reminisces. “It was Memorial Day 2004. We never looked back.” They bought a house and Paige partnered with a Birmingham architecture firm, Dungan Nequette, to run an interior design store called Tracery Interiors in Rosemary Beach, Florida. “Tracery opened in December 2003 and I became a partner in 2004, then proprietor in 2005.”
“Their work showed that there are better ways to build communities than a sprawling mess of subdivisions and strip malls, and that really resonated for me.” Little did he know that he would come full circle from studying Seaside to living a short walk away from it. Mark left Northwestern University, which lacked a program in architecture and planning, for the University of Colorado at Boulder and a
career in urban design. After graduation, he worked on the renowned Stapleton project in Denver and then spent several years working for a large firm in D.C. and Atlanta, where he met Paige. “I couldn’t believe that Paige had visited the towns of 30-A throughout her life, after I had spent so much time studying them. It wasn’t long before we made 30-A our home.”
“People come back every year to see us at Tracery, whether we designed their home or not,” she comments. It’s no wonder, since Paige is the Indiana Jones of cool collections. “Going back to my childhood days in Opp, I’ve not stopped looking for exceptional objects. Our clients love the treasures we find and they want to take something back from Tracery every time they come down to the beach.” Indy Jones did say, “If you want to be a good archaeologist, you gotta get out of the library.” And there goes Paige, ever jet setting, scouring the country to recover important artifacts and put them in their proper place. She is like a careful excavator mining precious sites. “For the shop or a client’s home,” she says, “I am always looking for found objects to mix with our custom-designed pieces and antiques. I like to mix it all together until it becomes a collection. We don’t create the same thing every time. Each client is different and I create spaces for them that are special to them—that are only theirs. I like to really get to know my clients, to step inside their world and represent who they are through a collection of objects, upholsteries, furnishings, fabrics, and colors, setting art around them as a reflection of who they are.” Paige makes it sound so simple, but there is more to her process than meets the eye. It feels both spiritual and scholarly. Inside her store and the homes that Paige designs is something that you can’t pinpoint, something that leaves you wondering, “Where is this from? How does it all come together? How does she do it?” My take is that Paige Schnell is a curator for artifacts of the home; she is a collector, creating mini museum galleries for people to live in. Paige may be the public persona of the Schnell family, but she isn’t the only creator at work inside their Seagrove cottage. Her husband, Mark, became an urban designer partly because of the New Urbanist 30-A town of Seaside and other designs by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. “A family friend sent me a newspaper clipping from the New York Times—this was pre-Internet—about the work of Duany and Plater-Zyberk,” says Mark. 198 | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 013
top: 30-a creative duo mark and paige schnell. photo by sheila goode bottom: schnell cottage, paige and mark’s cozy, eclectic home in seagrove beach, florida. photo by jean allsopp