An interest in designer furniture, eye for found art and love of color combine in this charming Jones Street home.
by Ayn-Monique Klahre | photography by Trey Thomas
Krista Glazewski and Christan McKay’s home reflects a keen eye for design, a love of color and an attraction to statement pieces. “We’re collectors of design furniture and artifacts,” says McKay. But the home also reflects the couple’s commitment to decorating within their university-career budgets. “Ninety percent of what’s in our home has been found on the resale market, given as a gift or created by us,” says Glazewski. “We can’t afford our taste — to buy new, anyway — so we’ve learned to wait until something comes into our view within our budget.”
The couple moved here last summer from Bloomington, Indiana, where both worked at Indiana University. Glazewski had been offered her “dream job” as executive director of the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University; McKay was soon hired as lead librarian for experiential learning partnerships at Hunt Library. They worked with realtor Mary Burr Edwards to find a home downtown, targeting Historic Oakwood. “We were interested in living an urban life, being able to walk to things,” says McKay.
At Edwards’ recommendation, they bought this 1923 two-bedroom Craftsman bungalow on E. Jones Street, sight unseen. They’d lived in a similar-style home before, “so it felt familiar,” says McKay. They were also excited that it had a fenced-in yard for their dog, Cinder; plenty of room for their teenager, North; and a shed out back to work as a studio for McKay, who is also an artist.
The first thing they did was paint the walls white. They enlisted Sedaris Hardwood Floors to strip off dark stain on the floors to reveal the natural coloration of the white oak and heart pine beneath. Then they populated the space with carefully collected furnishings.
The front room offers an overview of their eclectic, design-informed style. Here, a circa-2005 B&B Italia Tufty-Time sectional is partnered with black-leather 1970s Knoll Model 657 chairs and a vintage Fiam Italia curved glass side table. Hanging from the ceiling is a Verner Panton Moon-Lamp, introduced in 1960. The painting on the mantel is actually a “dumpster dive find,” but it’s by Los Angeles artist Jeremy Kennedy, who lived in Bloomington at the same time they did. “It’s all beat up and wonky, and the frame is skewed, but we love it,” Glazewski says.
North was the one who first spotted it, she says, when they were about 2. Near the front door is a bookshelf populated with, among other things, a hummingbird skeleton, shells, some of McKay’s pieces (a mask, bronze tiles, a linocut self-portrait, an etching of a hand) and a lamp nicked from a hotel in the 1950s.
There are just as many storied items in every room of the house — from the USM Haller cabinet in the hallway to a sign from an art exhibit in the Netherlands in the dining room to quilts by Glazewski’s mother on the beds. Combined, they reflect the couple’s fierce ethos of conscious consumerism. Says McKay: “We love beautiful pieces that have lived for a long time and will continue to live on.”
Glazewski and McKay fell in love with the green sofa in the den when they saw it on the resale market. “We were taken by both the form and the color, but it was out of our price range,” says McKay. “It never sold, so they kept dropping the price. We waited six years, but we got it!”
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.
