Architectural Digest March 2011

When Mississippi architect lewis Graeber III took his clients Carolyn and Warren Hood to New York to find an interior designer, their very first meeting was with Richard Keith Langham. Carolyn looked through Langham’s portfolio, pronounced everything “wonderful” and “marvelous,” and told him on the spot that he was hired. Back in the elevator, her husband was aghast. “You didn’t really like that stuff, did you?” he asked, referring to the mostly modern interiors Langham had shown them. “Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t like a bit of it.” But, she now recalls, “I’d noticed his eye for scale and detail, and I told Warren not to worry—Keith was from Brewton, Alabama, and he could do that Southern thing.”

That was 22 years ago, when Langham was a rising decorator at Irvine & Fleming. “I was still in my 20s,” he says. “It was the first good-size house I’d done on my own.” The residence in question was what Langham describes as “an old-fashioned, classic Southern house,” in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Graeber added a new wing, Langham carried out an extensive decorating scheme, and since then they have collaborated on three more of the family’s properties. “We all kind of grew up together,” says the designer, who launched his own business along the way.

So it was natural that after Hurricane Katrina hit five and a half years ago, the team would reassemble. The Hattiesburg property is far enough from the coast to have escaped flooding, but sufficient structural damage was done that Carolyn decided to take the opportunity to expand the kitchen and finally get the exercise room she had always wanted. What she got instead was an almost entirely new house.

The residence had been built in the 1970s in the middle of the energy crisis, and the ceilings were only eight and a half feet high. Graeber took the central block of rooms—entrance hall, library, dining room, and living room—down to the foundation and reimagined it with 13-foot ceilings. A curved staircase was added behind the dining room, as was a long gallery. Now, Carolyn says, all their friends think they doubled the size of the living room, though the square footage remains the same. The wall finish is the same too, a gorgeous pickled cypress infused with bits of gold leaf. “The gold is important,” Langham says. “Otherwise cypress can have a chalky, thirsty look—but this is so beautiful and mellow.” Bruce Nettles, who had assisted the original artisan, returned—for months on end—with his own assistant to re-create the effect. The master builder who made the stair arrived with a parrot on his shoulder. “We had amazing local talent,” says Langham.

But when it came to the wallpaper the designer had planned for the dining room, he sent “a whole palette” of paint chips to Gracie in New York City. The stunning result is a riverboat scene—incorporating the family dogs, the couple on bicycles, and a grandchild on a swing—inspired by a mural of the Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore’s Belvedere Hotel. Langham admits he loves the “big and clumsy” Irish dining table he found for the room in London. “It’s almost five feet wide,” he notes. “Since the proportions of the house changed so much, we had to beef up the scale of a lot of the furniture.”

In the master bedroom wing, Carolyn now has a more generous dressing area and the exercise room she’d been longing for, while the kitchen wing offers a new family room with plenty of what Langham calls “lolling couches” and a porch that overlooks the garden designed by Nashville’s Ben Page. A sunlit gallery runs along the back of the house, with arched windows that Graeber says he begged Langham not to cover up. They compromised by hanging a row of heavy linen damask portieres between the columns that divide the gallery and living room. The solution is but one example of how “really, really well” the two work together, Graeber says. And they seem destined to continue. “Lewis knows how to make a house flow for entertaining—as well as for family living—better than anyone I know,” says Carolyn. “Keith has a great eye, and he’s the most fun person in the world. All of us always have a good time.” 

“We all kind of grew up together,” says Langham of the partnership between designer, architect, and clients.

This article originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of Architectural Digest