A Mindful and Modern Mississippi Farmhouse

On most weekend mornings, George Koller makes his family pancakes. He doesn’t use just any old box mix, though––George grows and grinds his own wheat for the fluffy morning classics right outside his kitchen window, on his family’s farm in Madison, Mississippi.

Wheat is only one of the crops George has harvested from the farm, which he shares with his wife, Felicitas, and their twelve-year-old son, Jude. “If there is something that can be grown, we have tried it,” Felicitas says. The bounty includes plump red strawberries, leafy kale, dark green spinach, and baskets of farm-fresh eggs that find their way into almost every meal. 

A transplant surgeon, Felicitas met George at medical school in Galveston, Texas (he studied to be a physical therapist before taking on farming full time). The two married on Christmas Eve in 2004 and moved to Nashville and later Chicago, but an itch to come back to the South––and to land equipped for George’s farming needs––brought them to Mississippi in 2017. They moved into a house on a five-acre plot with the intention of building their dream home on an adjacent acre. 

A few years later, around the start of the COVID pandemic, a mutual friend connected the Kollers with Madison and Mark Talley, founders of Tall Architects in Ocean Springs. “We were able to see how they lived, how George worked on their farm, and how they processed food,” Madison says of visiting the Kollers’ property before the planning stage began. “It was a really intimate way to start the project.” The couples then began designing the home, which consists of three overlapping, interconnected “zones.”  

The first zone, a metal structure, holds the garage and mudroom as well as George’s farm kitchen (yes, there are two kitchens). The second, which houses the main living room and Felicitas’s “Barbie Dreamhouse show kitchen,” was constructed using shou sugi ban, a Japanese cedar that’s charred to enhance durability and resist bugs and fire. The third zone, containing bedrooms and an upstairs living area, was built with Manganese Ironspot brick, whose dark gray color and metallic sheen glistens in the sunlight. “If you were to take all three of those [zones] and separate them, they’re only gable roof buildings,” Mark says. “But when you put them all together and you start subtracting parts and pieces, you get these really intimate, special places that wouldn’t exist if they were all disconnected.”

“Creating moments for natural interaction was really important,” Madison adds, “and there are a lot of spaces that cultivate that without feeling forced.” Take the square openings in the wall above the main kitchen, for instance, from which Jude enjoys reading and peeking down to watch his parents cook below.

The house is a true amalgamation of Felicitas and George’s lives—a dichotomy of tranquility and functionality, elegance and durability. Natural wood and hues of cream, terracotta, and gold lie behind the dark, moody exterior. The spacious backyard patio, where Felicitas enjoys relaxing after long days in the O.R. under spherical string lights that glow orange at night, is steps away from George’s farm porch, where he raises chickens, sorts through mounds of produce, and even sheltered a group of baby lambs after a recent ice storm. 

Sustainability and reuse are driving forces on the farm. While a geothermal heat pump conditions the house, various building materials have taken on new life in the Kollers’ hands. A branch from a live oak tree on the property transformed into the main living room’s entertainment center. Leftover shou sugi ban planks became the front door, whose handles look as though they’ve been plucked right off one of the countless persimmon, oak, or elm trees that surround the property. George took leftover Manganese brick and constructed a pathway to his farm porch and used surplus metal from the roof and walls to construct garden beds in the potager garden. He even repurposed leftover wood from the foundation to transform a small shed into a treehouse.

Madison and Mark say it’s hard to tell where Tall Architects’s decisions left off and where the Kollers’s picked up, an overlap that’s fitting for the home’s layered design concept. Felicitas in particular was instrumental in selecting textiles, artwork, and elements like the ridged glass sink set below the wallpaper depicting birds in flight in Jude’s bathroom. “For myself, aesthetic pursuits are a way to balance the challenges and sad realities of work,” Felicitas says. But the function of the farm and all that comes with it is just as important. “This is for beauty and my personal happiness, but I also want those other things. I want there to be an overwhelming number of strawberries or tomatoes.”