Interior designer Rachel Cannon honors a Mobile showhome’s historic heritage with a seamless mix of old and new
It all started with the ceiling.
Rather than a clean slate like many new-build showhouses, this year’s Mobile Bay magazine Inspiration Home was set inside the historic walls of the restored Chighizola House, an 1840s-era Greek Revival townhouse in downtown Mobile.
“Historic homes are my favorite kind of project,” says Baton Rouge interior designer Rachel Cannon of Rachel Cannon Limited Interiors, who was chosen, along with her team, to transform the house’s front parlor. “What stood out immediately was the ceiling: the hand-stenciled design in the front parlor was visible even before the historic preservation began, and artisans painstakingly recreated it in period-correct colors for the showhouse. That detail alone told me exactly where this room’s design needed to start.”
The first step was the color palette. “People assume ‘historic’ means muted or dark, but that’s a misconception,” Cannon notes. Pulling from the ceiling design, Farrow & Ball’s “Tailor Tack” was chosen for walls. Its soft blush provided an intriguing backdrop for the RCL team to build out the room’s design, which would feature touches of gold, green, blue and statement chartreuse.
“This house came with a fascinating and long history, including a brief period where it was owned by a real-life pirate,” Cannon says. “The original plaster and lath construction was still visible on our first site visit. You don’t get that kind of soul from a blank slate. It changes your process. I didn’t need to invent a story because there was already so much to pull from. My job was really more focused on how to continue that story in a respectful way.”
Rather than frozen in time, Cannon wanted to blend old and new in a way that makes the space feel true to the home but fit for modern life. Oil paintings, an antique mirror and an antique side chair are juxtaposed by a statement cocktail table, skirted chairs and, perhaps most especially, a gold palm-frond chandelier by Currey & Company.
“A gas chandelier with globes and scrollwork would have technically been more period-appropriate, but the palm motif is my wink to the Gilded Age, when palms were a huge status symbol in parlors and a way of telling visitors you had the means and taste to keep something exotic alive indoors. I wanted that same nod to status and glamour, just reimagined as something sculptural and permanent hanging from the ceiling instead of crowding a windowsill.”
The result is a space that feels equally livable and immersive; one that tells the story of the structure’s past through the lens of today’s cutting-edge interior design trends.
“Showhomes are a lot like runway shows in fashion or concept car shows in the automotive industry. It’s where the designer gets to be truly creative and forward-thinking without the creative handcuffs that come with designing for real life,” Cannon says. “If you’re ever curious about what the newest ideas and movements in design (or fashion, or cars) will be, just look to showhomes, runway shows and concept car shows to see where the brightest creative minds are going.”
