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If there’s one thing Kurt Beadell believes most people get wrong when styling their spaces, it’s how to think about scale. In his 23 years living in a shotgun Victorian on Southeast Salmon Street, Beadell has packed his rooms with art, color and pattern that make his home as high drama as the events he creates for his company, Vibrant Table Catering & Events.
“I like the idea of putting really big things in really small spaces because I think it empowers things,” Beadell says.
No corner has been left untouched by this vision. Outside, giant statement planters the size of small boulders herald a welcome. His porch is a master class on the art of styling with texture. Inside, his entry looms large despite its size with Fornisetti’s “Nuvolette” cloud-themed wallpaper. A grand piano (he doesn’t play) takes up a corner of his living room. Further contrasts in size abound, like a giant wrapped sausage photograph by Isaac Lyman above his bed in his bedroom and a collection of tiny wire fox terriers on his nightstand, a nod to his 15-year-old companion, Biscuit.
At home, he says he spends all of his time thinking about changing the world around him. The need to reinvent space starts when something doesn’t feel right anymore, or feels out of place. Then a dynamic exchange of searching, shopping and placing ensues. “I’m going to get rid of those brown chairs in the living room,” he says, pointing to a pair of upholstered chairs. “You just don’t even see them anymore.”
When he first viewed it in 1998, the home had seven men living in it, popcorn ceilings, two bunk beds in a living room, and a ‘70s kitchen, and it was covered in ivy. “It was just weird and creepy,” he says. None of his friends thought he should take it on, but at $110,000, the price was right. Besides, he already lived in and loved the neighborhood and wanted to keep his walker’s lifestyle. He was sold.
Beadell had never rehabbed a house before, but he kept telling himself, “I’ll just do it one room at a time.” He started with the kitchen (he has redone it two more times since), and he’s never stopped, changing things often and frequently calling on his bestie, Bridgid Blackburn, a designer and co-partner at Cargo. Much had to be ripped out, but he kept as many of the vestiges of Victoriana as possible: all of the woodwork and trim, the window height, and especially the front-to-back nature of the home’s shotgun style, which allows anyone who comes through the front door to see through to the garden out back, where he hosts regular parties on behalf of nonprofits throughout the summer. He removed the upper part of one wall over a main doorway to heighten the front-to-back effect.
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“Bridgid and I are always asking each other: What would make this even more dramatic?” Beadell says.
Beadell’s dining room, with its magenta upholstery and chartreuse walls, is the highest expression of himself. During the pandemic, Beadell, who has a nighttime embroidery habit, took a couple dozen felted cakes he had made and been displaying for a few years and placed them in storage. But a few months later, he glanced at the room and thought, “I think I’ll just make one full cake. That room needs a cake.” Fifteen cakes later, the table is full again.
This story also appears in Willamette Week’s Home Guide Magazine, Nester, published October 2022.