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Hannah Crowell and James Wilson's tale is more than one about a house; it's a love story of discarding the past and starting fresh.
The owner of Crowell + Co. Interiors met Wilson more than 20 years agoin algebra class, of all placesat University School of Nashville. They dated for a decade, then took a ten-year break, during which each went on to marry other people. Crowell had two daughters and was back living in Nashville after flitting between coasts when Wilson, who was residing in Brooklyn at the time, came to town and asked her out for a drink. By then, they were both divorced and realized immediately that they were always meant to be.
After waiting so long, Crowell and Wilson still didn't rush into things: They dated for three years before starting to look for a home to make their own. The couple knew they wanted a single-story, mid-century ranch house with good bones, a property they could transform together, and something that wouldn't be too much of a money pit.
'We looked at one place that was like Carcosa out of True Detective,” Crowell laughs. 'It was horrifying.”
Eventually, they found the perfect fita 2,400-square-foot house perched on a sloped, two-and-a-half-acre lot high above West Meadeand immediately made an offer. In April 2014, they closed on their new homeand Wilson proposed. Then the real work began. Two days after closing, the walls came downin some cases, quite literallyand it was out with the old and in with the new. Wilson sold his East Nashville house and worked 12- to 16-hour days for the next three months, getting the new home in a livable state so that he, Crowell, and her daughters could move in by July.
The pair shared creative input, though Crowell continued to work full-time while Wilsonwho has a background in set design, painting, and furniture building from his days spent in New Yorktackled the bulk of the manual labor himself. Major components of the early renovation process included stripping the walls of dated wood paneling and ripping up carpet and linoleum that concealed multiple layers of pet urine and asbestos. Both bathrooms underwent major transformations with new tile, sinks, tubs, and a stall shower in the master.
Crowell is the first to admit they went over their budget once they got knee-deep into the gut job.
'When you open up a house, you are constantly finding little ‘surprises' that take time and money to fix,” Wilson adds. 'Cosmetically, that's one thing‘Oh, we'll wallpaper this room and put a chair there'but when you get into structurally trying to shore up a house, it's Pandora's box.”
Like most couplesparticularly when it's a pair of creatives with very different visionsCrowell and Wilson say they often butted heads when it came down to mapping out the aesthetic. For one, Crowell wanted color, while Wilson preferred an austere palette. And also like many couples, they quickly learned to compromise: Wilson got his white walls, but Crowell was able to add pops of color with statement pieces like a blue velvet couch dressed up with fuchsia pillows in the living room and a bold Hygge & West–papered accent wall in her youngest daughter's room.
'Blending our [existing] furniture was a nice exercise in compromise and editing,” Wilson says.
'And by ‘nice,' he means really ‘difficult,'” Crowell chimes in. 'For months, there was nothing on the walls because we couldn't agree on it!”
That's no longer the case; now, every bookshelf and countertop is tastefully adorned with books and trinkets, each with its own backstory. Clean lines and a minimalistic design punctuate the home, but the couple gave it a personality of its own via multiple textures and layers. By last summer, the Crowell-Wilson house was mostly completethough the designers will no doubt tweak and add to it in the coming years, particularly if they have another child as they're hoping to doand in October, they were married on the back lawn of their newly rehabbed home.
'We will die here,” Crowell says. 'We're never leaving.”