Inside

The bedrooms for the Stewart children are flung on the house’s second and third floors. (Two of the kids attend Fredericksburg Academy, a school Doug Stewart helped to found 18 years ago.) Richmond-based decorative painter Sunny Goode was brought in to add some flourish to the rooms. She created a whimsical frieze of fish for 8-year-old Douglas Clayton’s marine blue room and a green damask pattern on white panels in the pink bedroom of 14-year-old Catherine Greer. (The room of 17-year-old Kenneth Coleman is off limits to visitors.) “Sunny was thrilled to be creating the backdrop for this,” says Cathy, pointing to an over-scale, sunshine yellow, tufted patent-leather headboard in Greer’s room (all three kids go by their middle names). Cathy herself painted a demure porcelain bust of a young girl acid yellow, and she fits in perfectly.

When designing the English basement kitchen, the Stewarts worked with Richmond’s KDW Home (formerly Kitchen Designworks). KDW suggested marble-topped cabinets elevated on platforms as in an English country house. A rare mosaic—a 19th-century Dutch manganese tile picture supplied by Kim Faison Antiques in Richmond—sets the design tone for the room. Even the Viking stove’s plum color was chosen to complement it. The eat-in area is uncommonly chic, with white patent leather-upholstered dining chairs surrounding a Baroque-style table (painted white)—and the wall beyond opens into a green, Wonka-esque conservatory that is original to the house. In that room, potting benches were transformed into seats, and Gregory had striped cushions made to go with them—a groovy spin on a classic American Victorian architectural feature.

The Stewarts have been careful not to alter too many of the physical properties of the house—a challenging commitment when the talk turned to improving the lighting in the living room, which is the biggest space in the house. It had no ceiling light. “We were asking ourselves, ‘Should we do wiring in the ceiling?’” says Gregory. Answer: no. She subsequently found two late 19th-century Italian plaster medallions (from a shop in Santa Monica), had them installed them on the ceiling and draped the cords in silk. An electrician planed the medallions so they could be flush-mounted to the ceiling.

The Stewarts, who also own a home in the Outer Banks (Corolla) and another in Deepwater Cay in the Bahamas, say they are happy in Smithsonia, and with its eclectic décor. It’s all come together to form a stylish, reasonably child-friendly home for the family. “I’m a city person, and the kids love it,” says Cathy, “but I think my husband would be happier on a farm in Blacksburg.”

Maybe that will be next.