Opportunity literally knocked at the door for St. Louis couple Bradley Fratello and Doug Moore. While admiring their dwelling in The Grove from the street, a stranger walked up to their front door and offered to buy it for a generous price well above what they had spent building it. Quickly seizing the moment, they accepted the offer and moved into a condo in the Central West End. After a couple of years, they still craved city life but preferred to have more land with a seamless indoor/outdoor connection.

The owners of this home were drawn to Ladue’s location —more convenient to the airport and downtown than the couple’s previous home in Chesterfield. As they imagined their dream home, the couple already knew who’d be part of the team creating it. Award-winning builder Mike Mahn is a family member, and interior designer Debbie Donnelly had worked on remodeling the couple’s Chesterfield home. Now the owners needed to find the perfect lot where they would build.

When Fred Ortlip worked nights as a copy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he used his daytime hours for a round or two of golf each week with his Post colleagues. As he watched his ball sail down the fairway or eyeballed the correct line of a putt, he also focused on something having nothing to do with the sport.  “I admired a lot of the landscaping around the golf courses,” he recalls. In the late 1990s, when he and his wife Rory had some money left over from an insurance check to repair hail damage to their Kirkwood home, they decided to use it to enhance their own landscape.

Symbolizing love and devotion, hostas are shade-tolerant foliage plants that thrive from early spring to late summer. They’re a great addition to perennial gardens, woodland gardens, areas needing ground cover, suburban yards or even outdoor containers.

Love and Care

For more than 40 years, the Missouri Botanical Garden has produced this annual festival in conjunction with the Japanese Activities Committee, a coalition of several Japanese-American organizations that provide art, dance, food and entertainment for thousands of visitors each year.

This year, the Garden will welcome Kanariya Eiraku, an expert in the Japanese art of lone storytelling known as rakugo. Seated alone and with minimal props, Eiraku will show the audience how to weave masterfully comedic tales with multiple characters using only simple movements and voice changes.

During the remodeling of Suzanne and Bryan Jurich’s home interior, their living space metamorphosed into a timeless, classic milieu. Yet, more importantly, Suzanne proclaims, “the house also finally became OUR home.”

Making a house a home took on increased importance in this case, given that Bryan’s executive career has prompted the family to relocate often. Suzanne says this is the first house they felt they would be able to settle into for a while. “Every other place we’ve lived felt temporary,” she recalls.