Tour an Expansive Wisconsin Lakeside Villa That’s Filled With Amazingly Ornate Artistry

It was a life spent traveling the globe that sparked a Wisconsin family’s interest in the decorative arts. When the couple first sat down with designerJessica Jubelirer,they regaled her with stories of the past decade wandering the globe with their two daughters, who by now were college-age. They had been living and working in Asia for several years and this home project—a newly built mansion on the shores of a tranquil Wisconsin lake—marked their return to the States permanently. According to Jubelirer, they were eager to create a family home that paid homage to the grand estates and ornate palaces they had witnessed during their peripatetic past few years. “They wanted something that they had never seen before, even during their time living abroad,” Jubelirer says of the family’s brief.

Unsurprisingly, for a house as vast and minutely detailed as they wanted, that undertaking was no small feat. But Jubelirer was up for the challenge. “This was an opportunity to delve into so many different realms of artistry,” she says of the house, which took her five years and several international sourcing trips to complete. “From tracking down hand-painted Portuguese tiles and researching midcentury Swedish textiles, our shared love of history, nature, and artisanship really came together to create an incredible collaboration. They really let my team and I unleash our creative energy.”

Now, looking back, the finished project still feels like a whirlwind tour. “Everywhere your eye travels throughout the house, it lands on something new,” Jubelirer explains of the experience of wandering through the 14,000-square-foot, six-bedroom home. For Jubelirer, who opened her practice in 2008 and has since been working between Wisconsin and southern Florida, it was a herculean but unendingly fascinating project. Because the designer hails from a creative family—Jubelirer’s mother is a textile designer and her father worked in advertising—having carte blanche to commission artisans and craftspeople the world over felt like heaven.

For instance, in the dining room, she and her clients sought inspiration from classic Americana folklore for a mural that envelops the entire room. They commissioned the team at historic wallpaper producerGracieto hand-paint the bucolic scene, which depicts Revolutionary-era villages and agrarian tableaux. But the mural is merely the backdrop: Everything from the carved ceiling molding to the quilt-like window treatments is laden with its own heavily researched references. The former, Jubelirer says, is based on “a motif pulled from one of the Swedish tapestries in the house and handcrafted out of plaster into this very modern yet traditional grid on the ceiling.” As for the latter, it was based on the delicate pattern of a dress Jubelirer happened to love. She turned to New York–based Penn & Fletcher to fabricate what became the origami-like window dressing from scratch. “Every element in the home is the result of layers upon layers of imagination,” the designer reveals.

One of the most stunning—and, in fact, fortuitous—examples of the team’s artisan collaboration is the wood-lined double-height billiard room. “We stumbled into the Paris showroom of master millworks Féau Boiseries unexpectedly one day during one of our travels,” Jubelirer recalls of the discovery. “We simply fell in love with a piece of millwork that they had on display that had been reclaimed from a 1930s Jean-Michel Frank project.” They took the impromptu meeting as a sign and quickly commissioned them to design the wall paneling in the billiard room. “Féau Boiseries’sability to bridge traditional design with a modern execution really fit this home so beautifully. So, we absolutely had to work with them in order to create the [woodwork], which is made of Cerris white oak and inset with hand-loomed French horsehair,” Jubelirer adds.