At Home with Sara Kate & Jason Little - 405 Magazine

At Home with Sara Kate & Jason Little

  Sara Kate and Jason Little find treasure in life’s one-offs.

Photos by Rachel Maucieri

 

Sara Kate and Jason Little find treasure in life’s one-offs. Whether it’s an old building or an heirloom or lunch in an undiscovered bistro, the Littles love anything with a story. It’s a passion that’s reflected in their work. Sara Kate operates Sara Kate Studios, specializing in collected residential and commercial interior design projects, while Jason serves as first vice president for CBRE commercial real estate and acts as the local Investment Properties team lead. The couple founded Nostalgia Shoppe together two years ago as a way to launch development and design projects together. 

 

405 Magazine recently sat down with the couple to talk about their projects and what inspires them.

 

 

405: How do the two of you complement each other in working together on projects? 

 

Sara Kate: I adore color, patina and would definitely consider myself a collector, meanwhile Jason is very practical and is drawn to the very simple and classic. 

 

Jason: I am not a natural-born delegator and am typically reluctant to relinquish responsibility for a lot of tasks which means I can easily become the bottleneck on a team. But in working together with Sara, our skill sets and core competencies … are so naturally delineated that I don't feel like we really ever get in each other's way or impede the progress of the other. 

 

 

405: What icon, designer, artisan inspires each of you? 

 

Sara Kate: The designers I’m drawn to are very comfortable mixing and matching different eras, price points, colors and style. I’m very inspired by Rita Konig, Thomas O’Brien, and Ilse Crawford. All completely different styles but a unifying love for creating a welcoming space with the same design principles. 

 

Jason: I don't have very many individual design heroes but am most consistently drawn to and fascinated by products that are beautifully designed and of the highest quality but are at the same time innately functional. For example, I would love to find a reason to own a Swedish porcelain-tiled wood-burning stove, first designed in the late seventeenth century and used throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to heat mansions and manor homes throughout Scandinavia. 

 

405: Tell our readers about your Bradford House project and what your vision is for the location.

 

Sara Kate: We had loved the building and saw so much potential for it. It has this feeling to the place that really lends itself to gathering and lingering. We had wanted to do this project together and the building made sense to us in a way that no other building had … Everything in the house has been gathered with our hands from across the globe or been produced for the project with local craftsmen we know and love. 

 

Jason: Bradford House will be Oklahoma City's only independent boutique hotel … The hotel will be a 36-room hidden gem, housed within a former luxury apartment building … Our vision for Bradford House is to redefine what local hospitality can be through transformative design and unparalleled service.