What happens when a longtime residential developer of design-forward spec homes finally builds his own personal abode? The 30-something homebuilder goes buck wild. Well, sort of. As owner and Dallas-based Pierce Jordan says, “I’ve always had to kind of play it safe.” When, for the first time, he had no restraints, “I wanted the opposite of what I think a spec home would be.” Cue descriptors including eclectic, moody, inviting, and European.
Jordan had already broken ground on his home—designed by Austin architect Juan Carlos deLeon—when a large commercial project brought designer Evan Krenzien, of Evan Shane Design Build, to Dallas part-time. The two already followed each other’s work on Instagram, and it was kismet that they ran into each other at the gym and struck up a friendship. Partway through his build, Jordan said to Krenzien, “‘Let’s collaborate on my house and see what happens.’ I know a lot about design and construction, but with Evan being from LA, I wanted someone who could push me into looking at things outside my arena.”
Jordan was not interested in building a typical home for an unwed young person. For the 5,000-square-foot four-bedroom new build (with a one-bedroom guesthouse) in Dallas’s Bluffview neighborhood, with an exterior influenced by French Normandy architecture, the two concentrated on layering modernity atop classical European aesthetics. In this vein it was Jordan who pushed Krenzien into new territory. The Mississippi-born developer says growing up in the South gave him an appreciation for antiques and heirlooms. “I told Evan, ‘I want to incorporate things that I got from my grandmother or my mom,’ and I think at first he was kind of taken aback.”
The designer, who grew up in a 1990s Southern California home, was not used to looking back so far into history. His approach was to pair something contemporary with antiquity to make it “feel fresh and young.” To wit, a framed 12-foot stretch of salvaged 1700s European wallpaper that Jordan had purchased years prior hangs in the living room around the corner from a 3D Ben Medansky ceramic wall installation they commissioned in the same scale and tones. “Making the new feel more established and making the old feel fresh and current became the driving force of the house,” says Krenzien. “And it pushed both of us—me to the older and Pierce to the newer.”
When the designer came on board, Jordan had other defining design details already secured, namely stone. He’d traveled to Carrera, Italy, with Dallas’s Aria Stone Gallery and chose unique marbles that ended up acting as the project’s primary mood board. The saturated selections include Calacatta Viola slabs with a beige undertone and deep red and green veins that Krenzien says defined the whole home’s palette. “I used that as the grounding starting point for colors,” Jordan adds, including an all-red parlor, a brick-y butler’s pantry, and a sage green morning room. “When it’s nighttime and you have a moody red, the feeling you get is calm,” says the builder. “It was very important for me that the house feels like a safe haven when I come home, because I’m in construction all day.”
