Veranda Magazine – Sept -Oct 2015

Interior Design by Tara Shaw
Architecture by Barry Fox
Landscape Design by Byron Adams and Wanda Metz Chase
Photography by Max Kim-Bee
Produced by Carolyn Englefield
Written by Julia Reed

Perfectly Suited – Veranda Magazine / Tara Shaw

After landing her dream house in a twist of fate, New Orleans tastemaker Tara Shaw can’t imagine her cherished collection of European antiques living anywhere else.

When her house in New Orleans was being built —for someone else—designer Tara Shaw walked by it every day. “I thought, This can’t be New Orleans,” she says, adding that she loved the “severe front” reminiscent of Haussmann facades in Paris: a wall around the property that “seemed to hide a secret courtyard.” Although she lived in a charming Victorian at the time, it was French architecture she adored. The homeowner was also a Francophile who’d asked local architect Barry Fox to design a house modeled after the one he’d seen in France.

As Shaw watched the progress, she thought she might like to tackle a similar project one day. “I never thought this one would come on the market,” she says. When it did, she had to buy it: “It was as though it were built for me.”It certainly seems built to showcase Shaw’s collection of furniture, which she describes as “Italian mixed with Swedish, with some French and some contemporary.” Those pieces, in turn, are mixed with ones from her own line, Tara Shaw Maison. The painted Swedish-style dining room table, for example, is a copy of one she sold in her shop years ago. The chairs around it are original, though she now copies them as well.The Maison line, like Shaw’s thriving antiques and interior design businesses, grew out of her lifelong love of European furniture. Working as a rep for an apparel company, she “finally made enough money” to buy one good piece a year and started charting her taste: “Was I painted Italian? Was I rustic French?” It turned out she was both, and soon the yearly splurges weren’t enough to feed her growing addiction. Armed with $14,000 and a plane ticket to France, Shaw entered the trade, selling her first container of pieces from a mini storage unit at the Port of New Orleans in less than 15 minutes.

For the next two decades, she spent a quarter of each year in Europe shopping. But when she married in 2007, she curtailed the travel and began concentrating more on the reproduction line, which now includes everything from pillows and valances to the corner cupboard in her breakfast area and the steel-framed bed in her master bedroom. The bed is hand-welded in New Orleans, as are all the metal pieces she manufactures.
A native of Austin, Texas, Shaw says she fell hard for her adopted city from the moment she arrived, and now she’s equally enamored of her “sleepy neighborhood” near Audubon Park. If the neighborhood is serene, the house is even more so. “Most of my clients are such busy people, they want to feel their blood pressure drop when they come home,” she says. “That’s how I want to feel too.”

To that end, she decorated the space in her favorite shades of white. And while she kept the original cypress paneling in her study and the stained pine floors throught, she painted the dining room floor white, she says, “to make it feel more current.” That room’s 18th-century bench provides a brief master class on Shaw’s eye. The Swedish piece is covered in a Fortuny fabric (the tribal Tapa print) and topped with Maison bolsters in a Belgian linen.

After they married, Shaw’s husband, attorney Robert Walsh, suggested she might want to take time off, an idea that makes her laugh. Instead, she recently signed on with Restoration Hardware, which sells mirrors of her design (including the floor mirror in her dining room) and framed intaglios like the originals on her living room wall. And so her love affair with furniture and the decorative arts continues apace. “I have more ideas,” she says, “than time.”