An architectural tour of Heidi Gardner’s Kansas City home was a showcase for local businesses | KCUR

When Kyle and Tara Davis heard from Heidi Gardner about renovating her Kansas City home, the husband and wife team behind the design firm Cicada didn’t know how to feel.

“I saw the blue check mark (a mark from a celebrity or influential account on Instagram) and we had just finished something for another person with a blue check mark, and we almost just said we weren’t interested,” Tara Davis said. “It wasn’t a great experience, but we heard her. We met her a few days later and she was such a nice person and so kind.”

The Saturday Night Live star had just purchased a mid-century modern home in the area and hired the Davises to completely renovate it in the winter of 2021. The team took over the house, which was recently featured in Architectural summarydown to the studs and redone to look original to the 1970s design.

Gardner spends her summers in Kansas City between seasons of SNL, and her love for the city has become more public in recent years. She has joined other hometown stars as hosts the Big Slick and often brings her friends to the area to show it.

She continued that love for her hometown by enlisting Kansas City artists and designers to build and decorate her home. In addition to Cicada, Gardner collaborated with The Object Enthusiast to create a custom bar for her living room.

“This house is both a labor of love in Kansas City and a labor of love in New York, which is kind of like me,” Gardner said in the tour video. “My two favorite places in the world.”

The tour of the house has attracted a lot of attention for local entrepreneurs. Emily Reinhardt, the ceramicist behind The Object Enthusiast, said the custom bar cart made her fall in love with tile work again. After building Gardner’s 10-panel cabinet, Reinhardt has moved on to backsplashes and other, more intimidating projects.

“I can’t stop making tiles,” Reinhardt said. Once I did it, I thought, ‘Oh, I can do a lot of hard things.’ So now I want to tile a lot of surfaces. It’s something fun that came out of that project.”

Gardner’s mention of her has also led to sales Reinhardt’s website skyrocket. Much of her inventory has sold out in the past two days.

“Heidi had such a generous mention of me,” Reinhardt said. “Not just my name, but my company name, and it’s really snowballed in a way that’s so fun. I’m a little overwhelmed by the fact that there are so many things on my website that are currently out of stock.”

In addition to the bar cabinet, Gardner’s interior designer, Madelynn Hudson of New York, brought decor pieces Urban mining and the Glenwood antique mall.

In total, it took Tara and Kyle Davis more than two years to complete the work on the house. Ultimately, they said, the plan gradually expanded to include a full renovation to make the house feel “original” again after a “mess of haphazard renovations.”

Their team replaced an exterior wall leading to the backyard with windows to create a more seamless connection to the pool. The wood paneling on the walls, as well as the counters and cabinets, are brand new.

Tara said Gardner was deeply involved in the home’s design and even helped pick the pebbles for her custom terrazzo floor when she was in town. The SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike gave Gardner more time in Kansas City to work on the project.

“It may not have been the best situation, but we had about three months where we made important decisions and made progress on the scope of the project, which is great,” Tara Davis said.

While the Davises may have been hesitant to accept a celebrity client in 2021 when Gardner approached them, they are open to more clients like them in the future.

They say Gardner was an ideal customer: kind, easy-going and with a sense of creativity. The Davises hope that any potential future celebrity clientele will be the same.

“I think as we have been in business for more years, more people would be interested in us as a complete design company that can do multiple iterations of different design styles,” said Tara Davis. “As long as someone is willing to get extremely personal and do something out of the box, we’re interested in anything.”