Text and styling by Charlotte Safavi
The interior design team of Madigan Schuler was not new to the owners of this center-hall traditional home built in Alexandria, Virginia, by architect George T. Myers and builder Ilex Construction. “We had previously done a house for them,” says Kelly Schuler. The clients, a married couple with college-age kids, have impeccable taste, but when they decided it was time to build their forever house, they turned to Schuler to make sure the interiors worked for their lifestyle. “They wanted a home that they would really use and be comfortable in,” says the designer. “They wanted room to entertain, as well as space to display their collections, especially their art.”
The home’s entry opens into a 16-foot-long hallway with squared-off casement openings leading into separate living and dining rooms. The back of the house features the kitchen and family room with French doors that lead onto a screened porch and a large garden. “Room proportions are generous for social gatherings, and there is definitely a flow from the more formal spaces in the front to the more casual spaces in the back,” says Schuler.
A desire for color was at the top of the list for the homeowners. “Blue is the unifying accent color throughout the house,” says Schuler. In the dining room, which is visible upon entry into the foyer hall, walls are covered in a large-scale botanical print wallpaper on a mid-blue background.
Directly across the hall in the living room, the blue of the dining room’s wallpaper is loosely picked up in a Christopher Farr fabric. “It has great color and pattern,” says Schuler. “But because the homeowners have such lovely things in that room, we decided to use the fabric on a throw pillow so that the pattern wouldn’t be overwhelming.” From that pillow, the designer pulled blue for the tufted velvet armchairs and green for the linen curtains with cream linear-trellis embroidery.
At the back of the home, the palette turns a tad bolder. The family room’s carpet, with its bright blue linear markings, came first, followed by coral-orange and marine-blue tones via piping, pillows, and upholstery. On the porch just beyond, sunny yellow makes its happy appearance. “I wanted to bring in new colors so that the palette wasn’t exactly the same in each room,” says Schuler. “The key is finding that balance that keeps the palette from being either jarring or boring.”
A powdery blue brings a sense of serenity to the master bedroom. Schuler added in textures and subtle patterns with a grass cloth medallion-printed wallpaper and a leopard-print wool carpet. “It’s all about paying attention to the details,” says Schuler, who also interjected bits of black throughout the home. “Black adds gravitas to the lighter colors.”
“It was such fun working with these clients,” says Schuler. “They share my love of detail, proportion, and color.” And those common interests, paired with a designer/client relationship that has spanned the years, resulted in the perfect formula for creating a dream house.
Shop the issue below for more colorful inspiration for your interiors!
