One of the many years Todd Fletcher decorated his Broadmoor home for Christmas with a tree, lights, the works, he hung a “Happy Holidays” sign over the entry door. Then he forgot about it.
Other decorations went to storage when the holiday passed, but that sign remained there, still greeting visitors for weeks, months and then years. Now a permanent fixture, it captures the essence of Fletcher’s joie de vivre and introduces what dwells within his home.
The view through the front door shows the home in holiday dress.
“Good vibes,” Fletcher said. “This house is nothing but happiness.”
Fletcher creates that vibe with the force of his own energy, whether he’s wearing Rocket Man-style orange eyeglasses or scholarly black frames.
Vibrancy starts at the door with a laissez les bons temps sign and a “You look good” welcome mat.
Now nicknamed the Holiday House, every wall in Fletcher’s home is a gallery and every corner a gathering place.
A Christmas tree is located in the foyer.
Sea blue paint provides a background for dozens of aquatic-life images, from ocean fish to mudbugs. Crabs, redfish, shrimp — they’re all celebrated in a collection of what Fletcher describes as “seafood.”
Accents of eye-popping oranges and reds turn up the heat in comfy throws, ceramic vases, picture frames and table settings.
“I’ve always kind of liked red,” said red-headed Fletcher, “ever since my mom said I shouldn’t wear orange or red because it clashed with my hair. Who needs to listen to mom?”
The blue and orange color scheme is apparent in the living room, which also shows Fletcher’s ‘more is more’ homey decorating penchant.
The bold colors are a recent addition. Deciding he needed to make changes, he redecorated parts of the house recently and gutted the backyard to make way for a low-maintenance patio garden equipped with numerous seating arrangements.
The patio contains a vintage French fountain, a deck-enclosed koi pond, a $20,000 privacy fence and a covered space equipped with pull-down sheets of plastic to create a greenhouse in winter.
At night, when the fence lanterns glow, the string lights sparkle and the chimes reverberate, the space embraces like a temple.
A guest bedroom is located under the stairs off the foyer.
An avid gardener and plant collector, Fletcher gave up the colorful annuals and tender perennials that once grew in the garden beds and replaced them with hardy perennials such as ferns and hollies.
With the golden years in mind, he covered much of the soil with porcelain tile and restricted outdoor plants to containers.
“I’m done weeding,” he said.
This year was the second time Fletcher has made major changes to the late 19th-century, raised center hall property. When he bought it in 1996, it was in disrepair and contained 28 doors.
Todd Fletcher with friend Colleen Grogan
“It was a falling-down piece of s***,” he said. “I turned on a switch and the ceiling fan caught fire.”
He gutted it to the studs, replaced unnecessary doors with walls, added closets and a master suite in the attic. Today, it’s a 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bath house with a second-floor balcony overlooking the backyard oasis. He calls the balcony addition “the pope balcony” because guests enjoy waving from its superior position to those below.
An unapologetic maximalist, Fletcher has mastered the art of organizing scores of disparate objects or finding new uses for them. Pricey contemporary paintings from art galleries share space with rustic folk artists, a glass container of marbles, a framed collection of common sea shells and a shadow box filled with old keys.
The primary bedroom shows off Fletcher’s taste in art and color.
A digitally catalogued collection of 194 indoor plants, mostly succulents, live in just about every room. He raids his vast tie collection to make quilts for the beds, shades for glass closet doors and to macramé strips into pillowcases.
Many of his collections started in adolescence, he said, because his mother encouraged the habit. She once gave him a ruler collection.
Fletcher keeps most of his hat collection in the center hall. Forty-three hats hang near the ceiling. He keeps a long pole near the front door to bring them down. There’s a mirror handy to help him decide whether the retrieved hat is the right one for the occasion.
In a guest room, Fletcher created the wall-size artwork made of neck ties, as well as the tie curtains that cover the closet windows.
Camouflage caps and jaunty, raffia fedoras share a room with a crystal chandelier and a serving platter painted in the style of Clementine Hunter.
“Like with most things, I go a little bit overboard,” he said. “When I get into something, I go for it.”
In his view, it’s the art that matters, not the design. His style is “what I like,” and he doesn’t use focus points to unify rooms. “You honor the space,” he said. “You kind of vibe it.”
The dining area combines blue with vivid orange accents.
Fletcher enjoys entertaining. There are a dozen seating arrangements that he calls “stations.” Whenever guests gather, he tells them they can signal a “station” change anytime. When they do, everyone follows to the next spot.
The stations start on the screened front porch and flow to the living room — with its leather sofa, cushioned chairs, and martini tables — to the always-set dining table.
At the jazz station, paintings of greats such as Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong occupy the walls. A facing settee allows for listening to their music via whole-house speakers and pretending the sound is live in real-time.
There’s another screen porch in the back, Fletcher’s own favorite station, a couple more stations upstairs and several more outside.
The second-floor screened porch overlooks the back patio.
A favorite spot is the art deco cabinet that holds a collection of gin. London dry, botanical, flora, Fletcher has them all. He mixes gin cocktails in vintage glassware displayed near a deco-era, absinthe drink maker.
Amid the splendor of Jazz Age cocktail ware, with aromatic gin charming the nose and ice clinking against old glass, it’s easy to imagine sharing the moment with Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald in their Paris years.
Life isn’t all party time for Fletcher, however. There’s another room in the house, painted a serious taupe, that only he occupies. The office is “mission control” for his 9-to-5, “I want to change the world” self. It contains three oversized monitors and a laptop.
As a supervisor with Louisiana Healthcare Connections, headquartered in Baton Rouge, he manages a staff of people working with Medicaid providers. He spends many hours on the phone calming down harried health care professionals.
