“I had my eye on it for years,” says Anna Weiss , referring to a brick and wood-paneled home built in 1971 that stood out in a 1950s subdivision of St. Louis. Anna is the owner of local vintage furniture shop MoModerne , so her eyes are particularly well-trained to spot a diamond in the rough . “It always looked a bit run-down. The mailbox was old and rusty. I loved it,” she confesses. She was drawn to its flat roofs, complex composition, and oversize rear windows, and even went so far as to drop letters in the mailbox expressing interest in purchasing it whenever the owner was ready to sell.

BEFORE: The 1971 home featured a brick and wood exterior in shades of red.

AFTER: One major change that Anna wanted to make to the exterior was to alter its red color and paint it black . “I was pretty dead set on having a black house,” says Anna.

And when that day came, Anna and her partner, Luby Kelley, jumped at the opportunity. The home was being sold by the original owner—architect Jack Tyrer, who had designed the house itself—and while Anna wanted to retain the original floor plan and essence of the home, there was a lot that she wanted to change. On the “to stay” list were the show-stopping lava-rock-and-copper fireplace, the sunken living room, and the open staircase. On the “must change” list? The red brick exterior; the wall-to-wall carpeting; and the kitchen, which had “a drop-down ceiling with fluorescent lights, a wall of cabinets dividing the living room, and had terrible flow,” describes Anna.