Steve Rogers is well known to design lovers in Kansas City for his shop, Prize Home + Garden, and his adventures in hunting and gathering from Round Top, Texas, to Paris, France, which he features on Instagram. It shouldn’t be a surprise that at the foundation, the traveling, and sourcing is less about the find and all about making home the place you want to be most. His new house in Prairie Village is case in point.
“We’ve been here three years,” Rogers says of his wife, Jill, and their three children. “We’d been in our last house for 18 years, and we weren’t even looking to move.” But when this modern house on a large lot came on the market, it piqued his interest.
“This house was different,” he says. “It was on some acreage, which was great, and it was contemporary, which was sort of out of my wheelhouse. But the lines…”
The original farmhouse on the lot was torn down in the 1970s, and the subsequent owners built their modern dream house on the existing foundation. “It’s very linear,” Rogers says. “And in the center of the house, where the stairway is, it’s two floors. We were lucky that the house hasn’t had a lot of owners, and they all had a common sensibility and feeling that it is a really special house.”
Rogers wanted to honor the home’s aesthetic, so he took a couple of years to get to know the house better. “I couldn’t commit at first. For me, the house was art. With the built-ins, the walls of glass across the back, and the staircase—I needed to live with it. I wanted to be careful. My family was really patient about it,” he says.
Rogers says what began to emerge in his mind was a space that was modern and calming. “As we took the temperature of the house, everything was about clean lines and simple materials. We moved forward from there.”
The most significant task was remodeling the kitchen. While wanting to be respectful of the original design, Rogers needed to bring the kitchen into the current day. “I relied on wood cabinets and quartzite on the countertops, because I thought the natural materials felt more cohesive. We kept the hardware simple, because we really wanted everything to be streamlined.”
The nearby dining area is a symphony of form and texture. The vintage farmhouse table converses happily with the crisp, white West Elm chairs. The stack of Swedish bowls is a testament to the joys of collecting, and a nod to the restrained excess in this edited space.
The only furniture in the living spaces that came from the Rogers’s previous house was the sectional where the family gathers to watch television. The gleam of the chrome surround of the fireplace in the room is echoed in the frames of the nearby pair of midcentury Wassily chairs by Marcel Breuer.
Having a first-floor master bedroom is new to the family. In their previous home, all the bedrooms were off the second-floor hallway. This new floorplan gives everyone a little more space and privacy. “The upstairs is really the kids’ part of the house,” Rogers says. “Which is nice for everyone. They all have their own space and there is a lot less commotion. And we all love the staircase.”
One of the couple’s friends asked if they require people to sign waivers before they go up or down the elegant, but apparently daunting to some, open metal and wood spiral. “We really don’t worry about it,” he says. “Our kids are teenagers, so they’re fine. Our two dogs won’t go near it, but we haven’t had any trouble.”
Keeping the stairs and much of the lighting that was in the house when they bought it have been important to Rogers. “We kind of took in the tempo of the house, and everything was really about clean lines,” he says. “So, if we were to sell the house, we wanted all the things that would stay with it to feel like it had been here in the 70s.”
Of course, as befits the home of an antiques dealer, what’s here today might be gone tomorrow. “My mother likes to guess what’s different each time she visits,” says Jill with a laugh.
The It List
Antiques & Accessories
Prize Home + Garden
Appliances
Ferguson
Kitchen Cabinets
Shamrock Cabinetry