By Madoline Markham Koonce
Construction on Liz and Curt Rozzelle’s new modern Tudor home in Hollywood was completed in 2018, but in some ways that’s just when its story began. “You have to let the house and the yard and the garden tell you what it wants,” Liz says. “Is it in the right place? Where does the sun come in? What is the soil like? What does this room sound like?”
Take, for example, the walls in the Rozzelles’ living room, dining room, and kitchen. Originally, they had been painted Revere Pewter by Benjamin Moore, a neutral color that was popular at the time. Every time Liz walked in those rooms, though, the color didn’t sit right with her. “It was like a battleship in there,” she says. “I couldn’t handle it.”
Instead, she found that Farrow & Ball Pigeon, a cozy blue-grey color, looked really good next to the grey subway tile that also has purple hues, so she tested it out and then painted it on the walls of all three rooms herself. To complete the look in the dining room, she had custom color block curtains made with a color similar to Pigeon on the bottom and an ivory color on top for the 10-foot walls, and she had solid ivory ones made for the living room.
A study on the front of the house with wood paneling had a similar story. Its original grey color didn’t feel quite right, so Liz painted it a dark blue-black (Cyberspace by Sherwin-Williams) that now feels like what it was always supposed to be.
No matter which room you are in in the home, Liz has the same vision-come-to-life for it for their family, including sons Daniel, a UAB student, and TJ, a senior at Homewood High School. “What I have in this house makes me happy when I look at it,” she says. “I want it to feel warm and comfortable for everyone, especially my family.”
The dining room is emblematic of what Liz loves most about her home in general. Its tall windows let in ample daylight all day, as does most of the house as it was designed, and she has filled it with pieces that are meaningful to her.
The round oak dining table from Restoration Hardware was purchased 18 years ago and remains one of her favorite pieces in the house. The vitrine next to it had been a very dark wood stain when it was Liz’s grandmother’s, but she had a special furniture company remove it to reveal the original wood color.
On the opposite wall hangs one of several watercolors in the house that Liz’s mom painted in the 1970s. The paintings had been seemingly ruined with rubber cement when Liz got them from her mom, but an art instructor she found removed the acidic yellow marks from them, and Framed on Crescent framed them.
These meaningful spaces are also welcoming when the Rozzelles host events for medical residents Curt, a pediatric neurosurgeon, works with at Children’s of Alabama and fill their house with 40 to 50 people. Generally, most everyone ends up in their spacious kitchen, with cabinets painted Baked Brie by Behr and topped with honed Colonial granite countertops.
Behind the kitchen, the living room is full of wood and brass pieces and warmer colors that create a cozy space for the family of four adults and five rescue cats. The focal point of the room is a limestone fireplace that the Rozzelles had custom made. Most of the furniture came from Restoration Hardware, including the couch that Liz has had reupholstered in a blue fabric, but the drink tables by the couch are from Anthropologie and the rug from Perigold.
– Liz Rozzelle
“I want things to be warm and natural looking, with nothing too hard,” Liz says. “Everything needs to be soft and comfortable.”
The trim color that ended up feeling just right for the living spaces is ICI French White, a custom color Benjamin Moore mixed for Liz. She also had the exterior painted the same hue a while after moving in since she thinks it works really well with green landscaping and the dark trim (Dragon’s Breath by Benjamin Moore), and she had it painted by Reyes Painting, a business she highly recommends.
Elsewhere in the house are two bedrooms on the main level and four upstairs, plus an extra TV room upstairs. Behind the house sits a separate three-car garage with a studio apartment above it that family and friends stay in when they visit and where their teenage sons like to hang out with friends.
But perhaps the most significant space in the home for Curt is the basement. After living in the space for a while and seeing it getting cluttered, the Rozzelles brought in a designer from California Closets to create a plan for floor-to ceiling bookshelves for Curt’s collection of more than 400 military history games (games where you take an event in history and re-enact it with rules and roleplaying) that surround a commercial grade gaming table in the center.
For Liz, though, her favorite space is not inside the house but outside it, where on a good week she spends at least 30 hours gardening. Recently she planted native hydrangeas along the driveway, and she spends a lot of time in a pollinator garden in the backyard that now has mostly native plants. “That’s my favorite thing about the garden: There’s always a problem to solve,” she says. “Whatever solution you give it, you’re not really going to be wrong because you are going to learn from it. It satisfies my drive to learn and educate myself.”
Just like all the spaces inside Liz’s home, the garden is a place for serene comfort.
“I feel like a home should be an oasis for your family once you leave the chaos of everyday life at your job or school or whatever is going on,” she says. “You want to come home and be able to rest and relax and have pretty things to look at.
