T Bone Burnett and Callie Khouri's Storybook Nashville Home Where Music History Is Made and Oscars Sit on the Mantel

Callie Khouri fell for the house decades before she owned it. In the 1970s, Khouri, who went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Thelma & Louise, drove past the Tudor-style house almost every day. “I just looked at it and thought, ‘Boy, I want to go in there someday,’” Khouri says.The living room’s Zuber wall covering, Les Côtes de Villefranche, has hung here since the house was built. Nashville-based designer Roger Higgins matched the wallpaper by painting the walls in Sherwin Williams’s Favorite Tan. Custom brass sconces keep the light low, and the chandelier is original to the house. “I wanted the walls to sort of glow around you,” the designer says. “Everybody looks better.” Vintage Fortuny panels cover the windows, and the chairs are upholstered in a Scalamandré fabric. Someday finally rolled around when she returned to Nashville to run a show—the Emmy Award–winning show Nashville she named for the city. Two seasons of hotel living later, the house had a For Sale sign. Her agent warned that behind the chocolate-box exterior was a very particular house. “And I'm thinking to myself, ‘Well, I’m kind of a very particular person,’” Khouri says. She was later joined by her husband T Bone Burnett, a longtime Bob Dylan collaborator, and is the man behind Grammy Award–winning soundtracks from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain, to Walk the Line and Crazy Heart—the last of which earned him an Oscar to match his history-making wife.In the front room, Burnett and Khouri’s dachshunds, Ike and Mamie—named for the Eisenhowers and just shy of a year old—hold court on the couple’s George Smith sofa upholstered in a Mark Alexander blue velvet. The tufted leather ottoman is from Khouri’s former Santa Monica house. Above the marble-faced fireplace surround, the mantel’s carved shields echo the coats of arms in the home’s original leaded windows. One foot through the Gothic arched doorway was all it took for Khouri: Original ceiling paneling, an ornately carved mantel, and hand-blocked Zuber wallpaper hung when the house was built a century ago left her breathless. Told the paper could be removed, she didn’t blink. “The wallpaper’s not going,” she says. “I never walk past it without going, ‘Oh my god—somebody made this.’” It is worth noting here that properly removing Zuber wallpaper requires calling Zuber to do the work themselves, but thankfully that was surplus to the requirements of this project.In the library, Morris & Co’s Snakeshead wall covering runs above the quarter-sawn oak paneling. “What do you do when you get handed that?” Higgins says of the house’s English bones. “You go to William Morris, and it always looks like the right answer.” The fireplace surround is lined in reclaimed glazed brick from Atlanta’s Architectural Accents. The intricate mantelpiece was a find of Burnett’s—look closely and you will see the couple’s Oscars standing sentry on either corner. The vintage George Smith armchair is covered in a patchwork of antique rugs. Vintage Chinese Handwoven Wedding BasketVintage Hollywood Regency Peacock Figurines (Set of 2)Nashville-based designer Roger Higgins was brought on for the design collaboration ahead. Higgins trained in historic preservation—though “I’m not one that makes everything into a time capsule”—and his measure of success for the two-year renovation with architect Blaine Bonadies was a house that looks “like maybe it was always like this.”Higgins lacquered the dining room in PPG’s Amaretto —“not a screaming red,” he insists. Higgins covered the ceiling in hand-laid gold leaf so candlelight has somewhere to go. Drapery panels in Jim Thompson’s Choisya, trimmed in Samuel & Sons, frame the couple’s vintage breakfront, which keeps Khouri’s Royal Crown Derby china within reach. The dining chairs were reupholstered in Moore & Giles’s Burnham leather in Sunflower. They raised the ceilings wherever they could and opened up a narrow hallway with a new skylight based on the living room’s original ceiling pattern. A powder room went in—guests previously had to traipse through a bedroom—and the kitchen windows were lowered enough, at last, to see the garden from the sink. Higgins chased “magic light from nowhere” by bringing in vintage fixtures, dimmers everywhere, and hardly a recessed light.Burnett’s office, painted in Sherwin Williams’s Quiver Tan, is anchored by a pair of vintage rosewood Art Deco chairs and a desk Higgins reluctantly brought Khouri to see at Nashville’s Antiques and Gardens Show (he’d secretly hoped to take it home himself). A striking painting—by Burnett’s friend, fellow musician, and sometime collaborator, John Mellencamp—presides over the room, alongside one of Burnett’s many BAFTA awards. Downstairs, Burnett’s Grammys line the Sherwin Williams green bookcases of the studio where he edits and mixes music. The office is surrounded by vintage tube equipment and a turntable that has lived music history. The autumnal color story began with curtains from Khouri’s former Santa Monica bedroom. They were repurposed on the living room’s corner banquette and so fitting beside the Zuber wall covering that they set the palette for the rest of the house. Higgins lacquered the dining room in a henna color and covered the ceiling in hand-laid gold leaf to make candlelight romantic. Khouri’s brief was logline-pithy: The house “needed to reflect a more artistic energy.”The pendants over the marble-topped island were made for the room by a craftsman who builds fixtures from antique gas-lamp pieces. Higgins wanted the lighting to look “like it was here when we got here.” The stainless-steel-and-brass hood is custom metalwork by the same (now retired) Kentucky-based artisan who made the brass sconces in the living room. Beyond the doorway lies the utility kitchen, a hardworking little room Khouri treasured even before the renovation: One early Thanksgiving the main refrigerator ran out of room, and she simply shut the door between the rooms, opened the windows to the elements, and let November do the rest—a makeshift larder, and another homage to country-house living. Mason Cash S24 Mixing BowlVintage Hand-Knotted Kazak Oriental RugNearly everything else, this pair of professional storytellers already had. “They had more stuff than they had house,” Higgins says. Desks and a brass-inlaid table came from the Nashville set; a rug from the log house Khouri grew up in; the Burnett family crest glints in the leaded windows. The living room’s vintage Fortuny drapes are the exception that proves the rule, spotted by Higgins in a Newport consignment shop mid-vacation and hung exactly as found. Then there’s the library mantel Burnett unearthed, its twin nooks now unassumingly holding the couple’s Oscars.Between the kitchen and dining room, glass-front cabinets in Sherwin Williams’s Grassland hold the everyday glassware, and a vintage table doubles as the bar. Wherever possible, Higgins and Khouri converted swinging doors to pocket doors—in a house this size, she reasons, every square inch should earn its keep. Vintage Japanese Imari ChargerPottery Barn Harrison Ice Bucket & Tongs SetDownstairs belongs to Burnett—studio, listening room, a lifetime of records—a true musician’s lair, moody and windowless in the way that puts you outside of time. Artwork by Larry Poons covers one wall, and many of Burnett’s dozen-plus Grammys line the shelves of another. Asked about the particular responsibility of co-creating the space where so much significant music gets made, Higgins said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m not as much a designer as somebody that works puzzles.”The primary bedroom’s walls and trim, painted in Sherwin Williams’s Escape Gray, hold the green of the garden even in winter. The bed, linens, and damask drapery panels are all the couple’s own, and the nightstand is vintage. The artwork (right) is by Larry Poons—one among many from the couple’s extensive Poons collection, and possibly Burnett’s favorite, thanks in part to “the little blue man” he says you can see “skiing down the hill.” In some ways the bathroom had a kind of singular inspiration: the white marbled luxury of a grand old hotel, an aesthetic loved by both designer and client. This room is a fully realized dream, with walls in Calacatta Regina from Renaissance Tile & Bath around a Maidstone Marella soaking tub with fittings by California Faucets. On the vintage drop-leaf table sits the hand-painted jardiniere claimed at the much-loved Nashville Antiques & Garden Show: “I just saw it, and I was like, you and me. We go together.” Vintage Capo DiMonte Hand-Painted Fruit BowlDiptyque Figuier Extra Large CandleKhouri writes in the library, a Morris & Co.–covered cocoon that is almost whimsical in its coziness, but she’s most herself in the kitchen and the garden, where a part of the old roofline is finding new purpose over the gate. “Anything I can do to keep every little piece that was here, I do,” she says. Higgins compares the house to an old English estate, layered by generations: “It feels like a long story. It happens over years.” It is a house lived in by artists, and is a true extension of their capacity to create.Higgins covered every surface in Brunschwig & Fils’s Bird & Thistle wallcovering, letting pattern absorb what geometry can't hide. An antique bench and a painted blanket chest are both the couple's own. The ceiling beams were concealed prior to the renovation. The Arts & Crafts four-poster bed was shipped over from England along with much of the room. Flemish sconces by Visual Comfort flank the leaded window, above a sisal carpet from Textures. Nickey Kehoe Jeanne SconceVintage Bamboo Chinoiserie Corner ChairThe guest bathroom’s walls are wrapped in Scalamandré’s Raphael because Khouri wanted the little room under the roofline to feel like a treehouse. An Oxford sconce in polished nickel answers Higgins’s rule that a bathroom deserves real light on each side of the face. The green-painted cabinet is original to the room, refreshed rather than replaced, and the counters are Calacatta Gold marble from Architectural Surfaces. The sink fittings are by Kohler.