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This Dazzling Memorial Area Home Stands Out as a Renowned Architect’s Biggest Challenge: A From the Ground Up Transformation

BY // 11.07.17
photography Johnny Than

Internationally renowned architect and interior designer Lauren Rottet could not have picked a better place to hold a book signing for her new tome, Authentic Design: Lauren Rottet and Rottet Studio. The cocktail-hour fete was held in the Memorial area home of wildly successful entrepreneur Kevin Stolle, who tasked the architect with designing his house from the ground up.

This was her first soup-to-nuts home design and it presented something of a challenge. Not because she wasn’t up to the task. But rather what Stolle envisioned was totally out of her wheelhouse. At the book signing held in the cabana overlooking Stolle’s swimming pool, Rottet recalled her conversation with the client who insisted she design his house, which he envisioned as a lovely Mediterranean builder home.

“We’ll do the spirit of Mediterranean, indoor-outdoor, beautiful materials of the land but it will be contemporary,” she told Stolle. “Anything that is of the land can be very old world, like old stones and outcroppings.”

While guests perused the sleek new home and complimented the architect and the homeowner, Stolle reflected on the challenge. “I don’t know if you would call it a meeting of the minds or a conflict of the minds between Lauren and me,” he said. “I was really old world and I like wood and romance. She’s modern and light . . . This is the result and I think it was a great combination. I love it. It’s beautiful.”

It has been 17 years since Rottet published her first design book, Lauren Rottet: The Substance of Style. In the interim, the president and founding principal of her namesake design firm has been very busy designing and earning kudos for a repertoire that includes hotel, office and residential work as well as a furniture line. Authentic Design is published by Rizzoli with the forward written by renowned architecture critic Paul Goldberger, providing Rottet with a writer’s dream team.

Feeling bookish: Susie Criner, Maksim Koloskov, Vince Flickincher, Katie and Kyle Rottet, Anita Smith, Sir Mark Haukohl, Lauren Loreman, Ane Rocha, Lisa Pope Westerman, Renea Locke, Sarah Kost, Jill Frankie, Adan Garcia, Abbey Branch, Kevin Hamey, Ginny Hightower and Melody Faircloth.

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