Creating A Joyful, Honest & Fearless Home

At a recent house call, my client handed me a photo of a room from her childhood home. When it was taken, the shelving concept was not the subject matter. Instead the grainy snapshot from the 1980s was focused on a group of happy, good-looking people, sitting together in a family room on what might have been a Sunday evening after dinner.

As she looked at the photo and talked about adaptations to the design, she was suddenly overcome with emotion and we were both a little surprised when tears came to her eyes.

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How To Stay Put During A Renovation - If You Must

I have had more than a few clients who wanted to stay put during a big renovation and in every case, there was a minimum of ever-growing frustrations and, in one memorable instance, a complete meltdown that was damaging to the working relationship between the homeowner and contractor. I’ve never had a client say they were glad they stayed put, but I’ve heard many say they would never do it again.

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The Magic Of Beautiful Rooms? Pull Up A Chair.

Beginning in March, I was spending a lot more time at home. Zoom meetings with clients, colleagues, and collaborators helped normalize the new strangeness of working from home. It began to really sink in for me that another hard worker in my home was the upholstery I had invested in almost twenty years ago - as well as a few beloved pieces that had been in my husband’s family. The solidly built frames were more than able to serve us for decades to come, but the fabrics needed a change. My taste have shifted over the years, rugs have come and gone, and our art collection has only become more dense, offering new inspirations for texture, color, and pattern. Recovering just a few pieces this summer breathed new life into my home - and reminded me that a question client’s often have is about whether or not to reupholster their own pieces.

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The Small & Stylish Kitchen, Part One

Maybe your home is older and the kitchen was small from the beginning. It might not be in your budget to expand the space or doing so would steal too much space from another area. Or maybe, like me, you’ve just come to realize that a big kitchen is not necessarily a good one. Here are some helpful ideas for making the most of a smaller kitchen.

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Design Advice With Your Pet In Mind

I can still remember spending days as a child in our den with the windows open, the sunlight and cool breeze flowing over me as I read, using my very large golden retriever as a pillow. We spent many days joined at the hip. I remember Chancey as part of our daily activities.

So when I meet our clients’ furry friends I know how important it is for us to consider them in the design of our client’s homes. We’ve compiled our top tips to help you include your four legged companions without sacrificing style worth showing off.

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A Home With Good Bones : Proportion

Up until very recently, when I thought about a house with ‘good bones’, I came at it from a place of how the home looked to me.

I asked my colleagues Leesa Mayfield of Leesa Mayfield Architecture and David Logan of Vintage Building what the phrase ‘good bones’ meant to them. In this first installation of our ‘A Home With Good Bones’ series we start, like the professional nerds we are, with a conversation on the principals of design. Specifically, scale and proportion.

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What Our Upholstery Is All About

Upholstery is the most hard working furniture in the home, providing enduring comfort and establishing the personality of the room through its stylings and fabric. No one wants to regret this choice either on delivery day because the fabric doesn't compliment the room or a couple of years down the line because the sofa hasn't held up to wear and tear. 

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Sized Just Right: The Large Luxury Home

This blog is not about what kinds of rooms or how many should be included in a large house blueprint. The one piece of advice I always pass along to my clients is to build their home not for future owners or by any standard but their own. Choose your spaces because you think they will enrich your home life, not because other houses in your neighborhood have them.  

This blog post is for people who want a large luxury home where every space is useful and all of the details and proportions make the right statement.

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Sized Just Right: The Small Luxury Home

As a seasoned designer with diverse clients, I am often either helping a family decide how much to add to a home they are outgrowing or I am figuring out how to put unused rooms to work in a house that is a little too big for its owner.

Generally my opinion is that less house is better than too much house, but my skills and vision afford me the opportunity to create impactful designs no matter the scale of the project. For the homeowner who is trying to decide the size of their next home investment, there are a number of ways to evaluate what will be the perfect fit.

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The Next Chapter Is Green

John Strauss Furniture

By the time we left Market Square, we had not only found an exciting new furniture source, we had sat in on an impromptu lesson on craft and passion. The maker is John Strauss, who we had researched before coming to High Point for the spring market. We spent over an hour learning about the collections.  John showed us a curious little doodle the French use to line up wood cuts for drawer fronts.  It was no accident that we were spending this much quality time with one furniture maker.

Our goal is to kickstart an initiative to make our entire furniture offering both sustainable and American made. We found out about John's company while doing our research.  Going into market with these standards in place was transformative.  While we spent time with new resources - most of them artisans who chose to come to market in person to represent their lines - the rest of the attendees buzzed past with an air of confusion and agitation.  They seemed shell-shocked by the vast quantities of vendors and they reminded me of myself in past years: hit with a sugar rush of goods rather than nourished by a quality experience. 

We discovered so much of value in our research this market, as well as forging relationships with passionate craftspeople.  The American furniture makers of today are maintaining our treasury of hardwoods through responsible harvesting.  And our small-batch makers comply with the kind of workplace safety guidelines that are simply not present in most overseas markets. Most seductive to a designer's mind is the fact that our artisan resources thrive on customization, which allows us to offer more design options to our clients.

In recent decades there has been much talk about globalization.  In the sense that we knit nations together through robust trade and that we find common humanity through shared resources and knowledge, the concept of globalization is very attractive.  Yet we are deeply satisfied to opt out of doing trade with makers who are not sensitive to the needs of workers and the environment.  

When I was younger, I was a fierce environmentalist. Then I drifted, seduced by an industry that seemed careless to the matter.  When the determination to make changes in my company asserted itself, I knew the time had come to commit to the progressive values in business that I cherish personally.  Looking inward has helped me to discover seeds waiting to sprout and so the next chapter is green.

                     -PM