Design Advice

Every designer starts with different elements. For me, it’s all about fabrics. Here, I fell in love with a modern chinoiserie, then added color, pattern, and texture—jute, velvet, leather, and metallics.

Dining rooms can be the most playful areas of a home. Color-loving interior designer Perry Walter jazzed up this circa-1925 Virginia-Highland condo by highlighting the existing molding.

Working within the footprint of a former bungalow in Virginia-Highland, architectural designer Eric Rothman created a new house with this outdoor-oriented rear exterior, going for a Scandinavian-inspired look with an oversize wood gable.

Yesterday was San Francisco designer Jay Jeffers’s first formal presentation at ADAC, but it was certainly not his first visit to Atlanta. Named multiple times to both Elle Décor’s and House Beautiful’s lists of top talents, Jeffers and his husband Michael Purdy, creative director of their retail store Cavalier, have often sourced products at ADAC and local antique galleries. In fact, they’re big fans of Scott Antique Market.

With formal living rooms about as popular as VHS recorders these days, homeowners and interior designers are taking a looser approach to front sitting rooms.

When he’s not cultivating his interior-design business, 23-year-old Kevin Francis O’Gara puts his feet up in this cozy study/media room at his home in the Manchester neighborhood near Morningside-Lenox Park.

In September, celebrated Atlanta interior designer Suzanne Kasler is releasing Sophisticated Simplicity, a tome replete with a litany of previously unseen, lavish interiors in her signature classic style. Here, she shares a handful of design books that have influenced her, plus a new title she is looking forward to.

As architecture and furnishings have gotten the throwback treatment, so have appliances. One hot manufacturer, Colorado-based Big Chill, dreams up stylish, ’50s-inspired ranges, hoods, dishwashers, and, yes, refrigerators.

Lynn and Jimmy Lowe wanted a modern treehouse vibe for their home, which sits on a creek in the woodsy Emory area. The pros at Terracotta Design Build knocked down a wall between the family room and kitchen, then vaulted the ceiling and added new windows and doors as step one.

The Druid Hills house where interior designer Susan Ferrier lives with her husband, Adrian, was described in her new book as a “portrait of an artist and a bit of a sorceress’s cave.”