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For years Todd Fletcher has decorated his Broadmoor home for Christmas with a tree, lights and works, and he hung a “Happy Holidays” sign on the entry door brand. Then he forgot about it.
After the holidays, other decorations are put away, but that sign is still there, welcoming visitors for weeks, months and even years. Now a permanent fixture, it captures the essence of Fletcher’s joie de vivre and introduces his family home.
“The vibe was great,” Fletcher said. “This house is happiness.”
Todd Fletcher and friend Colleen Grogan
Fletcher brings the vibe to life with his energy, whether wearing Rocketman-inspired orange glasses or preppy black frames.
The energy starts with the laissez les bons temps sign at the door and the ‘you look good’ welcome mat.
Now nicknamed the Vacation Home, every wall in Fletcher’s home is a gallery and every corner a meeting place.
A Christmas tree is located in the foyer.
Aquamarine paint provides the backdrop for dozens of images of aquatic life, from sea fish to mud worms. Crab, redfish, prawns – they’re all popular in what Fletcher calls ‘seafood’.
Dazzling shades of orange and red add warmth to cozy throw pillows, ceramic vases, picture frames and table settings.
“I’ve always been a bit of a redhead,” says redhead Fletcher, “ever since my mom said I shouldn’t wear orange or red because they don’t go with my hair. Who needs to listen to mom?”
The blue and orange color scheme is evident in the living room, which also shows Fletcher’s “more is merrier” preference for home decor.
Bold colors are a recent addition. Deciding he needed to make a change, he recently redecorated part of the house and demolished the backyard to make way for a low-maintenance courtyard garden equipped with numerous seating arrangements.
The yard has an old-fashioned French fountain, a koi pond enclosed on a deck, a $20,000 privacy fence, and a covered space with pull-down plastic panels for a greenhouse in the winter.
At night, when the fence lanterns are lit, the string lights flicker, the chimes echo, and the space is surrounded like a temple.
The guest bedroom is located under the stairs off the foyer.
An avid gardener and plant collector, Fletcher ditched the colorful annuals and tender perennials that once grew in garden beds and replaced them with hardy perennials like ferns and holly.
With the golden years in mind, he covered most of the soil with tiles and confined outdoor plants to containers.
“I’m done weeding,” he said.
This year marks Fletcher’s second major renovation of the late 1800s Central Hall property. When he bought it in 1996, it was in disrepair and had 28 doors.
“It was a piece of shit that fell,” he said. “I flipped a switch and the ceiling fan caught fire.”
He stripped it down to the studs, replaced unnecessary doors with walls, and added closets and a master suite in the attic. Today, it’s a 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bathroom home with a second-floor balcony overlooking a backyard oasis. He called the balcony the “Papal Balcony” because guests liked to wave to those below from its vantage point.
An unabashed minimalist, Fletcher has mastered the art of organizing tons of different items or finding new uses for them. Expensive contemporary paintings from the art gallery share the space with rustic folk artists, marble terrariums, a collection of plain sea shells and a locket filled with old keys.
The master bedroom showcases Fletcher’s taste for art and colour.
A digitally cataloged collection of 194 houseplants (mainly succulents) for nearly every room. He raided his vast collection of ties to create quilts for beds, curtains for glass closet doors and tassels for pillowcases.
Many of his collections, he says, began in adolescence because his mother encouraged the habit. She once gave him a collection of rulers.
Fletcher keeps most of his hat collection in the central hall. Forty-three hats hung near the ceiling. He placed a long pole near the front door to pull them down. Having a mirror close at hand will help him determine if the retrieved hat is appropriate for the occasion.
In one guest room, Fletcher created wall-sized artwork made of ties, as well as tie curtains that covered closet windows.
Camouflage hats and lively raffia fedoras shared a room with crystal chandeliers and Clementine Hunter-inspired dinner plates.
“Like most things, I went a little too far,” he said. “When I get into something, I give it my all.”
In his view, what matters is art, not design. His style is “what I like” and he doesn’t use focal points to unify a room. “You respect the space,” he said. “You feel something.”
The dining area combines shades of blue and bright orange.
Fletcher loves to entertain. There are a dozen seating arrangements, which he calls “stations.” Whenever guests gather, he tells them they can signal a “change station” at any time. When they do, everyone follows to the next location.
The station begins on the screened-in front porch and continues into the living room — complete with leather sofas, upholstered chairs and a martini table — to the dining table.
At Jazz Station, paintings of greats like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong fill the walls. Facing benches allow their music to be heard through whole-house speakers and pretend the sound is real-time.
There’s another screened porch in the back, Fletcher’s own favorite station, and several more upstairs and outside.
The screened porch on the second floor overlooks the back yard.
A favorite spot is the Art Deco cabinet that houses a selection of gins. Dry London, Botanic Gardens, Flora, Fletcher has it all. He mixes gin cocktails in vintage glass vessels displayed near a Deco-era absinthe maker.
With fragrant schnapps snorting in gorgeous Jazz Age cocktail vessels and ice clinking in old glasses, it’s not hard to imagine time spent in Paris with Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald.
For Fletcher, however, life isn’t all party time. There was another room in the house, painted austere taupe, in which he lived alone. The office is “mission control” for his 9-to-5, “I want to change the world” self. It contains three very large monitors and a laptop.
As director of Baton Rouge-based Louisiana Healthcare Connections, he manages a group of employees who work with Medicare providers. He spent many hours on the phone calming agitated paramedics.
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