Text Karen Carroll
PHOTOGRAPHY Brian Bieder, Phillip Ennis, Emily Followill
This Atlanta designer creates timeless interiors that showcase the importance of editing, an appreciation for traditional style with a twist, and her love of color and a good white paint.
Southern Home (SH): Your roots are in the Midwest, where you had a successful design business. But you’ve lived in Atlanta for almost 20 years now, and your career has been on a meteoric rise ever since. How has living and working in the South influenced your decorating point of view?
Suzanne Kasler (SK): In Indianapolis, I had a commercial design firm, but when my husband and I moved to Atlanta, I decided to focus on high-end residential. In the South, people really, really decorate their houses—it’s different from where I was brought up. There’s such an appreciation for tradition. I’ve been able to bring a modern sensibility into that aesthetic and still maintain what I call a foundation of tradition. I’m an interior architect by training, so I’m very concerned with getting the architecture right first.
I always want there to be an ease and a prettiness to a room. Ultimately I’ve been able to create my own sense of Southern style, although I really wasn’t consciously thinking that way all those years ago.
SH: Do you believe Southern style has evolved in general during the time you’ve lived here?
SK: What I have seen, particularly over the last 10 years, is that homeowners want their interiors to be more edited and not as overdecorated and overcollected, even in very traditional houses. I love to use clients’ beautiful antiques and accessories, but I like to give these items a younger and fresher look with the use of paint, carpets, drapery, and a lot of editing. I’ll also mix in modern pieces, but again, I always keep that foundation
of tradition.
SH: We’ve often heard you say how vital it is to create the right “architectural envelope.” Since the houses you’ve worked on have architectural styles that run the gamut, what are the common threads that are important to you?
SK: I’ll look first at the floor plan of the house and work on it to make sure the home is flowing and living well. If you can get that right, then the house will feel good no matter what direction the decorating takes. And it’s important to take into account the sense of place, because obviously, a beach house needs to look and feel different from one on a street in Buckhead. I love working as part of a team—not only with an architect, but also with a landscape architect. I advise clients to hire the whole group, because the way people really want to live today is fully inside and out.
SH: When you find yourself in a position where decorating needs to compensate for the architecture—perhaps when you haven’t been involved in a team from the beginning stages—what’s your approach?
SK: Paint ends up being an amazingly strong player when you make a change. I love white, and it’s also really trending right now. When we paint the walls white, it looks instantly updated, particularly when there’s some kind of unusual feature that we want to make disappear. Then we can start layering on top of that. In my Kips Bay showhouse room last year, there was a big bulkhead in the ceiling, which gave me a bit of a panic attack. We couldn’t lower the whole ceiling because it would interfere with a window.
I added molding in the part that was raised, in the same depth as the bulkhead. I painted the ceiling, molding, and walls Farrow & Ball Pointing, a high-gloss white. It minimized the ceiling and diverted attention from what would have been an awkward detail.
SH: White does factor prominently in a lot of your rooms. It seems simple, but it’s often hard to get right. What makes it so challenging?
SK: Many whites have a fluorescent undertone, and when you paint with them, they just don’t look refined enough. It’s important to choose one with enough dimension to be sophisticated. The shade known as flat ceiling white is one of my pet peeves in life.
SH: Could you share some of your favorite whites?
SK: Benjamin Moore probably has my favorite group. I recently told my brother to paint his entire house, inside and out, with Benjamin Moore’s White Dove, and it looks terrific.
SH: As much as you love white, you have a very sophisticated way with color, too. Although your rooms often read as colorful, they never seem to overwhelm. What is the secret?
SK: Yes, I’ll do bold rooms, but it’s about how I can use color strategically. You can use all colors throughout a house as long as you use the same values. But often I let color come in through details, art, and accessories or in unexpected ways. The dining room is one place that I usually use color or a paper on the walls. For a dining room I did in an Atlanta showhouse, though, I lacquered the walls in white and used color on the ceiling with blue. I had never done a white dining room before, but the ceiling had an odd pattern of beams, and this was the best way to treat it.
SH: Speaking of color, you recently collaborated with La Cornue on a collection of ranges with some pretty unpredictable shades for the kitchen, including pink and turquoise. How did that come about?
SK: I’m inspired by the way the French approach color. After I selected the colors for the collection, I realized they were similar to some ribbons I had been buying from a store in Paris for years. I agree most people wouldn’t automatically think of putting a pink stove in a kitchen, but if you get the color just right, it will appeal to everyone in a classic way. We exhibited it at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show, and you wouldn’t believe all the burly contractors who were taking pictures!
SH: Where else do you find inspiration, both for your interiors and the many product collections you design?
SK: Fashion has been a huge influence. I’m drawn to the way fashion designers put colors together, and I also like couture dressmaker details. I’ll notice a beautiful pleating or ruffle from Stella McCartney or the way Fendi uses leather. An interesting aspect about fashion is you can see an element, and then it translates in a completely different way in interiors. With my furniture collection for Hickory Chair, I design with hidden zippers, flat flanges, and custom cording. A detail on a pair of Valentino shoes might inspire a square, gold nail-head trim on a screen. A piece of jewelry stirs up something for my lighting collection for Visual Comfort. I don’t think I’m consciously aware of how I interpret and absorb visual inspiration—it can be found everywhere.
SH: You use such compelling art in your projects. What’s your general philosophy about arranging and mixing styles?
SK: I always have some strong art, and mixing modern art into a traditional interior is a great look. I’ll also take a collection of things that are alike, such as French maps, and frame them the same and hang them closely together so they make one large statement. But at the same time, I love groupings of eclectic drawings, prints, and paintings hung in a more random way. Often I’ll employ all three approaches in a project.
SH: Finally, will you tell us what you’re collecting for your own house at the moment?
SK: Well, a lot of my own collections are “finished.” I love my Eiffel Towers, but I no longer buy them because I have no place left to put them. I’d say art is what I’m focusing on now. I used to acquire a lot of smaller pieces partially because they were more affordable, but now I’ve decided I should save up for the big statement instead of continuing to accumulate five small things. As much as I preach the importance of editing, I’m always trying to edit myself a little more!
