When the interior designer Benjamin Stelly visited his married friends the artist RF. Alvarez and the medical resident Chase Calvert, in Austin six years ago, he was immediately enchanted. Stelly, 35, had left the city for New York in 2010, thinking his hometown wasn’t the place for a young gay man with creative ambitions to meet a community of, in his words, “interesting worldly weirdos.” And yet, at the couple’s small white clapboard bungalow in Austin’s Cherrywood neighborhood, Stelly attended the kind of queer gathering, with talk of politics in between lots of jokes, that he’d come to love in Brooklyn. At the same time, he was mildly appalled, bluntly telling his hosts, “The way you have the house isn’t functioning for you.”
Alvarez and Calvert, both 36, moved to Austin from Los Angeles in 2016, so that Calvert could start medical school (he’s now in the same teaching hospital’s fellowship program). They found the Cherrywood house, built in the 1940s, a year later. Although the 1,100-square-foot home had appealing bones — including a charming pitched tin roof — and a rambling backyard perfect for mingling in during the pandemic, its nondescript interiors didn’t reflect its owners’ personalities or their love of entertaining. The house is where Alvarez, who’d previously run a graphic design studio, dedicated himself to making art full-time; its rooms often feature in his paintings, which fuse history with queer narratives. But the house itself seemed devoid of the color and mystery that define his works.
Luckily, Stelly was well qualified to adapt the space: He grew up with Calvert and co-founded the U.K.- and Texas-based interiors studio Stelly Selway with his partner, Tanya Selway, in 2020. Three years ago, the friends began to transform the home’s unwelcoming layout into a flowing, horseshoe-shaped sequence of rooms layered with unexpected hues and textures.
At the front of the house, a small portico opens into a 215-square-foot foyer that now functions as a space for hosting guests with a fireplace and an old piano. At the center of the room is a 1980s black Cipollino marble table, sourced by Stelly online, that the couple use for card games and serving cocktails. Calvert, a devoted gardener, also likes to top it with large arrangements of flowers from the yard, including roses, dahlias and anemones. To the left, through a wide, open doorway, is an ocher-painted parlor that connects to the compact kitchen, which was left largely unchanged during the redesign. “It feels like it’s a tiny Parisian apartment kitchen and I’m doing my best with it,” says Alvarez. The parlor is where guests pile onto two oversize couches and hang out late into the night. “I love cooking dinner for everyone while friends sit nearby,” he says.
Alvarez also enjoys how the home’s updated, less cloistered floor plan exposes the contrasting shades of neighboring rooms. “My canvases are usually black with yellows and blues coming through,” he says. “I love seeing color through thresholds.” From the foyer, for instance, you can see the grayish-blue dining room, its shade complementing the warm tones of the pinewood furniture: Brutalist French and Belgian chairs that Stelly found at the Round Top Antiques Fair, about a 90-minute drive east, and a Parsons table that Alvarez and Calvert brought from Los Angeles. A doorway — among the few in the house that actually contains a door — separates the room from the primary bedroom, a sea of brown and yellow taken up almost entirely by a large wood-framed bed.
Works by Alvarez and his friends hang on many walls, near antiques, contemporary pieces and custom designs by Stelly that are deliberately mismatched. In the entrance hall, a vintage leather-and-reed Moroccan Tuareg mat clashes joyfully with the marble table’s veining and a pair of round ottomans that Stelly had reupholstered with a mottled brown wool-blend fabric. In the parlor, expanses of cream canvas and corn yellow linen are thrown breezily over the old sofas. “The mix is wild,” says Alvarez. “It’s different in a way that really suits us.”
And never does the house feel more alive than at night, when it glows like one of Alvarez’s paintings. Since Stelly’s intervention, the couple’s friends seem to visit more — and then refuse to leave. “We wanted to create a queer space,” Alvarez says. “I spent a lot of time feeling out of place, and struggled with owning my Texan roots. Now I feel this is where I belong.”
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