The elegant meets the exotic
T
here are many personal treasures to be found in Mya Reyes’ 3,200 square-foot Queensridge home, but one of her favorites is a girl’s shiny bronze Shantung dress. Reyes wore it as a child growing up in her Detroit neighborhood. “I just loved that dress!” she says. “I think it was something about the bronziness, and I was just so different when I wore it, because, well, who had 62 | Desert
Companion | April 2013
a dress like that?” Hanging in her Summerlin closet, six decades later, the dress has more than sentimental value for Reyes. “I think that dress helped to develop me as a person,” she says. It inspired the elegant and exotic style that makes her house a vivid showcase of her personal history. “When we first met Mya, she called herself the reincarnation of Josephine Baker. She was very dressed and glamorous,” says designer Andrea Miranda-Hall of Inspired Design. “So that’s where we took off from.” Recalling the dramatic flair of the early 20thcentury performer known as the
Bronze Venus, they began with the circular staircase. Standard white spindles were replaced with sweeping wrought iron designs; the blonde wooden stairs covered with bold cheetah-print carpeting; the railings painted a dramatic black; and the curved walls were lined in a paper of glistening midnight mica stone to bring it all together. Their design concept grew from there to incorporate Reyes’ eclectic tastes and her many cherished pieces — such as her glass-top dining room table with its base of brass-sculptured rams’ heads. As a consultant in diversity