Amid the older bungalows on a St. Petersburg street, the Milics designed and built an airy, sleek house that is as eye-catching inside as out.
By JUDY STARK
Published February 28, 2004
[Times photos: James Borchuck]
Designer Jo Milic’s home is a portfolio of his work, “and I only do contemporary,” he said. The rectangular order of the dining room’s windows, table and cabinetry gives way to “the raw, chaotic” contrast of the hanging staircase, plywood bench and entertainment unit in the living room.
Light pours from the second-floor windows through the bookcases, backed in fiberglass, and through stainless-steel architectural cable railings. The kitchen island, topped in wenge wood, is all curved lines, a design challenge.
The birch-and-mahogany staircase rests on invisible ledges in the wall and seems to hang in space, suspended by threaded rods inside stainless-steel sleeves. The refrigerator? It’s a refinished 1954 Westinghouse that holds beer. The wall’s six colors echo shades used throughout the house.
Only the walls of the wing at right are original to the home. Milic said he was inspired by architect Frank Gehry, who built his own home using common materials in unusual ways. “I wanted it to be as interesting on the exterior as it was on the interior.”
ST. PETERSBURG - If this house were music, it would be a Miles Davis, cool school-era ballad: slick and inventive, with a touch of the unexpected.
On a bungalow street in the city's Old Northeast, tucked under a giant live oak, Jo and Monica Milic's apple-green, metal-roofed, unapologetically modern house is the offbeat note that reminds why a piano has black keys as well as white, and why it's the variations on a theme that keep things interesting.
"Sometimes I forget I did this," said Milic, 36, who designed the house, built much of it himself and designed most of the interior furniture and fixtures, which were fabricated by his workshop. "Then strangers come to visit, and remind me. I never get tired of seeing the look on their faces" when they walk in the door.
When they walk in the door, what makes jaws drop is this sleek, uncluttered, loftlike space: open, airy, a jazzlike, carefully controlled combination of order and chaos. A dining area that is a study in rectangles is the perfect foil for a spidery Italian chandelier. A staircase hangs in midair, apparently suspended from stainless-steel cables. A bench and an entertainment unit, made from laminated plywood, are Milic's own design. The front door's birch plywood has been routed in an abstract design.
The house is one of six that will be on the St. Petersburg Catholic High house tour March 6.
"Everyday materials reused in a different way" are the hallmark of the house, Milic says. The kitchen cabinets are maple plywood with opaque plexiglass fronts. The floor in an upstairs library is plywood squares, 30 inches on a side, coated with concrete paint. The bookcases that ring the balconylike second floor are backed in sheets of fiberglass so light pours through them down to the first floor. Stainless-steel architectural cable serves as railings.
The eye-popping staircase wall in the living room is made of 1/2-inch ultralight medium-density fiberboard (a material often used in kitchen cabinets), painted in six colors that echo those used throughout the house. The brushed stainless-steel pulls on the kitchen cabinets? "Home Depot," the designer said. "No big deal. Most of this house was built at Home Depot."
Trained though not licensed as an architect "Architecture is more red tape than creativity", Milic is a designer who is creating his own line of furniture through his business, Jovica Milic Inc. (www.jovicamilic.com) and working on projects for many clients: new homes, remodelings, single rooms, or details, such as a 20-foot stainless-steel waterfall for a home in Pasadena Yacht & Country Club, a staircase, a dining room table. He designs commercially, also: The Kingdon Alan Gallery on Beach Drive NE is his design. He formerly worked as a designer for Hands On, a St. Petersburg company that designs interactive museum interiors for clients around the world.
His workshop employs a small team of artisans - "a cabinetmaker, a welder and a machinist," Milic says. "The really fascinating thing is to teach guys with no design experience how to loosen up and build this off-the-wall stuff," like the lighting assembled from Home Depot components or the kitchen island, which is all curved surfaces, a design challenge just to prove they could do it.
Milic broke ground on his home in 1999. To meet city setback codes at the time he had to retain three walls of the original 80-year-old, 1,100-square-foot home. Given that his design was unusual for the neighborhood, "we framed it out in five weeks so nobody could stop me," he said. (One neighbor complained about the angles, the newness, the color, but has since moved away, and Milic said neighborhood reaction "is all positive now." The apple-green color, unusual a few years ago, "is old news now," he said.)
The house now has 2,500 square feet and a 400-square-foot garage. On the home's second floor are a master suite and two smaller rooms, used as an office and a library, and a second bath. The first floor includes living and dining areas, a kitchen, laundry room, another bedroom and bath. There are, the designer pointed out, "no hallways and no dead ends."
"Most people interpret modern as cold," Milic said. "Well, only if you want to make it cold."
This modern house is warmed by a mix of furnishings and accessories. Some are by the masters of modern design, like the black leather LeCorbusier lounge chair. Paintings by Claudia Strano Jennings hang in the living room. Suspended from the second-floor ceiling are eight long, narrow cones in shades of red, gold, black and brown, made of movie film by Nancy Cervenka McLaughlin and specifically commissioned for the house. In contrast, an old Mexican wooden table and a cabinet made from wooden doors found in a barn bring their age and weathered patina to the rooms. "Every piece tells a story," Milic says.
The modern lighting fixtures throughout the house are Italian, commissioned at a fraction of their cost here when the Milics visit his wife's family there. A sleek knob and lockset on the laundry room door was $45 at a neighborhood hardware store in Italy.
When he started the house, Milic's intention was that it be "a portfolio house" - a place that showed what he could do, to which he could invite clients. "But for the first five years I couldn't get a job. Clients were afraid of taking the jump." That has changed. "Now I always have my first meeting with a client here," he said, and it's amazing how receptive clients are to, say, a wall painted in six colors when they see what his looks like. "Half of them ask me to do a wall for them," he said. "The only thing that matters is that they want to do something avant-garde and contemporary."
The house cost him $200,000 in labor and materials, Milic said. When he refinanced recently it was appraised at $520,000.
So what's it like to live in a place as sleek and slick, as unusual, as jazzy as this? "I get a lot of pleasure out of it," Milic said. "I relax. It's comfortable. I find I'm at peace here. I like looking at my surroundings."
Taking the tour
Jo and Monica Milic's house in the Old Northeast section of St. Petersburg is one of six homes on the St. Petersburg Catholic High School home tour, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 6.
The other houses: three homes at Pasadena Yacht & Country Club; a beach house in St. Pete Beach; and a penthouse at Vinoy Place in St. Petersburg.
Tickets are $15 at Artistic Flowers, 3247 Fourth St. N and 3525 49th St. N; Jene's Tropicals, 6831 Central Ave.; Gulf Coast Garden Center, 4355 Haines Road; and Diamonds Direct, 5085 34th St. S, all in St. Petersburg; Black Forest Flowers, 3426 Tampa Road, Palm Harbor; and Jennie's Flower Shop, 2730 W Columbus Drive, Tampa.
