906 East Martin Luther King Boulevard

The building came to us carved up. Decades as three separate apartments had left it with partition walls where rooms used to open into one another, and services routed wherever they would fit. Putting it back was less about decoration than about reading what the original house had been and undoing everything that had been done to it since.

The staircase is the piece people come to see. It is a curved flight built around a sweeping plaster core, with white oak treads winding up against it and a handrail shaped by hand along the whole run, finishing in a scroll where it meets the wall. There is nothing catalogue about any of it. As far as we know there is not another staircase quite like it in Tennessee.

Away from the stair, the work is quieter and just as deliberate. A white oak library wraps an arched window with a built-in bench under it, shelving carried floor to ceiling. The kitchen sits behind an arched doorway in white cabinetry, on Calacatta marble with the veining matched across the joins. Original brass door hardware and reeded glass were cleaned and put back into use rather than replaced.