Story by Emily Robertson | Photography by Darren Harris | Harris Visual Media

Meredith Fane Morrow grew up in a neighborhood in the South Warren area of Bowling Green and both her parents and grandparents still reside there today. As her and her husband began to search for a new home, her grandmother told them about a home in her childhood neighborhood that was about to go on the market and the couple decided to take a look.

“When I was younger, I would walk around the neighborhood and I didn’t even notice this house,” Morrow says. “So it was a huge surprise when we saw it and loved it. When we walked in for the first time, I looked through a large window in the back of the home and saw two red bud trees outside, and it felt like we were in a tree house.”

Morrow says the home, which has four bedrooms and two and a half baths and is around 3,500 square feet, had nearly every specific thing that she was looking for in a home. It also included many unique characteristics that you don’t typically find in a home built in the late 1990s.

“It has an extra large laundry room and a front and back staircase,” Morrow says. “They built it to make it feel like an older house and give it character, even though it was built in 1999. The best part is that there was space to add what it lacked and we just thought it was the perfect house to create exactly what we wanted.”

After purchasing the home in September 2020, Morrow says that the couple began to prepare to renovate the entire home. Morrow’s husband is a contractor, so his connections helped the couple to continue with renovations even when work slowed for many during the pandemic. She says they moved in during 2021, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that the home was truly finished because there was no surface in the house that went untouched.

I've always had a pretty strong vision for interior design,” Morrow says. “I had pictures of what I wanted it to look like and then I met with my friend, Natalie Hughes, who co-owns Embellish Home, and she helped me to make it come to life.”

The couple renovated the bathrooms and gutted the kitchen to make for a more open space, along with refinished and new flooring and paint throughout the home. They also re-imagined the mantle, with a contractor pouring a custom, concrete mantle.

Morrow draws a lot of her design aesthetic from her time living and teaching English in China and, later, traveling extensively in Asia. They relied on a strong Asian influence with antiques and art from the area, and many bold design choices throughout the home.

“Natalie said ‘normally people do drama in one or two rooms. You have drama in every room,’” Morrow says. “Natalie called our style ‘collected.’ And that was a word that really spoke to me. I really wanted all of the things in my home to speak to memories and travel. I wanted things to tell a story. I also got many items from Embellish Home, but I’ve traveled a lot and wanted my home to reflect that as well.”

Morrow says she wanted the home to be full of color and for people to know it was uniquely their home. From custom, orange velvet chairs from Embellish Home to navy blue cabinets in the kitchen and a bold counter top, the home showcases several colors throughout the space.

"My favorite part of the house is the view from the foyer area into the office,” Morrow says. “We had a really strong vision for the foyer. We installed board and batten on two walls in the foyer, and then on one wall we have 1890s Egyptian doors that I found. They are eight feet tall and we put them on barn door sliders and they look cool and dreamy. And then, as you look in, the doors frame a mural that I have on the back wall.”

The wallpaper mural is one of two that the Morrows purchased from Anthropologie and enlisted David Alexander to install in the home. For all the color she wanted in the home through furnishings, Morrow struggled with how to select paint colors, but enlisted some professional help, and used a very practical tip to select unique colors for the whole house.

Now, as Morrow has added the final touches in the last three to four months, including the kitchen table and lots of decorative pieces, she is excited to enjoy her hard work, and plan for one more important room in the house.

“We are expecting our first child, so now we get to design a nursery for our daughter on the way,” Morrow says. “I already have a dramatic wallpaper picked out, so I am excited to create the room for her.”

The Morrow home would not have been possible without the help of these businesses:

Furniture, Decor, Bedding & Lighting:
Embellish Home, Builders By Design
and Finishes By Design
Countertops & Backsplash:
Platinum Granite and Quartz
Hardwood Flooring: BPM Flooring
Wallpaper Installation: David Alexander
Electrical: Artisan Electric, LLC
Plumbing: Shane Elmore Plumbing
Glass Shower: Homeworks