20 December 2016

Designing a Home in New Orleans

Tucked Under

Decorating

Few rewards are sweeter for a designer than when beloved clients move to a new home, and hire you for a second time.

We’re thrilled to be working with “second time” clients who have moved back to New Orleans from a sojourn in New York. They’re now proud owners of a magnificent Italinate-style double gallery house in the Garden District. Built during the middle of the nineteenth century, this house personifies American architectural grace. We’re thoroughly enjoying the process of researching period rooms of the time as inspiration, and ruminating on how to refresh these elegant, expansive rooms. With 11 foot ceilings throughout, the windows play a huge role in the architecture of the home, and thus, require some serious attention.

This Alexa Hampton dining room inspired us to use a similar style window treatment in our client's dining room.

For a recent presentation, we drew inspiration from style of window treatments above, simplifying it a bit because, well, it suits this young couple better. We sketched an elevation and rendered curtains over the actual windows as a way of demonstrating how this particular style would suit the windows in their own dining room. The ceilings are 11 feet tall, so by mounting the window valances as close to the ceiling as possible we’re accentuating the grandeur of the room.

This room overlooks gardens on both sides.

We added a colorful trim to break up the seriousness of the singular color. This fabric is a wonderful lime green damask from Quadrille.

These curtains are designed to make an impression.

In the living room, we chose a slightly more tailored valance concept, inspired by other period rooms with extraordinarily tall ceilings, like the two images below below.

Inspiration images

We love the idea of a silk and linen stripe in a subtle pale blue and off white coloration. This pattern is dramatic, but will still be so compatible with the prints and graphic patterns we plan to use on the some of the upholstered pieces and pillows in the room. But more on that later!

Notice the multi-color tasseled fringe.

In the master bedroom, we wanted to add a little whimsy, so we’re hoping to fabricate a ruffled edge on the inside edge of the panels.

Shown in this photo are curtains from a Miles Redd room that we've admired for some time.

In this house, a more powdery aqua blue strie fabric will be the material selected.

In the library, we’ve selected a colorful floral print from Bennison which we are proposing to be fabricated using a classic pinch French pinch pleat mounted on round edge return curtain rods.