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If a man is known by the books he keeps, then interior designer Jason Arnold is revealed by the coffee table tomes in his Germantown home. The mélange of designers representedTony Duquette, Billy Baldwin, Miles Reddare legends, all bound by panache, exquisite taste, and glamour, along with the ability to anchor that trio in reality.
Arnold inherits that mantle, as evidenced by his 1,400-square-foot Victorian shotgun cottage, where beauty is balanced by subtlety and richness.
'I'm always drawn to high contrasts,” Arnold says.
Built in 1899, the cottage would have once been the domain of blue-collar workers. Arnold initially found it covered in vinyl siding and 'reeking of cats and dogs.” After purchasing it, he replaced the vinyl with period-perfect wood siding and painted it black. On the porch remains a swath of original gingerbread trim and a plaque proclaiming the home's historical designation.
Inside, the foyer is colored with an off-black, high-gloss oil paint for a look that is just short of lacquer.
'I love that reflective quality,” Arnold says. 'A dark room painted in a high gloss feels larger, because you get that reflection.”
Amplifying the foyer's glamour is a vintage Lucite table that Arnold found at the Antiques and Garden Show of Nashville. The living room is a scene of design eras mingling harmoniously. A contemporary rug in black-and-white stripes lies across the original pine floors. For seating, there is a custom-made Chesterfield sofa with clean lines, along with a set of Louis XVI-style bergères in black leather. And there's more Lucite via a floor lamp and candlesticks. 'I have a bit of a Lucite fetish,” Arnold admits.
Hanging above this tableau is a breathtaking chandelier made of oxidized brass, which Arnold discovered at GasLamp Too. Dating to the Brutalist aesthetic movement of the 1960s, it was designed and produced in Denmark by Svend Aage Holm Sørensen. The room's most sumptuous piece is a French buffet, crafted out of burled wood, from the mid-1800s. Arnold loves its book-matched inset panels and distinctive material.
'Burl adds a lot of warmth and texture,” he says. 'And I'm really drawn to the honey-golden tones.”
One quickly learns why honeyed tones charm Arnold: A bonanza of gold hues, through fixtures and furniture, provide a sexy complement to the many black tones that reoccur throughout the house. As with the foyer, one of the two bedrooms is painted in high-gloss black, and black is also found in the kitchen cabinets, a claw-foot tub and hexagonal bathroom tiles.
All of the baseboards were milled to match what little was left from 1899, work done by James Dunn of Vintage Millworks. The floor plan was reworked to accommodate two-and-a-half baths; originally there was one. Yet, only one foot was added to the home. Today, Germantown is the site of teardowns galore, but this Victorian cottage preserves the past without being fettered by it, because, here, the patina of age lives side-by-side with modernity.