For years, Baton Rouge watercolor artist and writer Moffitt Aycock wanted to move to the Spanish Town neighborhood.
“Whatever I saw that I liked I couldn’t afford, and what I could afford, I didn’t like,” she says as she sips from a glass of freshly made iced tea.
Luckily, she finally found a shotgun-style house on Spanish Town Road a decade ago. It was built in 1917 and had been completely gutted. Needing some help to spice up the place, she knew just who to call—her longtime friend, interior decorator Charlotte Kean.
“She had done work in my old house in Houma and in an apartment I had on Jefferson Highway,” Aycock says. “I called her and said she had to come work on this house.”
Kean agreed on one condition.
“She said, ‘I’ll do it if you keep your mouth shut, and I can do anything I want,’” Aycock says, laughing. “I told her, ‘You got it.’”
A trip through Paris and Spanish Town: The hallways, which were once dead space, are lined with tall white bookcases that feature everything from Tennessee Williams to travelogues. Along the other side of the hall are pictures Aycock and her daughter Julia took, mostly of Spanish Town sites and France. Over 10 years, Aycock visited Paris for a month at a time. “You don’t go there as a tourist,” she says. “You go there and live like they do.”
A space for the grandkids, too: The guest bedroom is filled with children’s paintings of Babar the Elephant. A sock puppet and stuffed animal sit in a chair, reading a book, near the head of the twin-size bed. Aycock mentions that this is where the grandkids stay, with a nod as if to say, “Cute, huh?”
Handpicked works from a Louisiana artist: The front living room is dotted with works from Avoyelles Parish native Tony Mose. Over the past decade, Aycock has picked several of Mose’s colorful portraits to decorate her house. Her kitchen cabinet, where she keeps most of her groceries, was custom-fit with doors Mose painted, showing two women sharing distinctive glances at passers-by against a black and deep red background.
For entertaining: With the TV stored away on a moving table near the back of the kitchen, Aycock made the living room perfect for her dinner parties. There is a red velvet-y sofa near the window and two olive green, bird-patterned chairs. In the middle of the room is a table for mixing drinks, and a dining cabinet lines the back wall. “It’s an easy house to entertain in,” she says.
