You could call McKenzie Dove a painter; her Cy Twombly-esque abstract art and impasto-layered oils are her claim to fame and the genius loci of an avid Instagram following. But you could also call her a sculptor. Or a floral arranger. Definitely a craft-cocktail concocter. Probably an industrial designer. And most certainly a decorator.
Raised in rural Texas by parents whose child-rearing skills can politely be described as off-kilter, Dove’s formal education stopped at the third grade (stay tuned—she’s working on a memoir). Her freewheeling girlhood—riding horseback to the local Sonic for cherry limeades, staging a wedding for her agility-trained bunnies, staying up way past other people’s bedtimes to rearrange the furniture in her room for the hundred-and-tenth time—was fecund ground for the kind of eccentricity that giddyups right past boundaries and lets curiosity lead the way to divine its own idiosyncratic taste.
The conservatory in Dove’s studio has brick floors “worn out in the most amazing way.” Dove juxtaposed them with florid gilt Baroque-style consoles she patinated, then topped with her own plaster sculptures.
Paul Costello
Dove at work painting an abstract canvas in her storefront studio in Lakeview, a five-minute drive from her home in Birmingham, Alabama.
Paul Costello“Art has always been a part of my life,” says Dove, who recently uncovered a pair of sketchbooks she kept in her tweens, one entirely devoted to floor plans (“They were actually pretty good”) and another to a lighting line she branded “Sophie.” Never a stranger to a hands-on approach, she was given a crowbar for her 12th birthday. “I’ve been a collector since I was 13,” says Dove: When she married her husband Michael and moved with him cross-country at age 24 so he could finish medical school, a full-on semi-trailer truck was required to port all her stuff.
The capacious studio includes an office, a sewing loft, and dedicated spaces for painting, carpentry, welding, and plasterwork. Dove found the vintage leather-and-steel slingback chair outside of a barn in Kentucky, where she once lived.
Paul Costello
The terra-cotta floors in the studio’s conservatory seemed to practically call out for an array of potted plants. “It reminded me of an Italian palazzo,” she says—a note she subtly underscored with antique Italian garden chairs around the Drexel Heritage table.
Paul CostelloSounds like she’d be a clutter-monger, right? In actual practice, her aesthetic is almost ascetic in its restraint, as evidenced by the Birmingham, Alabama, house she now shares with Michael and their one-year-old son, Liam. Built in 1950, it had most recently been renovated in the ’90s; the Doves spent three years stripping away the later additions to recapture its original character.
Traditional upholstered seating (including a pair of vintage armchairs slipcovered in Schumacher’s Gweneth linen) and one of Dove’s giant-scaled triptychs creates an electric grouping in the studio office. Wire-framed Bertoia chairs sidle up to a 1920s Italian table Dove uses as a workstation.
Paul CostelloIn the foyer, plaster furnishings she crafted herself—a modernist angled library table, a neoclassical urn, and nubby pendant lamp—are carefully arrayed like an installation near one of her oils and a painted gilt armchair covered in gently worn verdigris velvet she scored at an estate sale. “The way you have to understand composition and negative space as an artist and a sculptor informs the way I arrange things,” she says. In that same vein, she has a keen eye for how tactility and volume interact: “I could build an entire room of plaster. It has so much texture and richness, but it’s simple and minimal.” (Naturally, she’s at work on a furnishings line featuring her favorite medium.)
The view of the foyer from the piano room in her home, where the Doves host dinner parties for larger groups, reveals toned-down parquet floors inspired by Versailles and an antique urn that once graced a chateau near the French palace. Dove’s Syros plaster pendant hangs above her Cinq II hexagonal center table.
Paul Costello
In her home’s dining room, Dove painted an ethereal mural to accentuate—but not overpower—the lush view of trees outside the windows. The chinoiserie china cabinet—filled with heirlooms the Doves use every day—is in lively conversation with both the antique carriage-house lantern and the vintage leather-wrapped Cassina chairs. Curtains in Schumacher’s Greek Key Embroidery fabric.
Paul Costello
The plaster console in the living room is a prototype; Dove wanted to use it in her own home for at least five years to make sure it could stand up to the wear and tear of everyday life (mission accomplished). The Louis XVI table is from Chairish, and the oil paintings both on the table and in the foyer are works by Dove.
Paul CostelloAs with her paintings, Dove prefers tone-on-tone color schemes when it comes to interiors. “A lot of stark contrast throws me off. That’s why I love flowers, because I can have a hit of color when I want it, but I don’t have to be married to it,” she explains. A devoted accumulator, her basic building blocks are vintage pieces and antiques. They don’t have to be blue-chip—though that helps—but they do have to have a sinuous quality that gives them the gravitas to stand on their own, whether that’s a sculptural scroll-arm recamier covered in plainspoken white linen in her living room, a sleekly swooping leather-and-steel sling chair in her studio gallery (a five-minute drive from her home), or a delightfully patinated cane-backed Louis XVI armchair in Liam’s room, of all places.
Yes, that’s Louis XVI for a toddler. The nursery is a microcosm of Dove’s approach. With crisp, fresh, mineral-and-white-striped textiles and an unapologetic embrace of adult-worthy pieces—the other hero is a bleached Provençal commode with beautifully book-matched drawer fronts—it avoids all the saccharine clichés of babies’ rooms but is still irresistibly sweet. An insouciantly upholstered ottoman with swishy ruffles helps calibrate the push-pull between the exalted and the charming, as does a screen that seems salvaged from some sunbaked mas but was actually made by Michael. (“I bought the caning off Etsy,” adds Dove.)
Dove lined the interiors of the canopy curtains in the primary bedroom with Schumacher’s Bassano Embroidered Toile. She loved the pattern’s richness and texture, but since it’s not “out in the room,” it doesn’t overpower the serene vibe. The bedcoverings and exterior curtains are in Lange Glazed Linen with Dominique Linen Tape trim, both by Schumacher.
Paul Costello
In son Liam’s room, a sisal rug is a grounding influence that unites a range of antiques, including a bleached Provençal commode and an Italian daybed the one-year-old will grow into. The ottoman, covered in Schumacher’s Regatta Linen Stripe to match the daybed and curtains, pleats and puddles generously, lending a blowsy touch.
Paul CostelloIt is the ethos of a particularly sophisticated brand of do-it-yourselfer, who dreams up an idea—say, a powdery white pendant chandelier with an overscale hobnail motif like Diego Giacometti’s and Jean-Michel Frank’s modernist-primitivist love child—and thinks nothing of rolling up her sleeves to create it. Dove’s studio-slash-gallery-slash-office has plenty of space for her to paint, but is also equipped with welding, carpentry, and plaster workshops; for her, it is all one big, balletic think tank. “Most interior designers are probably artists and most artists would probably be good interior designers,” she says. “It’s life-giving for me to go back and forth between media. Today plaster might be my favorite thing and then I’ll spend days building a table and get dusty and burned out, so I’ll go back to oil painting and when I get tired of that, I’ll think about flowers or decorating.”
Multidisciplined multitasking in the service of living your best life? Seems like the very highest form of art.
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 14 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
