Spacious and beautiful views, family mementos and fun accents like a second-story slide that adults and children alike enjoy sliding down all the way to the basement make Lauren and Matt Toppins’ Shadow Ridge home the perfect place for both entertaining and making family memories.
The home in Oklahoma City’s Shadow Ridge neighborhood is a modern-but-classic home with a Spanish vibe; filled with natural light and materials and gathering places indoors and out. Counting bedrooms in the pool house, the property has six bedrooms altogether.
“I just love that they’re personal and not afraid of it,” said designer Micah Abbananto, whose design firm is Micah & Co. “Family is very important to them. So they celebrated that and I think that’s great.”
Living room shelves are filled with photos of the Toppins family, which includes four daughters: Dylan, 14; Walker, 10; Macguire, 7; and Claire, who died as an infant in 2019 shortly after being born with the chromosomal disorder trisomy 18. A colorful painting created in honor of Claire’s memory by Shawnee artist LeAnne Henry Wright hangs near two of the girls’ rooms.
For the Shadow Ridge home, the Toppins worked extensively on design with Abbananto, who worked with the builder MassaRossa Luxury Homes and collaborators to pull the house together. Abbananto helped them find ways to repeat the arched design element of the front entrance in accents throughout the home, bring in natural materials and lighting and tie the project together. Other collaborators included architect Brent Gibson Design; stager and stylist Amanda Layton with The Staged Life; and pool house architect Ford Duncan of Bradford Concepts.
Lauren and Matt met overseas years ago: They were both students at the University of Oklahoma College of Law at the same time, but didn’t know each other until they met while studying at Oxford University in England as part of law school. They kept English gardens and European style in mind when they designed their home, pool, pool house and backyard.
Today, Lauren Toppins owns and operates Cherrywood, the real estate brokerage firm she founded, and her husband Matt Toppins works at Chesapeake Energy. They bought the lot in Oakdale 10 years before they built the house during the pandemic.
The personal accents they love include a painting by local artist Promise Edmonds of Pearl, their Frenchie bulldog, hanging in their pool house; a hand-painted upstairs bathroom with colorful splashes created by their college friend Casey Reed, arched doorways and windows throughout that echo their front entrance — and, of course, the slide. Their daughters and friends and adult friends all enjoy zipping down the slide, jumping into the pool from an accent wall or lounging on the patios or gathering spaces outdoors.
“It’s been a perfect home for us,” Lauren Toppins said. “We truly love the Oakdale area, but we enjoyed the building process as well. … We’re excited. This is our forever home.”
