How a Globetrotting Designer Reinvented a Louisville Home
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In the dining room of a Victorian home in Louisville’s bohemian Highlands neighborhood, Stephen Reily is surrounded by art. A slender man who speaks with graceful authority, he is pointing out the room’s playful baroque, goth wallpaper.
Hand-tinted in watercolor by artist Francesca Gabbiani, it features whiskey bottles, vultures, and cigarette packs. Beside him looms a stack of resin boxes designed by the North Carolina native Sam Stewart, 15 in all. Each one backlit by the midafternoon sun, they grow smaller in their climb toward the ceiling.
With its vertiginous walls and strange proportions, the whimsical home of Reily and the nonfiction author Emily Bingham has what he describes as an “Alice in Wonderland effect.” To cross its threshold is to enter a madcap maze that gets curiouser and curiouser with every step, where 13-foot-tall walls dare visitors to always look up and reconsider their relationship to space.
When they bought the 1871 house in 1995, Bingham and Reily embraced their responsibility as caretakers of a precious slice of local real estate just a block from the bustle of a trendy commercial corridor. They were surprised it would also become an extension of their civic engagement, philanthropy, and commitment to social justice.
“The work on the house prefigured, in an unexpected way, the turns our lives would be taking,” Reily says.
A former director of Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, Reily was instrumental in bringing Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor to the institution in April 2021, just months after Taylor was killed by Louisville police officers. The museum’s urgency in a moment of crisis was widely hailed. Now, as founding director of Remuseum, an initiative launched by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, he is helping reorient the ways cultural organizations spend their money.
Bingham’s books, meanwhile, ask readers to reassess accepted historical narratives, a task that is not always easy in the South. Her most recent, My Old Kentucky Home, highlights the racist roots of Stephen Foster’s classic tune and questions whether it should have a place in contemporary public life notwithstanding its importance in the folk music canon.
Disruptors by nature, Bingham and Reily eventually turned their attention to shaking up their living quarters. Their home was initially decorated with family in mind, but after 17 years spent raising three children, they craved change. Big change.
“Emily turned to me and said, ‘You know, we either need to blow it up, like, reinvent it dramatically, or we shouldn’t do it at all,’ ” Reily says. They enlisted Rodman Primack—the founder of the Mexico City– and New York–based textile and interiors studio RP Miller and the co-founder, with Rudy Weissenberg, of the design gallery AGO Projects—to “smash the boundary between art and decorating.” And smash it he did.
Primack embraced the house’s “vernacular history”—its particular cultural and geographic context—and turned up the volume. “We started talking about how color could affect the way you move through the house and how pattern could augment some of the proportions,” the designer says.
Just as Reily is seeking to change how we experience art in museums, he and Primack sought to transform the way we live with it. “Houses are not museums,” Primack adds. “I want people to really live in these spaces and to feel that the work we have done allows them to live their best life.”
To minimize the entryway’s height, Primack brought on Marco Rountree Cruz, a Mexican artist with roots in graffiti. Inspired by an offhand comment Bingham made one morning at breakfast about sandhill cranes flying through Kentucky, Cruz created a mural using black electrical tape that lends the room a startling sense of dimension. Primack painted the floor, knowing that the combination of colorful pattern and wear over time would mimic the welcoming quality of a threadbare rug. In the living room, charcoal-and-cream-striped taffeta curtains were inspired by the portraits of the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta. A round conversation sofa, upholstered in pale yellow primrose, offers another nod to the house’s Victorian roots. Then, a decorative swerve. The Federal mirror hanging above the mantel? It’s designed by the young New York artist Misha Kahn, who offers a punk touch with a shimmering purple frame.
In Reily and Bingham’s view, creativity and function not only go hand in hand, they’re aesthetic equals, engaged partners pushing each other forward. When they work well together, Bingham says, the result can reach “a whole other level of joy.”
That openness is at the core of how the couple move through the world, as patrons and citizens. Much of Reily’s mission is anchored by a faith in the power of art to nurture conversations, and Bingham’s work as a historian interrogates the differences between generations to broaden our cultural narratives. That’s one lesson Primack took from working with the couple on their home.
“The past is always telling us something,” he says. “We don’t have to be stuck in it.”
This story appears in the November 2023 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Charity Begins at Home." SUBSCRIBE NOW
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