Tour 'The Help' Director Tate Taylor’s Mississippi Mansion - Celebrity Homes - Architectural Digest

This has been a passion project, probably about 40 years in the making, because my mom said that when I was about 7 years of age, I started talking about how I wanted to have an old house one day and fix it up. It's funny, when I came back to Mississippi to shoot The Help, one of our characters lived in an old antebellum house, and the bug hit me again, and I was on a quest to find a place. A man named Dr. Coleman, who was an Irish immigrant, built this house in 1836, and there is a castle in Ireland called Wyola, so we think that maybe he was copying a place in Ireland, and that's how this house came to get the same name. For about 10 seconds, I thought I would do this myself, until I realized there is just no way. Homes like this, you soon learn there's something called scale, in size of pieces of furniture. I was out of my league, and I wanted to be careful in who I chose, because these antebellum homes can quickly turn into your grandmother's house, if you're not careful, and I didn't want teddy bears and rocking chairs and velvet furniture everywhere, so I went after Shawn Henderson. It was a wonderful pairing. I wanted my heritage of the Old South to meet this contemporary New York designer and see what would happen when we put our two brains together, and I couldn't be more pleased. It's a little old, it's a little new, it's mid-century, the color schemes are great, and it was fun for Shawn to venture into uncharted territories, and I learned a lot from him as well. I wanted to make this a place where many, many people could be here, but everybody could disappear if they want to. That's why the doctor's office has its own mini kitchen and laundry room, and the old cook house is the same. I slept 40 people here Thanksgiving of 2014 comfortably, and the thing that people said most often that made me happy about the home was that they could disappear. So once the creative juices started flowing here, and once John and I named our company I shot my movie Get On Up in Natchez, and what this place became is a creative think tank. So I bring my crew here, and we plan, and we talk, and we break bread, and we make meals in our pajamas, and we talk about the job at hand, and it's such a great way to work. And I'm about to go into production on the adaptation of the novel The Girl on the Train, and about a month ago I did the same thing. Pretty soon the house next door will have all the editing equipment, and I will pretty much never leave this place unless I have to get a shot in New York or something. That's the plan, that's the dream, and that's actually what's starting to happen.