Curated Casa

Fall 2024

September 12, 2024

Words by Andrea Darr | Photos by Josie Benefield

Midwest Maven brings her uniquely blended brand of new/old and high/low to a sprawling hacienda in Mission Woods.

hen Jo Marie Scaglia walked into the Spanish Revival house on a corner lot in Mission Woods, she wasn’t looking to buy. But her sister, a real estate agent, had sent her a photo of it, and said it was her dream house. Jo Marie instantly felt the same.

She purchased the property in August 2022 on the whim of excitement, its full potential hidden under the weight of heavy woodwork and red carpet. Jo Marie has never shied away from a restoration project—we featured her Weston farmhouse retreat in the Spring 2023 issue—but a few weeks into ownership, Jo Marie experienced the dreadful thought that she’d made a mistake: the house was too big for just her and her 13-year-old daughter, Star, and it needed a lot of work.

Incredibly, the prominent hacienda-style home, with its red tile roof and stone courtyard facing busy Shawnee Mission Parkway, had sat vacant for a decade before the previous owner bought it. During their three years living there, they replaced windows and the roof and resurfaced the courtyard. Inside, the house felt not just outdated but unknown to Jo Marie.

Yet the Saltillo tile was charmingly nostalgic and comforted Jo Marie as she observed the space and envisioned what it could be.

“I didn’t know why until I realized that we had the same tile in the entry of the house I grew up in,” she says.

Since then, the house has felt like home. But it’s Jo Marie’s special brand of styling that has really settled her in.

For her, fixing up a house is a puzzle whose parts do not come from a box on a store shelf. It is not a matter of simply “updating.” It is a creative phenomena in her brain that can assemble a melange of objects into a cohesively divine space that anyone would want to spend time in.

“It’s nutty; I’m a lunatic—but in a good way,” she says nonchalantly.

Her feeling that way could be partially attributed to insane hours she spends as a restaurateur. Jo Marie owns The Mixx, with locations in midtown and Overland Park, and Caffetteria in Prairie Village. The rest might only be explained by a slight obsession. When she’s not running three businesses or crafting recipes, she’s scouring estate sales and vintage shops.

Interview with Jo Marie from Midwest Maven

Jo Marie’s daughter, Star, plays this century-old, perfect-condition Vose & Sons piano. The room’s accent wallpaper is called Garden of Eden; sourced from The Beverly Collection, out of Weston, Missouri, it comes with or without snakes. Jo chose with, of course. It’s a meaningful selection because The Garden of Eden is also one of the original and most popular salads at The Mixx, still offered on the menu 20 years later.

Jo Marie softened the black-framed patio doors with airy floor-to-ceiling curtains that she found at a Loose Park home during a Rick Pence estate sale. Hot pink swivel chairs pull color from the art hanging above a mirrored dresser. “I believe you can use things all over the house that aren’t typical,” Jo Marie says. The easel and featured artwork were a gift from Mortera Vintage.

Jo Marie ripped out the former carpeted, value-engineered stairs and installed white oak treads and neutral but patterned tiled risers “so the art and the madness pops,” she says.

A sunken living room is also standard in Spanish Revival floor plans. Jo Marie removed columns from the railing to open up the space and crowned the room with a 1978 Murano chandelier she picked up at an estate sale for six times less than one listed on 1stDibs. “It came to me,” Jo Marie says. She sourced the white sectional from Vinca Vintage.

“The kitchen is my center,” Jo Marie states. When she comes home late from the restaurants, she drops into one of the originally upholstered Kravitz swivel chairs at the island. Other unusual but awesome decor choices include a tiled ceiling and silk wallpapered walls. The light fixture was a serendipitous Chairish find—it happened to come from KC through 200Main Vintage.

The open shelves are such a handy feature at her Weston retreat house that Jo Marie duplicated them here for her in-town collections. “I’m an organized hoarder; even minimalists appreciate it,” Jo Marie says.

Jo Marie offices at a lucite chair poised at a vintage laminate desk found in the West Bottoms Antique District. Books, photos and art personalize the original bookcase behind, which she painted in Farrow & Ball Railings No. 31, an inky blue-black.

“I have a shopping problem,” Jo Marie admits.

Hoarding is a problem, but here, everything has a place and looks perfectly curated.

“When you buy what you love, it all goes together,” Jo Marie explains.

The hunt for beautiful things—art, rugs, pottery, dishware, glassware—is part of the attraction, and the landing of deals is effectively a high—especially if a found object elicits a eureka moment when Jo Marie knows just where it will go.

“I can’t describe it,” she says. “I don’t do everything at once. I just find something and know that it’s perfect.”

Jo Marie’s style doesn’t fit any labels. “Eclectic” could be the closest yet doesn’t begin to describe the layers that peel back on the journey through each room. Quite simply, the house unfolds. Look up to see grasscloth or tile on the ceiling. Look down at the vibrant and plush vintage rugs underfoot. All around, the collective jibes with color and texture, mashes eras, tells stories and induces questions about provenance—for instance, the 1800s thrashing board repurposed as living room art, or the kitchen’s former ventilation hood upturned with plants on the coffee stoop.

“Oh, I didn’t see that before,” friends will often tell her.

Jo Marie points out a newish term in the world of design that collides seemingly opposing ideas: Maximal Minimalism. She applies this to herself in a few ways: She claims minimalism’s functionality and lack of clutter—every piece in her home is intentional—and maximalism’s laden personality. Her version of the term also works on a financial level—Jo Marie spends less money for more stuff. Nearly every object she owns once belonged to someone else.

Home Walk Through

A four-poster Noir bed anchors the vaulted bedroom, one of Jo Marie’s favorite rooms in the house. An Asian antique side table has a surprise chair hidden inside.

The primary bathroom’s copper tub, installed by the previous owner, makes a great focal point and center of relaxation—if Jo Marie could find the time to use it. An arched opening to the Zellige-tiled shower emulates other arches throughout the house. An antique French dresser became a vanity, with wall-mounted faucets fashioned above.

The fireplace is original to the house, but Jo Marie had it relined for use. The leather camel foot rest is a perfect example of her shopping experience: “A lot of times I buy things and don’t even know what it is.”

“Pink is everywhere in my houses,” Jo Marie says. In this full hall bath, Lewis & Wood wallpaper pairs excellently with trim painted in Sherwin-Williams’ Coral Reef. The Moroccan rug is from Kate McConnell Studio; the framed wood block print is by Glenn Gant, an artist who studied under Thomas Hart Benton.

Jo Marie replaced a chain metal fence with an elegant white courtyard wall in the backyard. She enjoys caring for the property’s 300 plants—hydrangeas, hostas, yews, and columnar maple trees, to name a few—while her rescue dogs lounge in the sun.

A stone wall protects the house from busy Shawnee Mission Parkway. The hum of traffic dims to white noise in the background and can barely be heard inside the house.

A front entry courtyard is typical of Spanish Revival style. It’s one of Jo Marie’s favorite places to unwind. Several seating areas provide options for dining or resting. “Even with all the cars driving by, it’s not that loud,” she says. The Virgin Mary statue was a gift, set atop a potting table she fashioned out of an iron base and a marble top. A centuries-old Greek urn marks the center of the space. The hanging baskets are from Family Tree Nursery.

“Only, like, 10 pieces in the house might be new,” she notes.

Jo Marie especially likes to support local craftspeople, shopkeepers and artists; and she works with upholsterers and cleaners who can make her secondhand finds like new.

Her home isn’t just about the objects in it, though. It’s about the flow of rooms and how they make her feel.

“Sometimes at night, I just walk around enjoying the spaces, just me and the dogs,” Jo Marie reflects. “It just feels like it’s supposed to be. I’m so grateful and fortunate to have this home.”

Two years into this project, she might finally be done fussing with the details of the house.

“It’s to the point that I don’t need anything; I shop for other people,” Jo Marie says.

That leaves an opening in her schedule for relaxing and enjoying her surroundings.

“Here, I feel like I have escaped somewhere, but I haven’t gone anywhere,” she says. “It’s like living in a dream—a fairy tale—and the funniest thing is that I wasn’t even looking for it.”

Interior Designer: Midwest Maven, @mwmaven

Resources:

Interior Designer: Midwest Maven
Original Architect, 1966: Nearing and Jones (now NSPJ Architects)
Landscaper: Fisher Landscape
Potted Plants: Family Tree Nursery
Concrete Patios: Tommy’s Concrete
Welding: 1Fabrication
Appliances: Fisher & Paykel, Nebraska Furniture Mart
Countertops: Architectural Surfaces
Fabrication: Granite Tops & Tile
Florals: Chuck Matney, The Little Flower Shop
Lighting: 1st Dibs; Chairish (200Main Vintage); Wilson Lighting; RH; Elsewares
Tile: The Tile Shop; Floor and Decor

Art: Blue Gallery; Byron Cohen Gallery; Franklin Bowles Galleries (San Francisco and New York); Daphne Covington (abstract entry) (Plaza Art fair); Circle Auction (large black and white Viccaro); KC Brown Button auction house; Lori Buntin Local (through Stuff in Brookside); Chris Dahlquist
Wallpaper: Beverly Collection Paint: Farrow & Ball; Sherwin-Williams
Plumbing: Neenan Estate Sales: Brown Button Estate Sales; Pence Auction & Estate Sales; Kathe Kaul, Quality Estate Sales
Vintage Dealers/Shops: Kate McConnell Studio; Mortera Vintage; Vinca Vintage; Heather London, Urban Mining; Modern Design Gallery; Good Weather; Gilded Garage
Specialty Cleaning: Arrow Cleaners