On the outside, a mansion on a suburban street just south of Cincinnati looks ordinary enough, other than the long set of stairs leading up to the front door. Behind the walls, however, the house’s unique character emerges, a product of the imaginations and interests of its well-traveled owners.
Many of the rooms in the interior have distinct designs that honor countries or regions that current owners David and Darlene Barnes visited, from Asia to the Southwestern U.S. to England. The five-bedroom house at 943 Squire Oaks Drive in the Villa Hills neighborhood, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, also has a number of features hard to find in most homes, such as a shooting range and a hibachi grill like those in certain Japanese restaurants.
“The decor is unusual, and that isn’t necessarily a plus, because it’s really honoring the owners’ personal experience,” Lee Robinson, who listed the home for Robinson Sotheby’s International Realty in Cincinnati for $5.7 million, told Homes.com. “You want the buyer to envision themselves in a home. But the house is just exceptionally high quality – they didn’t cut any corners.”
The couple knew they wanted their travels to be a key feature when they built the house in 2013, David Barnes told Homes.com. The couple operated a business that made broadcast television equipment, and often doubled their work trips as family excursions with their children.
“We always pick things up in our travels, and we kind of designed the house around our collection,” he said.
One room is meant to evoke an English conservatory, with numerous tall windows and glass openings in the roof to let in ample light. The decorations and furnishings in a bedroom recall the couple’s travels to Asia. Then there’s a Disneyesque theatre, with LED lights on the ceiling shaped like Mickey Mouse.
Part of the lower level has a strongly Southwestern feel, including a bar called “Cantina Maria.” The dining room next to the bar includes a built-in hibachi grill, where the couple practiced cooking skills they learned abroad. It wasn’t easy for the company that built the house to acquire the grill, Barnes said, since the manufacturer normally sells them only to restaurants.
On the wall next to the hibachi are what appear at first to be four small windows; in fact, they are television sets turned sideways.
“If you want to have dinner in Japan, we can play a video from Tokyo on those four screens, or videos of the Southwest, whatever mood you want to be in for dinner,” Barnes said.
The shooting range is also on the lower level, which enabled Barnes to nurture a hobby he picked up as a child. The company that built the range also produces guns for police and military training, he said.
The house’s swimming pool is outdoors, but it sits in the middle of the house. Glass walls in many of the ground-floor rooms provide a view of it. It was meant to be a reflecting pool, according to Barnes, not just a place to cool off.
Barnes credited his wife’s design skills for smoothing out the differences among the various rooms, despite their wildly varying themes.
“We managed to choose colors, trim and things that really blended together so when you walk through the house, there’s not a stark difference from one room to the next,” he said. “There’s a transition to it.”