The New Glamour: Julie Elam’s Condo

For Julia Elam, elegance seeped into her fibers like a tea stain on linen, something she says simply happens growing up in the South. “When you are brought up there, you just know these things. You know how to be a socialite. You know how to make your home your castle,” says Elam, whose popular Oak Lawn Avenue tabletop and accessories boutique, Napa Home, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary.

Some miles east of Gulfport, Miss., her current home on Turtle Creek Boulevard blends styles, eras, and looks—the freshest approach to decoration these days. When Elam walked into the high-rise condo, she knew she wanted to create an environment that was modern but soft, glamorous but approachable. “I wanted it to be a nighttime condo, warm, sort of New Yorkish, but me,” she says. “This home is a little like a shedding; I am giving myself new life.”

After four years of living in Austin, where she and son Randy Phillips opened Napa Home’s first location, Elam ventured here with the idea that Dallas would simply be a second venue. Elam says: “After we arrived, I realized that this is where the store should be based, and it’s where I wanted to live.” They shuttered the Austin shop and focused on crafting a more targeted look for Dallas. While the Austin boutique had an easy elegance similar to the feel she loved during her years living in Northern California, the look for Dallas is more sophisticated and urban. Her condo takes its cues from the accessories she gathers on buying trips for the store. “To describe it,” she says, standing in front of a small shagreen table, “it’s a little modern, a little traditional, and a little Asian. I’ve always loved a little Asian.”

At 2,600 square feet, Elam’s condo is the proper size for her and her two French bulldogs, L’il Bean and Napoleon. She didn’t need two bedrooms, so she converted one into a dining room with a city view that dazzles, especially over dinner. Dramatic charcoal gray walls (“It took us seven versions of gray to get it right,” she says) and ebony-stained hardwoods find high contrast with classic white moldings and pale upholstery. The paint color was a “bold move” for Elam, who had preferred corals and light greens in her previous homes. Antiques, such as ones reminiscent of her Gulfport childhood, are paired adventurously with contemporary accessories and artwork, infusing softness with history. Fresh seasonal flowers are always cut, chosen for shape and subtlety, and placed as backdrop, not center stage. From the front door, a long entry hall spills into the living room, spacious and bright, edged with 10-foot floor-to-ceiling balcony doors and flanked with champagne-shaded silk, the same luxe fabric that disguises an open kitchen area off the living room.

Elam rounded off the square edges of the room by angling a Kreiss lounge, in washable suede, and placing a Philippe Starck floor fixture behind it. Champagne silk draperies soften the hard lines of a striking ebony cabinet.

The bedroom that captures Elam’s talents in remarkable ways. A jeweled roost, it provides spectacular views in three directions and shows off Elam’s eye for balance and distinction as well as her appreciation for craft. A massive thousand-year-old screen, hung as a headboard, anchors the other furniture and plays on the room’s small scale.

“The two sides that bend are very narrow, and no one knew what to do with it,” Elam says. To keep the bedding below compatible with the ornate decoration of the panel, she designed a tailored spread of pale aqua silk, dotted with raised velvet flowers and skirted underneath in burnished brown. A sharp corner of the room is obscured behind shirred drapery and an oval side table and armchair, rounded, too, against the right-angled geometry of the bed, board, and windows.

In total, Elam has designed a space full of presence, sleek decoration, and interesting scale—ideas she absorbed on the Mississippi coast but has pared to their purest, uncluttered form. “We had traditional antiques all over, and big men sitting up in little chairs,” she remembers. “They looked so uncomfortable. Here, you don’t have to worry about that.”

Julia Elam’s Design Tips

To disguise an unwanted kitchen “pass-through,” Elam hung a pleated and beaded silk curtain in front of the cutout wall, extending it beyond the open space on either side. Pillows in ice cream tones on an open cane sofa and a contemporary totem of eggs create drama.

1. If you like it, whatever it is, use it in your home. If you like it, it will work.

2. Create vignettes, or simple collections of furniture and accessories, to accentuate spaces or cut off harsh corners. Angle chairs and tables to round hard edges of a room.

3. Floating furniture, rather than placing it squarely on the walls, will help a room feel less boxy.

4. Do not be afraid to mix antiques with contemporary pieces. Look at scale, color, and shape to decide if the juxtaposition is peaceful.

5. Elam likes floral arrangements that are understated and often monochromatic. Don’t let them take over a room, she warns. Blend in flowers and incorporate color that is already present in the décor. Select containers—vases, glasses—that are proportioned to the height of the stem. Arrange several containers of varying heights in a grouping.

LEFT: An 8-foot mahogany and beveled glass screen separates the living room from the hall. In front, a like-minded cabinet supports a weighty vase of Casablanca lilies. RIGHT: In the entry hall, a shagreen-topped table is held up with metal legs and illuminated from below with a whimsical hand-blown cluster of glass.

ABOVE LEFT: Platinum striped Limoges porcelain, from J.L. Coquet, swirls atop an heirloom antique dining table lined with hydrangea blossoms. Elam wrapped small tumblers with pliable leaves to hide the flowers’ stems. A candle from D. L. & Co. in black glass is sold at Napa Home.	ABOVE RIGHT: “The boys,” L’il Bean and Napoleon, accompany Elam to the store each day on plaid leashes, garnering not a small amount of hubbub. Here, at home, they pose by an antique sideboard and Ivan Reyes painting. A metal floor vase sporting orchids lends a bit of Asia to a dining room corner.

BEDROOM: A wooden screen extends the full length of the bedroom and provides sculptural relief. Neckrolls in chocolate silk and a fitted spread in aqua and brown velvet add quiet softness to the carving behind.