A Dallas Couple’s High-Rise Apartment and Designer Joshua Rice Prove to Be the Perfect Match

Written by Rebecca Sherman

As Sylvia Hargrave and Magnus Wetterstrand know, good things can blossom out of the most challenging situations. In 2011, when their longtime designer abruptly left town, they were left with unfinished interiors two months before Christmas.

“I was desperate to find another designer,” remembers Hargrave, a prominent eye surgeon and chief of ophthalmology at Methodist Dallas Medical Center. In a rare free moment, she headed to the Dallas Design District, where she popped into the contemporary design showroom Smink. Spotting two of her friends shopping, Hargrave asked, “Is anybody here an interior designer?”

They pointed across the room to Joshua Rice, who had opened his own design business four years earlier after working with architecture and design firm Bodron + Fruit. Hargrave didn’t mince words.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Listen, I’m in a very bad situation.’ I explained everything.” Rice agreed to stop by their apartment at the W Residences and take a look; their chance meeting was fortuitous.

Hargrave and her husband, a senior pilot with American Airlines, had been living in the Victory Park area tower since 2007, a year after it opened. “We like really modern, clean spaces, and were drawn to the W because of the liveliness of the area — my husband is a big hockey fan, so he was excited about being able to walk across the street to the American Airlines Center and watch games,” she says. “And we have a great downtown view.”

The couple had been redoing the apartment slowly over the years with their previous designer, and after meeting with Rice and looking at his portfolio, they asked him to step in and finish it.

“He was very polite, but I could tell he wasn’t thrilled with what the other designer had done,” Hargrave says.

White walls and hard-edged contemporary furnishings gave the interiors a harsh feel. Rice says, “I love minimalist looks, but I don’t like cold minimalism, and this space was flirting with being cold.” But he wasn’t being hired to do an overhaul; the goal was just to get them through the holidays and then some. They liked the changes he made, and over the next few years, the couple enlisted Rice’s help finishing other areas in the apartment.

“Very long story short,” Hargrave says, “we went to Sweden for two months over the summer — my husband was born and raised there — and when we came back, pipes had burst, and the whole place was flooded.” It wasn’t just furniture that was ruined; floors, walls, and cabinets had been steeped in muck for weeks. The whole apartment had to be gutted, but Rice had a blank canvas to work from.

“That’s when he gave us our dream place,” Hargrave says.

Joshua Rice is known in the design world for obsessively curated interiors filled with important furnishings, and national magazines have taken note: His collaboration with Wernerfield Architects was published in Dwell in 2014, and interiors he created for a modernist home in Diane Cheatham’s award-winning Urban Reserve enclave landed in the pages of Architectural Digest in 2017. But the residence he created for Hargrave and Wetterstrand ranks among his favorite projects.

https://www.papercitymag.com/home-design/dallas-home-design-high-rise-w-residences-joshua-rice/

Photography: Robert Tsai, Pages: 56-65