Marie Flanigan and her husband Joe slowed down for a while in order to build a dream home, spending three years thinking about how to design a corner home they owned in Houston Heights.The new dwelling on the block possessed an authentic sense of place, not to mention a bygone sense of time, thanks to the salvaged brick (some stamped Houston) originating from demolished midcentury homes in the city. 

Marie Flanigan’s passion for panes is evident in a small library with an airy and expansive presence thanks to its double-height windows and floating cloud ceiling. In this marquee space, a studied homage to Alabama architect Bobby McAlpine’s thoroughly fenestrated work, nary a sunbeam is sacrificed by the window treatments. 

The living room in Flanigan’s family home in Houston demonstrates her love of layering textures and styles, an approach inspired by another of her design heroes, John Saladino. Here, a substantial Bauhausian coffee table made of white oak and travertine is a foil to the room’s elements of Hollywood regency, a sienna-hued velvet sofa and antique sconces, the latter inspired by the iconic sheaf-of-wheat table in Coco Chanel’s Rue Cambon apartment.

The dining room’s hand-painted custom wallpaper, featuring a thick grove of trees based on an 18th-century Aubusson Verdure tapestry, adds an Old World contrast to the contemporary furnishings.For a more cocooning feeling in the primary bedroom, Flanigan created a second lower ceiling with white oak and hung Mark Alexander lambswool drapes in Verde, which picks up the color of the vegetation outside.