Histroic Kessler home receives award-winning remodel

Before Jessica Maros worked in interior design, the Vancouver native was part of a Nashville-based band. Her time in Escondido led to national tours and the group’s music was featured in NBC’s This Is Us and HBO’s Girls.

And as that chapter of her life started coming to a close, she began working more in home design along with founding her studio Maros Designs in 2018. She later moved to Los Angeles, where she worked with HGTV star and interior designer Leanne Ford. Maros relocated to Dallas just before the pandemic with her husband Stephen Marley.

“When Steve and I met, we were looking for homes, and I always said, ‘If I’m ever going to move to Dallas, I want to live in Oak Cliff,’” she says. “Because every time we came out here, I was like, ‘This is so my vibe, my people.’ I love it.”

Their 1924 Kessler Park American-style home came with charm, but also with major updates. There were rooms without any lighting and damage from a winter storm. The home originally stood with 2,000 square feet, but has been updated to include 1,300 additional square footage, expanding the living space, primary and adding in a bathroom.

And of course, she added her own design touches to bring in calming tones, making the home “Zen and meditative,” which has led to accolades specifically for the new primary bathroom from Paper City Dallas and LUXE Interiors + Design’s annual RED Awards. The primary bathroom has white Daltile mosaic flooring that matches the same black version of the powder room downstairs. The walls are covered with microcement, except for the toilet room, which has paint that mimics wallpaper. The shower includes front-facing windows, so she added waterproof curtains to allow for more natural light in the space.

Downstairs, the kitchen, living and dining rooms have been rearranged, adding on more living space and a mudroom to the front entryway. Despite so many new additions, many aspects come from the original home.

“We used a lot of the remaining pieces that were existing in the home, and we just kind of moved them and shifted everything,” Maros says.

All original doors and doorknobs were kept. The original red oak floors were bleached twice to get a lighter finish. Old pine was found under the exterior bricks, salvaged from the garbage and re-stained to include on the ceiling of the kitchen and mudroom.

“At first I was going to have a white ceiling, and I’m glad I didn’t do that because the wood’s just so beautiful, but old pine generally goes red,” she says. “So when they first put a coat, it was bright dark red. And I’m like, ‘Hell no.’”

An additional two rounds of bleach landed the pine at a deeper brown. Then, the window frames were bleached and stained until Maros found the right shade to match. The hearth of the dining room was also kept.

“Originally, when I took off, there was a bunch of beepboarding and stuff on the fireplace. I took it off in hopes that there would be this incredible thing underneath. And it was brick, and the brick was gorgeous, but I couldn’t,” she says. “We tried to strip it down. It just was so much work, and it was looking kind of dingy, so we ended up just micro cementing over the fireplace. I love the material. It’s durable, and it breathes well, and it’s great for bathrooms.”

Replica arches were also recreated from the original design for the new configuration of the home.

In terms of decoration, art and DIY are staples throughout.

In the primary bedroom, the hanging Arterior chandelier has additional fabric thrown over it to make it look more interesting, Maros says. Another DIY is the custom frames she made that hang along the staircase wall, simply adding notches to the edges. She also painted the piece that hangs above the primary suite bed with water and dye.

“I love painting, I do it for fun and for just pure joy,” she says. “I don’t consider myself an artist. I just do it for the colors.”

Even with her music industry days behind her, there are still pieces of her past career found in the home: from a guitar and vinyl room to the two black and white paintings of musicians by an unknown artist. Other works of original art include pick-ups from the Nashville flea market, watercolor art of women done by a friend’s mother, and her husband’s great uncle’s paintings that date back to the 1900s.

There are some parts of the home that ended up a little different from what Maros envisioned, but she enjoys them all the same. As a house within a conservation district, there were certain rules she had to follow when it came to the final exterior. To add on to the backhouse, she went through a yearlong process of approval from the City.

“I was OK with it because I didn’t ever want to change the fascia. However, the paint color. I really, I wanted it black. And I wasn’t allowed to have black, so I was looking for the next darkest color,” she says. “And, I found this dark green, and I’m like, sold. So sometimes those limitations, I believe, are really good because it allows you to just view things a little differently, change your perspective, and kind of change things up, and those things are sometimes good.”