Taste, as tribal and self-conscious as it can be, is in its purest form a palimpsest of memories. Impressions gathered over the course of a lifetime, re-trodden and adapted, but still bearing an imprint of their original form. The homes that one inhabits, as a child in particular, seem to sink to a deep part of the subconscious, often becoming the building blocks for personal expression later in life. Such is the case at this house in Utah belonging to the American interior designer Meta Coleman, her artist husband Nicholas and their two teenage children.

After separating from Meta’s father, her mother (‘German, liberal, artistic, blunt – very different to our neighbours’) had relocated from Washington, DC, to Provo, Utah, a leafy college town an hour south of Salt Lake City, surrounded by the towering mountains of the Wasatch Front. Meta’s childhood summers were spent at the house of her maternal grandparents in Germany. Her grandfather was an architect and a great collector of antiques and art and, though he had died before Meta was born, the home he had made with her grandmother became an enduring aesthetic influence.

‘That house shaped how I think about design,’ Meta says. ‘It made me sensitive to the way you can create an atmosphere with colour and objects. My study is actually inspired by the design of my grandfather’s in Germany. There is a lot of his essence in my home. The colour palette – the reds, blues, greens and yellows – in this house are all a by-product of the European side of my upbringing. It’s complicated. I don’t always resonate with American culture, but I’m also not totally German. That’s the wonderful thing about travel, I guess. I’m a big proponent of choosing which parts of a culture you want to embrace as part of your own philosophy.’

In the sitting room, walls in a custom yellow inspired by Meta’s mother’s house showcase paintings by Raymond Ching (above the mantelpiece), Bruno Liliefors (left) and Mosse Stoopendaal, and framed plaster casts of flower petals by Jess Wheeler on the top shelves. An armchair in Lee Jofa’s ‘Althea’ citron linen, a sofa in Josef Frank’s ‘Anakreon’ black linen and a wooden chair Meta inherited from her grandmother, with cushions in Estrid Ericson’s ‘Elefant’ storm blue linen, are arranged in front of the chimneypiece, featuring traditional tiles found at antique shops in the Netherlands and Portugal.

Dean Hearne

Meta went to college in her hometown of Provo, studied photography and married Nicholas. In 2004, the couple bought a plot of land to build a house: ‘We were only 27, so it was a little hare-brained.’ They based the architecture on what she describes as a classic Colonial style and continues, ‘We thought, you can’t get that too wrong. But, admittedly, there are some things that are a little off.’

The house remained a blank canvas for years, its decoration evolving over two decades as a series of what Meta describes as ‘experiments’. As the couple travelled the world, they would return with new ideas to try: a ceiling frieze inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte in the sitting room; a tile pattern copied from Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris in the bath-room. The house contains a happy confluence of influences – Biedermeier, the Vienna Secession movement, Alpine and Bavarian motifs alongside Josef Frank textiles.

In the kitchen, blond alder wood cabinets reminiscent of an Alpine chalet are coupled with tiled walls that were inspired by traditional Portuguese kitchens. The children’s bathroom has vintage Ikea lights and a striking tile pattern – with the look of an amoeba under a microscope – based on a classic Italian design but subtly rescaled and recoloured. Meta says she was trying to evoke the feeling of an Italian bathroom that has been there for ages but got a revamp in the 1960s.