Step Inside a Historic North Carolina Home That Goes Bold on Whimsy

Alex and Katherine Slater know a thing or two about good shelter. In 2016, Alex, along with two friends, created the Shibumi Shade, the fluttering aqua-and-blue canopy now ubiquitous on Southern beaches. But a few years earlier, the couple spotted what would become their own stylish sanctuary, an Italianate-influenced Victorian farmhouse in Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood neighborhood. “We walked by and I told Alex, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my dream house,’” Katherine says. “It was so striking.” Just as Shibumis have a graceful simplicity about them, this house, with its sassy red door and red terne-metal roof, conveys a stately nonchalance. Sporting gingerbread details courtesy of decorative sawnwork unique to North Carolina and big arched windows, the structure seems absolutely comfortable in its own clapboard skin, standing tall and proud on one of Raleigh’s most prominent corners, as it has since 1878. Back then, this area would have been the outskirts of the still-small city, and this home, constructed for the son of the stonemason who built the North Carolina capitol, sat on two acres with outbuildings and farm animals. Today Oakwood is the largest intact nineteenth-century neighborhood in the state, and it’s smack in the heart of downtown. “We love being able to walk to our favorite bars, shops, and restaurants,” Katherine says. “We totally ditch the car on weekends.”

The house had remained in the same family for close to a century before shuffling owners a few times in the last two decades. When the Slaters heard it might hit the market again, they finagled a preview showing. They swooned over the nearly eleven-foot ceilings, the seven fireplaces, and the grand staircase. But for Katherine, a few rungs sealed it: “I am an avid reader and have always fantasized about having a library, with a ladder. And there it was.”

While some young couples might be intimidated by stewarding a historic property, the Slaters, both North Carolina natives and UNC grads, were energized and undaunted. Alex and his business partners, Dane Barnes and Scott Barnes, after all, launched Shibumi by teaching themselves to sew, setting up sewing machines in a spare bedroom in the Slaters’ first house a few blocks over. (“They’d sew all night,” Katherine reminisces. “The AC couldn’t keep up, so it was literally a sweatshop.”) But this house deserved more than DIY gumption, so they looked to Maggie Dillon, of Raleigh-based Maggie Dillon Interiors, to infuse it with fresh spirit. “They knew they wanted loads of color and pattern,” Dillon says. “Their only ask was that we have fun with it, while honoring its existing character.”

Previous owners had updated the kitchen and bathrooms, so the only construction entailed reconfiguring the closet and bathroom space upstairs to create an extra room in the two-bedroom home. “Then we found out we were pregnant mid-renovation,” says Katherine, so that room morphed into a cozy nursery, which Dillon outfitted in cheery Bemelmans-inspired wallpaper. “It reminds me of the Madeline books, which I loved as a child,” Katherine says. Her daughter, Frankie, is a fan too. “She’ll pause mid-bottle and look up and giggle.”

The nursery hardly has dibs on whimsy. Dillon pollinated the whole house with a fanciful flair, starting with a migration of butterflies and birds swooping up from the foyer to the second floor—a Schumacher wallpaper pattern designed by the Western North Carolina artist Anne Lemanski. “I would wallpaper every room if you let me,” says Dillon, who chose a more linear yellow-gold pattern for the front reading and game room to counter the winged commotion. A massive Urban Electric lantern anchors the bright space. “The superhigh ceilings allowed us to do things that otherwise might overwhelm a room,” she says.

In the living room, Dillon painted the walls, trim, and ceiling a more subdued mauve. “The monochrome makes it feel cohesive, a clean backdrop for everything else that’s going on,” she says. And importantly, it gives John Lennon an appropriately regal setting. “My favorite piece,” says Katherine of the portrait she bought from a gallery in her hometown of Oriental.

Mushrooms, wildflowers, and “leafy things” lend the dining room wallpaper a lively, “unexpected edge,” Dillon says, even as the room leans more traditional. She left the antique dining chairs distressed, reupholstering them in leather and adding a menswear wool plaid on the back. “I guess plaid’s kind of our signature,” she says, laughing, noting that plaids pop up on club chairs and sofas, and in the wall covering tucked behind the existing library bookshelves, “to give them more depth.”

Though having never previously worked on a historic project, much less one very much in the public eye (“ask anyone in Raleigh and they’ll know the red-roofed house on the corner,” Dillon says), she easily found her groove in this space. “Maggie understood from the jump what we were hoping for, and she ran with it,” Katherine says. Or maybe she flew, like the butterflies. “They make me happy every day,” she adds. “I love that they spark Frankie’s imagination, and mine. You can’t ask for more than that.”