A gated entrance with a winding quarter-mile drive through a six-acre estate sets the tone for the Flower Magazine 2025 Show House in Nashville, Tennessee. This year’s property is a stately colonnaded home built in 1999, newly renovated by architectural firm Pfeffer Torode. As always, the show house—helmed this year by AD100 and AD PRO Directory talent Corey Damen Jenkins as design chair and Ariella Chezar as floral chair—pairs designers with floral artisans to create botanically informed interiors. Proceeds from the house, which features the work of 23 design studios, raises funds for The Next Door Recovery, an organization providing affordable, gender-specific addiction treatment for women in a faith-based environment.
Last-Minute Heroics
For Jenkins, the show house came with a dash of drama. He and his team had the challenge of simultaneously installing the equestrian-inspired study here while also working on the dining room for the Kips Bay Decorators Show House in New York. “It was a whirlwind of flights, deadlines, and caffeine,” Jenkins says. Adding to the pressure, the églomisé glass top of his study’s Maitland-Smith coffee table, which had arrived intact, mysteriously shattered two days before the public opening. “Thankfully, Jay Paschall [the CEO of Maitland-Smith] came to the rescue, personally driving eight hours from North Carolina with a replacement top,” the designer tells AD PRO. Now that’s design dedication! The resulting room is a master class in sophisticated pattern play, combining damask, geometric, houndstooth, tartan, and animal print patterns.
Designer Aldous Bertram’s cheery English garden themed powder room and hallway (incorporating chintz wallpaper and fabric by London-based designer Nicole Fabre and Espalier paper by Soane Britain on the ceiling) also involved a last-minute frenzy. When a mirror he’d planned on failed to materialize, he built and painted a punchy pedimented mirror in Yves Klein-blue himself using materials from Home Depot. “Nothing like an emergency to inspire creativity!” he says.
An apt appreciation of flora
In a secondary bedroom, DuVäl Reynolds of Virginia-based DuVäl Design debuted his wallcoverings collaboration with Paul Montgomery: a painterly, ethereal European scenic in soft, romantic hues. His goal was to “evoke a sense of wistful nostalgia, as if Alice has abandoned Wonderland, grown up, and built a life in the real world,” says the AD PRO Directory designer. Other moments of fantasy includes AD PRO Directory members Forbes Masters’ glamorous pool lounge, where a metallic botanical wall covering plays off fringed upholstery and fur throws.
While some designers invoked botanicals with floral prints and wallpapers, designer Amanda Khouri paid a more literal and tactile homage: She enlisted Justin Roberts, a Kentucky-based artist and sculptor to craft a willow backsplash in the cutting room. And for a ladies’ sitting room, Nashville-based Lynde Easterlin envisioned a place where Bunny Mellon might read her gardening books. Accordingly, the designer chose de Gournay’s Florilegium (botanical studies) wall covering from the Bunny Mellon collection, featuring “intricate details of bugs and beetles that look like they’re crawling up the walls,” she explains.
Whimsy, folly, and other unexpected objects
Rebecca Gardner of Houses & Parties is responsible for the garland of faux sausages strung on Bevolo lanterns above the kitchen island—one of many fanciful cues laced throughout the house. The designer’s handsome scullery and butler’s pantry decor includes a luscious vegetable display and oversized decorative mousetraps for velvet mice (they’re a Houses & Parties exclusive). W. Gardner Antiques in Houston supplied the antique baskets, brass double scale, Swedish measuring blocks, and ceramic baking containers.
Fans of Mark D. Sikes know to look for a landline telephone, which has become a sort of talisman for the designer, in his show house rooms. His salon and bar, dubbed the Tangier Tent, was inspired by his stay at Villa Mabrouka, Yves Saint Laurent’s former vacation home in Morocco. Now a boutique hotel, the North African villa boasts emerald green Murano chandeliers and beamed ceilings against whitewashed walls. Sikes says he found a similar color story in the Nashville house itself: “a backdrop of cool and serene whites layered with accents of emerald green on the woodwork, tile, decorative accents and landscape.” Drawing from both the Moroccan villa and the home’s existing palette, the AD100 talent tented his room in dramatic green-and-white stripes from Brunschwig & Fils.
Memphis-based Sean Anderson crafted a grand yet intimate multi-story library in the home’s central turret, incorporating various earthy colors and styles of millwork. “I imagined it being a quiet, subdued, intimate respite from the vastness of the home, a world within a world,” the AD PRO Directory designer says. The two-story bookshelf wall provided ample space for his internationally-sourced collection of antique objets d’art.
The Flower Magazine 2025 Nashville Show House runs until October 26. Tickets can be purchased here.
