Only a few of the Bryan Place townhomes boast the high living room ceilings shown here. Surrounding the fireplace are the remains of a doorway from a French chateau, which the previous owner had cut down into a mantel. The ornate mirror above it came from the same chateau.
The turquoise-colored artwork in the corner of the living room is by Brazilian artist Hamilton Aguiar, known for his landscapes as well as a series of sensual pieces that seem to shift and bend with the light. Part painting and part sculpture, the artist has traced fine, hypnotic, dimensional waves into the oil-and-resin surface of the work.
The couple encountered the piece at a gallery in Vail, Colorado.
The wire mesh figure by sculptor Eric Boyer was the first piece the couple bought together in Santa Fe. “It was not only the sculpture but the shadow it creates that attracted us,” they explain.
Seven years ago, a local couple moved from a quaint 1926 cottage in the Wolflin neighborhood to a townhome in Bryan Place, a tidy cul-de-sac just east of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. The 29 units in this cloistered community are tucked between the historic Bivins property to the north and Interstate 40 frontage to the south.
“It’s hidden in plain sight,” they say. “So many people tell us they’ve driven past it a thousand times but have never been [beyond the entrance].”
Avid travelers, the couple has been together nearly 30 years. They decided to downsize from their former home into this two-bedroom, three-bath townhouse. “We loved our house in Wolflin but we felt we wanted something more lock-and-leave,” they say. With retirement on the horizon, they’d be less inclined to worry about things like yard maintenance.
The close-knit Bryan Place community was developed by Franklin Jeffers, a longtime Amarillo real estate broker who had been a driving force for assembling land for the 1968 construction of the FirstBank Southwest Tower downtown. Following that project, Jeffers worked with Betty Bivins Childers in the 1970s to develop some open land on the south side of the family estate. According to the couple, Bivins sold Jeffers the land after he agreed to build luxury townhomes rather than retail spaces.
“The intent was townhomes for couples whose kids were grown, so they didn’t need a four- or five-bedroom house anymore,” says one of the owners.
The property still plays that role—at least four residents over the age of 90 still live within the development. In fact, Franklin Jeffers’ widow, Rena, lived in one of the townhomes for the last 40 years of her life before she died in 2021 at the age of 96. Franklin passed away in 1999.
The couple loves the relationships they’ve encountered at Bryan Place. “It’s like what it was in the 1950s,” they say. “You know your neighbors. If someone’s sick, you take them some food. During the pandemic, we all kind of stuck together and took care of each other.”
The townhouse is filled with art, most of which they’ve collected from their travels to places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-style village located in Mexico’s central highlands.
Beyond the art, their home is filled with other attention-getting elements courtesy of the previous owner, Jeanette Barnhill Case of Turkey, Texas. Her son, Ross, was a designer in Palm Springs, California, and readied the home for her when she moved to Amarillo from the family’s ranch near Turkey. “He pretty much gutted the thing,” they say of Case, the designer.
Case installed the black metal stair rails, shipped to the home from Europe. The fireplace mantel and the mirror above it came from an 18th-century chateau in France. The couple doesn’t know many details of the French chateau, but the provenance of the art is much more certain. “[With] most of our art, we know the artist,” they say. “That’s something that’s important to us.”
The large, vibrant contemporary painting across from the fireplace is by artist Christian Price Frazer, who is represented by Cerulean Gallery. Cerulean owner Caroline Crockett Kneese lived in Amarillo a few years ago and recommended the piece to the couple. “When we moved here, there was this huge wall and we’ve never had a huge painting. Caroline brought this over for us to look at and we loved it. We wanted this [living area] to be formal but we also wanted to modernize it a little bit,” they say.
Kneese was especially involved in helping to arrange and mount the art collection within the restrictions of the home’s formal, picture-frame wall molding. They consulted Kneese for placement throughout the townhome, but the living room proved a particular challenge.
The impressionistic painting above the baby grand piano is by San Francisco artist Daniel Bayless, who grew up in Borger in the 1970s. It portrays the inside of the Duomo in Milan. The interior of the iconic cathedral was closed when the couple visited the Italian city a few years ago. “We got to see the outside but not the inside, so this is our inside view,” they say.
The sheet music on the couple’s piano once belonged to Sybil B. Harrington.
Like the fireplace mantel, the stair railings in the townhouse originated from a chateau in France. Years before the couple moved in, the home’s designer cut out the bottom wall of the staircase in order to install the rails.
The downstairs owners’ suite felt cavernous compared to the small bedroom of their previous home. “We had this bed at our other house and, as soon as we bought it, I thought, ‘This is a huge mistake. This is way too big,’” one of the owners says. The tall headboard proved to be the perfect size for the townhouse. Like the kitchen, the colors of the built-in bookshelves were there already—and just happened to match the furniture. “This headboard was meant to be here.”
As it turns out, the couples’ beloved French bulldog, Chloe, was meant to be there, too. She quickly made herself at home in the new space.
Immediately right of the home’s entry, the galley-style kitchen and breakfast nook is lit by west-facing windows that open onto a fenced courtyard. The couple loved the colorful cabinets when they bought the townhouse. The vibrant hue originated with Palm Springs designer Ross Case. “The color of our kitchen cabinets were way before our time,” they say. “That’s what they were doing in California at the time, but not here, and now it’s what you see in all the [design] magazines.”
While the couple spend much of their time in the bright sunlight of the breakfast nook, they keep the formal dining room set according to the season. “We reset it seasonally for a fresh look,” they say. The captivating bird’s nest at each place setting, paired with Juliska dinnerware, is an element they’ve enjoyed for several years and look forward to bringing out as the weather warms.
This mirrored hutch in the entry hall greets guests with one of the couples’ favorite vignettes. “The painting is by a Santa Fe artist we stumbled upon at her open house. We loved the colors and geometric patterns in the painting,” they say.
Paintings line the entryway from the front door into the living room. Highlights include this arresting Nancy Walker portrait. In a perfectly small-world Amarillo connection, the tattooed inspiration for the painting—local nurse Lindsay London—just happens to be the fiance of this feature’s photographer, Adam Baker.
