May 17, 2026For Atlanta-based Melanie Turner, redesigning a century-old masterpiece of a house in Tampa’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood represented something of a homecoming.
The Welsh-born interior designer grew up in that Gulf Coast Florida city and as a teenager dreamed of a future filled with the finer things in life. “When I was a sixteen-year-old in high school,” she recalls, “I would sit in art class and think about how I’d come back here one day in a limo and have the red carpet rolled out for me — ‘I’m going to show them!’ ”
With this commission, she unquestionably has something to show. Asked by the house’s new owners — a young couple with a blended family of four teenaged children — to make it into the dream home they’d imagined it to be when they bought it, she leaned into what she describes as their “eccentric and whimsical” personalities and aesthetics, marrying those with the Queen Anne–style architecture and ambience.
The result is a statement-making showplace, one that’s as livable for this social, art-collecting young family as it is lovely to look at.
“They wanted it to be moody, original, unexpected, full of character, boldly layered with a mix of new and old pieces,” says Turner, a member of the just-announced 1stDibs 50 class of 2026. “They didn’t want it to feel like anything else in town. They wanted that wow factor.”
Turner gave the couple what they asked for, and then some. The house itself helped with that. Set among other architecturally significant Hyde Park properties built by local turn-of-the-20th-century tycoons — in vernacular styles ranging from Colonial to Queen Anne to Craftsman — the three-story, nearly 9,500–square-foot structure impressed the designer from the outset.
Ornamental trims and moldings outline its redbrick exterior, which features coping and arched embellishments at the corners and over windows. The facade is particularly impressive, with broad covered porches extending on either side of a grandly porticoed entry topped by a balustraded balcony.
Inside, Turner found many more period details to love: a grand central staircase, beautiful stained-glass windows, wood pocket doors in nearly every room and fireplace after fireplace after fireplace. But decades of neglect and historically insensitive aesthetic choices had left the interiors as a whole rather lackluster.
Although the clients thought of the place as their dream house — so much so that they jumped at the chance to buy it even as Turner was in the middle of designing a different Tampa home for them — its rooms needed some significant reinterpretation .
“It was basically as if they’d put Wite-Out on everything,” the designer says of the paint treatment previous owners used on the house’s extensive woodwork. The pine floors, moreover, had been left to oxidize. “It was a white house with orange flooring,” she says. “Everything had been stripped down to nothing.”
To correct these missteps, Turner began by rehabilitating the architecture envelope — not with extensive renovation but with a surgical restoration followed by a savvy deployment of colors inspired by the rich hue of the antique tiles adorning the wooden fireplace surrounds throughout the house.
With white walls erased and spaces now drenched in color — salmon for the living room, green for the dining room, blue for the bar born from a front parlor — Turner set about furnishing the interiors. For this, no gesture was too bold.
Before the fireplace in that blue former parlor, for example, she placed a custom bar seamlessly clad in huge slabs of purple-veined honed Calacatta Viola marble, arranging in front of this an arc of scalloped-back Munna Design Studio stools upholstered in a multicolor Kravet textile. Bespoke étagères holding barware flank the mantel.
Extending up the curving walls and onto the ceiling is a watercolor-style hand-painted mural by artist Bethany Travis depicting inky black trees silhouetted against a deep turquoise sky. With its bold and atmospheric moves, this room has become one of the most popular in the house. All the clients’ friends, Turner says, always want to come over for drinks.
They’re probably eager to stay for supper, too, given the drama of the mossy olive-green dining room. A swooping chain-link Christopher Boots light fixture, set with asymmetric hand-blown glass orbs, hangs over a contemporary table surrounded by armless chairs whose upholstered seats seem to balance precariously on conical bases.
The light and bright kitchen probably has many fans, as well. Here, a classic micro-mosaic hexagonal-tile floor is countered by more modern book-matched, richly grained, hand-honed Viola Antic marble surrounding the custom-painted Lacanche range. Reissues of Adolf Loos Jugendstil pendant lights, meanwhile, illuminate a lozenge-shaped island.
Upstairs in the pink-tinged primary suite, Turner hung above the headboard of the client’s gothic-style bed a grouping of Victorian-inspired rosettes she had made in black epoxy. Overhead is a Sputnik- style chandelier crafted of purple murano glass, which Tuner sourced on 1stDibs from Red Rose Antiques. She took inspiration from high-fashion boutiques for the windowed closet and dressing room she created from a former sleeping porch.
Turner dialed up the fun, eclecticism and eccentricity even further in the kids’ spaces, especially an art-filled, ruby-red-walled lounge outfitted with a fringed settee upholstered in a House of Hackney botanical fabric, a curvaceous Julian Chichester wall mirror and Baker lamps with hourglass bases. Hanging from the ceiling is a crystal chandelier original to the house.
On the top floor, Turner rocked the kasbah in a room under the eaves anchored by a custom port-toned-velvet serpentine sofa that’s more than 22 feet long. When the house was built, she says, “This was probably attic space used for housekeeping and other staff.”
Now, however, since the adults have all “these wonderful rooms downstairs, this is for the kids.” Mosaic-topped tables, low-slung lounge chairs and vintage poufs from Stephanie SchofielD Decorative Arts and Design surround the sofa, all underneath a tiered, perforated-metal Moroccan chandelier. Turner also hid mattresses for slumber parties and installed a big retractable projection screen for movie nights.
In the end, she says, what makes this project a success is that it truly embraces and reflects her clients’ personality, ensuring that it feels like their home — and no one else’s. “It’s not in any way neutral,” she says. “It’s so sad that some people are afraid to show who they are.”
