Heights home cribs from family retail business

Designer Bill Stubbs waves his hand around the dining room in Elizabeth and Michael Cegelski's new home.

"Everything you see in here, every single thing, is from Gallery Furniture," he says.

The Cegelskis, who moved into their just-built Heights home a couple of months ago, have a deep connection to the Houston furniture retailer: Elizabeth, 27, is the younger daughter of owner Jim McIngvale, also known as "Mattress Mack."

After the Cegelskis married in 2012, now-30-year-old Michael's oil-and-gas job took them to Pittsburgh for six months, then Denver for a year. When they got the chance to move to Houston, they took it, and they plan to stay. Elizabeth, who finished her Ph.D. at the University of Houston last year, is now a social worker at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. She's also president of the Peace of Mind Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she was diagnosed with as a child.

"This was the first place that we wanted to actually make a home," Elizabeth says. "I think all of our other places, we knew they were temporary, so we just kind of made do."

The two-story, 3,700-square-foot Craftsman-style house they found last summer still was under construction, which meant the Cegelskis could customize the details. So they brought in Stubbs to help them make decisions.

Stubbs could be called a family friend by now. He's worked on several projects with the McIngvale family, including a redesign of the family's vacation home on Lake Travis a few years ago. With this house, Stubbs had a mostly blank slate.

"The only thing we brought with us that we were super-attached to were our photos," Elizabeth says. The couple has collected Peter Lik photos for several years and has amassed about a dozen of Lik's oversize landscapes.

From that simple starting point, Stubbs used his knowledge of Elizabeth's taste to guide him.

"I have watched what Liz has picked for her wedding, her bedroom at the lake house - all of that adds up in my head," Stubbs says. "In her family, she's the one who likes things clean and a little more sparse. She doesn't need all the tchotchkes and the layers of stuff."

The house does have a few flourishes of opulence. While most of the windows have blinds to complement the simplicity of Craftsman style, the master bedroom has thick, patterned draperies. "You have to change the acoustics of the house in the bedroom," Stubbs says, to absorb sound and create an atmosphere of softness and rest. And each of the home's four bathrooms has rich, patterned wallpaper. "With each one, I just wanted you to walk into the bathroom and feel it was a little elevated, a little elegant," Stubbs says.

"I'm not a wallpaper person, typically," Elizabeth says, but she agrees that it works in the bathrooms and in the laundry room, where Stubbs used a white paper with a contemporary lattice pattern in charcoal gray.

"Never in my life would I have thought to put wallpaper in a laundry room," Elizabeth says. "But, the reality is, that's one of the places you spend the most time in your house. It's one of those things where even your laundry room feels fancy."

Although everything came from Gallery Furniture, Stubbs says he had no trouble filling the house with items from a single store.

"You can custom-order anything," he says. "Most of the wood furniture came right off the (showroom) floor, but the upholstery you can have custom-ordered, so I selected all the fabrics."

"I think a lot of people walk into a furniture store and if they don't see what they like, they leave," Elizabeth says. "And this includes me - it's overwhelming to me. I wouldn't think about custom-creating something. That's why it's nice to pair with a designer."

The rooms reflect Elizabeth's desire for clean lines and clutter-free spaces, but small details raise the luxury level. Taupe-gray beadboard is installed overhead in the kitchen between the ceiling's exposed beams. Built-in cabinetry gives the first-floor office a polished look. And everywhere a window has blinds, Stubbs selected a tape to color coordinate with the look of the room.

Those details are the "unexpected surprises" that give their home its style, Elizabeth says.

In a small sitting room just off the master suite, Stubbs hung some personal photos and mementos from the Cegelskis' wedding, a beach-front ceremony on the Turks and Caicos Islands.

"(As) a young couple, they don't have a lot of history, so there's not a lot of stuff," he says, adding that he wanted to display something that shows "who they are and where they came from."

"I wanted the house to feel personal," Stubbs says, "not like we just filled it full of furniture."