When musician Kacey Musgraves was moving into her new home – a sundrenched 3,500-square-foot property in Nashville – she was in the middle of writing her genre-blending fifth studio album “Star-Crossed.”
Both the album and house were a marker of some major changes for the 33-year-old Grammy winner, as she navigated her life following her divorce from country singer Ruston Kelly. For the May issue of Architectural Digest, she opened her doors to the house, saying she was hoping to “embrace a minimalist mindset” for the first time.
“I wanted a place that felt like me where I could express myself without having to think about another person and what they might want,” she told the magazine. “This felt like a new beginning.”
With the help of designer Lindsay Rhodes, Musgraves looked to transform the house’s original colorful, maximal aesthetic into a peaceful, plant-filled refuge with vintage touches. The interior mostly comprises creams and wood hues – save for a dusky pink piano room (Farrow & Ball’s popular “dead salmon” shade) and a powder room they left untouched, which was papered with charcoal sketches from the late local artist Hazel King (one of Musgraves’ “favorite things” about the house, she said).
“Kacey needed to start from white to see where she wanted to go,” Rhodes said in the article. “The house had a lot of subway tiles and Craftsman-style details, so we wanted to make everything feel clean. We basically blanketed the entire kitchen with plaster, even the island, to create smooth lines and give it a stone-like texture. Then we used a pale mineral paint throughout the house. It almost feels like a watercolor; instead of being flat, it gives a little dimension.”
Despite her minimal aspirations, Musgraves is an avid antique thrifter – and many of the objects in the home were purchased secondhand, including her poolside conversation-starter: a gargantuan classical bust of a woman made of plaster, which she spotted at a shop while in Minneapolis on tour.
“There’s something really interesting to me about taking ownership over an object that meant a lot to someone else, and kind of becoming the new steward of whatever it is,” she said. In one of her guest bedrooms, she thinks of the history of the antique gilt French bed frames she put in the room. “I love thinking about who might have slept here, what they dreamed about, the love that was made on this bed,” she said. “To me, it’s really magical.”
When she looks around her new home, there are small touches that remind her of where she’s at on her journey, saying the many orbs and circles in the house are a reference to the theme of “full circle-ness,” which kept emerging as she was writing the tracks on “Star-Crossed.”
“I had some spiritual experiences that involved orbs – I had a psychedelic plant therapy session in which people from my past kept presenting themselves to me in the form of orbs,” she recalled. “Without running the risk of sounding like an absolute psycho, it was really transformative for me.”
Top image: Kacey Musgraves sitting poolside in her Nashville home.
