Sometimes it takes a friend or a friendly designer to tell a homeowner the truth about their home. In the case of Shannon Bowers, she is both friend and designer to the owners of this Dallas home. “They’re so chic and sophisticated, as well as warm and gracious, and I just felt that the house didn’t really feel as if it reflected who they are,” says Bowers, MILIEU’s Editor-at-Large and a prolific interior designer with her own namesake firm.

Although the homeowners and their now-teenage son had been living in the house for ten years, they agreed with Bowers that the house had somehow aged beyond them and that a change was needed. “The beauty of our having lived here already for so many years is that we had a lot of time to think about what we really wanted our interiors, and even the exterior, of the house to become,” says the homeowner. While she and her husband love the scale of the house, with its generously proportioned rooms that allowed them to host frequent large gatherings, they also craved a greater intimacy. “We wanted intimate spaces amid the big rooms,” the homeowner says, “and we knew that Shannon would be able to create that effect for us.”

Bowers, too, recognized that the Birmingham, Alabama– based architect Jeremy Corkern, with whom she has collaborated over the years on many projects, would be the right colleague to transform the house, inside and out. The residence had been built in the late 1980s as a speculative (“spec”) house, with the current owners having purchased it in 2009. “The architect who designed this was very talented,” Corkern concedes, “and the issue was not about the house’s bones, scale, or layout, but simply that it had aged.”

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INTERIOR DESIGN BY SHANNON BOWERS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIGUEL FLORES-VIANNA

WRITTEN BY DAVID MASELLO

This story appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of MILIEU.