August 8, 2022 Update: This home is now on the market. It is listed for $2 million. Learn more here.
When interior designer and realtor Jessica Koltun bought her Midway Hollow lot in 2020, she was faced with a dilemma: If you design houses every day, how do you decide what your own will look like?
Koltun has been designing houses for years. She’s an interior designer by trade, getting her start by renovating $10 million mansions in Las Vegas. Looking for a change, she moved to Dallas in 2015. She had never visited the city before. She got her real estate license and began flipping houses, breaking into architectural design and construction three years ago.
She’s designed over 20 homes in Midway Hollow and drawn plans for seven, but building her personal home was a much different story.
“I do this for a living—design and real estate—but when it comes to your own house, like my own house, it was so much more difficult,” she says.
Koltun knew the things she wanted—like a corner lot and plenty of sunshine. “I pretty much feel like I designed it around the sun,” she says, choosing a C-shaped footprint to maximize the house’s natural light. She also knew she wanted to mix traditional architecture—like arches and the foyer’s groin vault ceiling—with contemporary finishes.
The result is a bright, timeless four-bedroom home that feels fresh, modern, and balanced. Symmetry is “my number one when I’m designing a space,” Koltun says. “I really feel like when you’re walking through a space, it just feels so good.” The front foyer is a perfect square of arches that draws visitors into the dining room, office, and stair vestibule. Arches are carried throughout the home, including bathrooms and hallways. Double arches frame both the living room and kitchen, with sightlines all the way to the front door, too.
When it came to the finishes, “I didn’t want any space to feel like an afterthought.” She mixed metals, like nickels and golds, to give her spaces a more eclectic, less “matchy-matchy” feel, as she puts it. She installed chair rails in her showers to give the bathrooms a more decorative, hotel-like look. “It feels like it’s more like intentional than having a little niche where everything kind of gets thrown there.” Koltun also sourced antiques and modern furniture to furnish each space, laying down one-of-a-kind, hand knotted Turkish Oushak rugs throughout the home.
And she used a lot of marble. Koltun installed Carrara marble in all the bathrooms, the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, and the upstairs laundry room. The kitchen was even designed around the marble slab backsplash on the range wall. Koltun loves the stone so much she named her two Dobermans Carrara and Thassos, types of European marble.
Koltun moved into the house in March. There are still some spaces that need to be finished out, like the game room. And she’d like to install a pool at some point. But she’s content with how the whole house has come together.
“If I did another one, I would honestly just want the same thing,” she says, “like there’s really not much I would change. I’m really happy with everything.”
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