How a Fort Worth Lifestyle Influencer Renovated Her House Crush Into a Home — One Fabulous Piece at a Time

Bradley Agather and Coley Means were just two months away from their wedding day in 2013 when the starter house of their dreams came onto the market. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect — or more stressful — for Agather, a professional gifter and lifestyle influencer whose popular Luella & June blog turned 10 last year. Means, an oil-and-gas attorney, had recently accepted a job in Fort Worth when their real estate agent called about a house for sale there. Agather begged off, explaining she was deep into wedding-planning mode.

“No, you really need to come see this house,” the agent insisted.

Located near the historic River Crest Country Club, the midcentury modern residence was designed in 1961 by Dallas architect Glenn Allen Galloway. It was love at first sight the minute they stepped onto the front porch. “Coley and I looked at each other like ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’” Agather says. “I’ve always wanted a house with an orange front door, and this house had one. I’ve also loved pineapples ever since I was little — and it had a pineapple door knocker.” Talk about serendipity.

Throughout the couple’s engagement, Agather had been on the hunt for an easy, ready-made nest. “I didn’t want to redo a kitchen or bathrooms. I just didn’t need another project,” she says. None of that mattered the minute they walked inside. “Oh, my gosh. This is the house,” she remembers saying. “And I’m going to have to renovate the whole damn thing.”

“Oh, my gosh. This is the house,” Agather says. “And I’m going to have to renovate the whole damn thing.”

The kitchen and bathrooms would need overhauling for sure, but the bones of the house were sublime. With vast walls of glass and an open floor plan, it is one of Galloway’s most beautiful designs. The architect’s signature floating walnut bookcases and cabinets, which he used to divide the large living area, remained intact. “Finding a mid-century house like this one is rare, and we weren’t going to come across another one soon,” Agather says. “Coley and I left to have a glass of wine and think about it. Then we said, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’”

There were already numerous offers on the table from other interested buyers, but Means found a way to appeal to the homeowners’ emotions. Along with their best offer, he attached a heartfelt missive. In it, he mentioned the pencil lines he’d seen on the wall marking the owner’s children’s and grandchildren’s heights over the years. Means had made a mental note of their names and referenced them in the letter. “We got a call three days later — and we’d gotten the house,” Agather says.

After a year of renovations, the couple moved into their new house in April 2014 — a month before celebrating their first anniversary. Only two rooms were furnished: the master bedroom and the kitchen. The rest of the house was almost empty, and that’s exactly how Agather planned it. “The bedroom and kitchen were the two rooms where we spend all our time, so I wanted them to be ready to go,” she says. “The other rooms we pieced together slowly. That’s the bit of advice I’d give anyone: Wait and figure out how you use the house before you fill it with furniture, and be thoughtful about your decisions. That way you end up with things you really love.”

“That’s the bit of advice I’d give anyone: Wait and figure out how you use the house before you fill it with furniture, and be thoughtful about your decisions.”

Agather collaborated with Fort Worth-based Kelley Parker Roberts of Beckley Design Studio on the renovations and interiors. “I wanted someone close to my age in Fort Worth who had a similar style to mine,” Agather says. “Also, I learned a long time ago that in everything you do, hire someone who is smarter than you are. That was definitely true of Kelley.”

The admiration was mutual. “At the time, we didn’t have a lot of 20-something clients, and I was struck with how mature Bradley was,” Roberts says. “She was confident in what she wanted, very sophisticated, and very knowledgeable.” As a former fashion editor for FD Luxe and the daughter of stylish power banker Elaine Agather, she has an inherently great eye for design. “Bradley could look at things and quickly say what she liked or didn’t like,” Roberts says. “We’ve had clients in their 50s who couldn’t do that.”

Agather’s strategy was simple, yet methodical: Find one great piece she loved, and build the whole room around it, slowly. She kicked off the dining room with a vintage burlwood Milo Baughman table, discovered at Sputnik Modern. Next came a Lindsey Adelman light fixture, which Agather had long coveted.

It was more than a year before the set of 10 Lawson-Fenning chairs arrived, so temporary seating was brought in. Agather never let an unfinished dining room stop her from setting a beautiful table with china and linens, and it’s still a priority, even when it’s just the two of them having pizza for dinner. “I have a deep love of dinnerware,” Agather says. She often mixes different looks from her wedding china, including plates created by Parisian interior designer Alberto Pinto for Limoges, and Hermès’ striking Bleus d’Ailleurs pattern. She also incorporates special pieces, such as Marie Daâge’s “artwork on a plate,” and Laboratorio Paravicini’s hand-painted Italian ceramics, which she discovered while researching a blog post.

The living room didn’t have furniture for two years. It’s not that Agather wasn’t buying anything; it all went into storage bit by bit, waiting for the big reveal all at once, her designer says. Agather built the room around a blue-and-pink vinyl work by Derrick Velasquez, found by art adviser Illa Gaunt. It hung on the wall by itself for what seemed like forever. “At first, I thought I’d go crazy with a big empty space for so long,” Agather says. “But then we figured out how to use it as an extra party room.” With rented tables and chairs, they hosted big family Thanksgivings and dinner parties for 35. “We’ve even had dance parties in there,” she says. “It was so much fun.” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. “I got the idea from my mom without even thinking about it,” Agather says. “Growing up in our house on Desco [in Dallas], there was a time when there was no furniture in the living room, and my mom would have parties in there.”

Slow and thoughtful are keywords here. Agather and Means took their time building a collection of contemporary artworks by Kaari Upson, Robert Voit, Joel Ross, and Anja Niemi. Agather took five years to fill the bookshelves in the living room with meaningful tomes on art, design, fashion, gardening, and photography. It’s still a work in progress. “My dream is to always be surrounded by books,” she says. “I’m always reading. I pull them out all the time for inspiration, even at the dinner table.”

Fashion is a big influence, and Agather doesn’t have to look farther than her own closet for a stylish mix of classic Hermès, vintage Chanel, colorful La Double J dresses, Khaite jeans, and tailored Blazé Milano jackets. “I approach decorating my house the same way I do my wardrobe,” she says. “I like classic, well-designed pieces, with an unexpected color or an interesting print mix. Bottom line, I only buy things I really love. I find that I never regret these purchases. Plus, surrounding myself with things I love makes me happy.”

The house’s modern architecture was a reference point, but Roberts says her client wasn’t slavishly trying to reproduce an era. “She loved the mid-century style but didn’t want a lot of vintage furniture. We had quite a few Knoll pieces made to order so it would feel fresh. There was definitely a mix of old and new.” The Warren Platner dining table in the breakfast room was a wedding gift, which she paired with newly made Eero Saarinen armchairs from Knoll. In the living room, a pair of vintage chairs that Agather owned for years was re-covered in a blue-spotted Brunschwig & Fils fabric. The blue Shine by S.H.O sofa, Stark rug, and blue benches were customized for her. The buffet in the dining room was custom made so that Agather could easily access her heavy box of Tiffany & Co. sterling flatware.

Color was also nonnegotiable. “The only color I don’t like is mauve,” Agather says. And she’s as particular about getting the right hues in her house as she is for her wardrobe. There were times when she’d pull out dresses from the closet to show her interior designer, and they’d compare them to the fabric swatches. The vintage Marco Zanuso chair and custom pouf in the living room needed to be more of a blush, not hot pink; and the Knoll chairs in the breakfast room should be marigold, not yellow.

“I held up an Hermès shopping bag to all these paint chips to decide what color of orange to repaint my front door,” Agather says. The winner? Benjamin Moore’s Rumba Orange.

As for the symbolic tropical fruit that first caught Agather’s eye? She had a bigger brass pineapple door knocker made to replace the original, which she saved and encased in Lucite. It’s on her bookshelf now and makes for a sweet story when anyone asks.

“The house is everything I wanted it to be, and more,” Agather says. “It was totally worth the wait.”