“You know when you move into a place and you carry all this baggage?” Mollie McKool asks. “I didn’t want to do that.” So when the fashion photographer relocated to her Oak Lawn digs in 2004, she decided to do so luggage-free. “I literally sold or gave everything away except for my bedroom furniture.” With help from a designer, the majority of her townhome was transformed into a black, white, and aqua sanctuary. But the master remained untouched. Last spring, she made a purchase that made the bedroom impossible to ignore any longer. “I lived in this queen-size bed that you almost had to climb into, and I decided to get a king-size bed. That’s what started it—a fabulous, contemporary king-size bed,” she says. She enlisted the help of friends Lisa Martensen and Jan Jones of Martensen Jones Interiors to create a more sophisticated space that blended with the rest of the house. The first order of business: make the white walls a lot less white. “Sound doesn’t wake me, but the least bit of light is like death. I knew I wanted it dark,” McKool says. Jones and Martensen were up for the task. “The walls had a museum finish already, and we didn’t want to disturb it. So we decided to paint,” Jones says. From there, they designed the custom black and white television cabinet and found many of the accessories on trips to High Point. And while they held to a mandate to keep materials kid-friendly for McKool’s two grandchildren, the result is decidedly adult. “It’s so bold. You get very few people who can pull off a sexy bedroom,” Martensen says. Even better: McKool sleeps soundly these days. “Oh, man. Now I have to set two alarms to wake up,” she says with a laugh.
