Sara Noble of namesake interior design firm Noble Designs says that this modern home in rural Johnson County was a little different than a typical clients’ home in Leawood or Waldo.
By that she means it wasn’t unusual to see farm animals in and around the home—for instance, a young lamb named Corona trotting through the house as if she were a golden retriever.
The lamb, who was born around the start of the pandemic, was in a litter of three. For a mother sheep, that’s a lot to manage. So the homeowners, a family of four, brought the lamb into their newly built Stilwell farmhouse, where it loyally follows the family around.
The modern farmhouse-style home was designed and built by Todd Hill Homes in 2018 on a piece of land that’s been in the homeowners’ family for over a century. Noble and her co-designer Ruth Barton were hired early on to help choose finishes and layouts that worked for the farming family. The home’s exterior boasts a clean, white and black design. The welcoming front porch features a rocking chair and is fenced in by live wood columns. When you step inside the front doors, you’re greeted by charming accents and pops of pattern and color.
Family Room
When it came to the family room, Noble wanted to bring attention to the structural architecture of the coffered ceiling and brick fireplace. She kept the color palette warm and traditional with leather chairs, a rustic wooden glass cabinet and a gray rug. The sunny yellow accents are heightened by the flooded natural light that the room’s many windows bring in.
Breakfast Nook
When the house was built, this space between the kitchen and living room had two static columns.
“We decided to do a built-in bench between them and then designed a wood paneling to go around it to give it a nice, kind of concealed look,” Noble says. The airy, dropped side walls allow you to see into the rooms on either side while sitting at the table. The large-scale printed Roman shades add color and interest.
Kitchen
The star of the kitchen, in Noble’s opinion, is the backsplash tile. The soft curves of the gray open-shell print give the room an added decorative punch. She loves the robin egg blue-painted island base, too, which adds a tasteful pop of color against the white cabinets.
“The wood and black iron on the barstools, pendant light fixtures and cabinet cup pulls also tie in kind of an industrial look,” Noble says. When it comes to picking island light fixtures, she says scale is everything. “People tend to go too small with their kitchen pendant lights.”
Powder Room
Noble says the vintage-vibe vanity in the powder room is a Restoration Hardware find that contrasts favorably with modern, playful accents like lampshade sconces, cross handles on the faucet, fresh Schumacher butterfly-and bird-printed wallpaper and a decorative mirror.
“We love doing a framed mirror,” she says. “That’s probably what we’re doing a good seventy-five percent of the time in bathrooms.”
