To know the lauded Lexington, Kentucky, landscape designer Jon Carloftis is to know his mother—even if you never had the privilege of meeting her. Whether he’s chatting in person or sharing snapshots on Instagram as he creates his signature stunning green spaces in the Bluegrass State and beyond, his late “Momma,” Lucille Bowling Carloftis, tends to be part of the conversation. Rightly so, given her larger-than-life presence in the lives of Carloftis and his five siblings as well as in their native Livingston, Kentucky.
Lucille and her husband, Carlos, together with their gaggle of children, operated Fort Sequoyah, a fixture of fifties and sixties roadside Americana that later morphed into the erstwhile artisan-centric shop Rockcastle River Trading Company—all from their family compound just off Old Dixie Highway and surrounded by the Daniel Boone Natural Forest.
From an early age, Carloftis knew Lucille wasn’t like other moms. “She had an ethereal way about her—always moving slow, never hurried, never frazzled, even with six children,” he remembers. “Style was her life, and I never saw her without her signature coral lipstick, one of her box purses, and her handmade Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi jewelry.” Lucille also drove giant Cadillacs her entire life, first white ones, then later navy blue at Carloftis’s suggestion, sometimes with a fresh gardenia or two tucked inside to fill the car with fragrance.
Over the years, she infused Carloftis with a love and appreciation for history, craftsmanship, and wild natural beauty, often taking her brood on trips to historic homes and parks. But one of the biggest lessons from her that he carries forward today, both in his work and in his personal aesthetic, is quality over quantity. Lucille loved simplicity, he says, preferring, for instance, to wear as her watch a pared-down men’s design from the 1930s. She championed not being “too flashy” with clothes, he recalls, because “patterns distract from your face and personality, and all people will see is the costume.” In the home, that translated to clean lines and Shaker-style furniture and an overall unfussiness. For example, “There were no draperies in the house,” Carloftis says. “She wanted all of the natural light, and we owned fifty acres, so there were no neighbors to look in.”
So that he could forgo window treatments, too, Carloftis designed the garden around his own home in Lexington with total privacy in mind. “Everything I do, wear, drive, eat, decorate…it’s all from Momma and Daddy—who had equally the same high style in everything he did and wore, and loved Momma so much,” he says.
But beyond aesthetics, Carloftis considers his mother’s kindness an equally important component of her style. “People loved her, men and women, because she became a supporter of all who needed some guidance and help to get on their feet,” he says—a legacy evident, even at the end. “At her funeral, close to two thousand people came to pay their respects.”
In true Lucille fashion, the hearse that day was navy blue—just like her trademark Cadillac. As Carloftis puts it, “One in a million is how she’s been described, because she treated everyone, no matter if it was the Queen of England or the housekeeper, exactly the same way.”
