and patterned flooring for the interiors and developed both interior and exterior color palettes. Bland reports that the company has begun two new Alexander Julian neighborhoods in Graham and New Bern.