How to Decorate

Alton LaDay and Olivia Westbrooks join the podcast to discuss Alton’s new book, In the House: Celebrating America's Leading Black Interior Designers. The book profiles 33 of America's most talented black interior designers, tracing both contemporary talent and historical pioneers. Alton, a veteran marketing director and PR firm owner, was inspired to write the book during the 2020 lockdown to highlight positive success stories within the design community. Olivia, an interior designer and host of Hallmark’s Home is Where the Heart Is, is one of the featured designers in the book.

Key Takeaways from the Episode:

Focusing on the Individual: When selecting the 33 designers, Alton required them to have nationally published work but prioritized their personalities and personal stories. To emphasize the people behind the designs, every designer in the book receives a full-page headshot.

A Vast Array of Styles: The designers in the book are intentionally not listed alphabetically. This layout mixes up the design styles—from traditional to modern, neutral to colorful—to keep the reader engaged and demonstrate that black designers are not a monolith.

Unconventional Paths to Design: Many of the featured designers discovered interior design as a second career, transitioning from corporate roles or law. One designer was a highly successful attorney on track to become a partner before leaving to go back to design school.

Finding Inspiration Early: Olivia discovered her passion for design as a child by watching Christopher Lowell on the Discovery Channel in the 1990s. Her mother enrolled her in a weekend intensive program at the Art Institute of Houston, eventually leading Olivia to earn a degree in interior design from LSU.

Historical Pioneers: The book also touches on the history of black designers, such as Harold Curtis Brown. Brown is considered the first documented black interior designer, known for his work on the Saratoga Club and Hotel Navarro in the early 20th century, though it is believed he later had to pass as white to continue his career in the 1930s.

Inspiring Future Generations: Olivia notes that the book serves as a vital historical record and a tool to show future generations what is possible. By showcasing such diverse talent, the book keeps the door open for aspiring designers and normalizes the presence of black designers in top national publications and show houses.

Personal Triumphs: Alton shares the inspiring story of Tiffany Brooks, a featured designer who has balanced a highly successful career with severe health challenges, including a kidney and pancreas transplant after being diagnosed with diabetes at age six.

Also Mentioned in This Episode:

In the House: Celebrating America's Leading Black Interior Designers is available at major outlets and Phaidon.com.

Follow Olivia Westbrooks on Instagram at @oliviawestbrooksinteriors or visit oliviawestbrooks.com.

Watch Olivia on Hallmark Plus's Home is Where the Heart Is.

See Olivia's living room project on the Ballard Designs House Tour series on YouTube.

Please send in your decorating dilemmas to podcast@ballarddesigns.net so we can help you with your space! Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.
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Samuel Cochran, Global Features Director at Architectural Digest, joins the podcast to discuss his book, American Designers at Home. The book offers an intimate look inside the personal residences of 20 influential American interior designers, including Kelly Wearstler and Ken Fulk. Cochran explores how these professionals use their own homes as spaces to experiment and recharge, free from client demands, rigid timelines, and external expectations.

Specificity of Place: Rather than relying on red, white, and blue clichés, Cochran noted that modern American design is often defined by a deep connection to local architectural history and the surrounding environment.

The Freedom to Experiment: A shared American design ethos is the freedom to pull references from anywhere, honoring the past while maintaining the irreverence to break the rules, mix styles, and live with what you love.

Embracing the Journey: Many of the featured homes were born from transitional life moments and evolved slowly over years, proving that even for top designers, a home is a process of trial and error rather than a polished overnight success.

Ken Fulk (Provincetown, MA): Known for his polished, maximalist client projects, Fulk's personal waterfront home is a crumbling, weathered refuge where he preserves the historic house's peeling wallpaper and patina.

Roman and Williams (Montauk, NY): Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch’s home reveals a wild, time-worn connection to nature that contrasts sharply with the slick, romantic commercial spaces they are known for designing.

Jessica Helgerson (Paris): Helgerson embraced thrift and creativity in her small Paris apartment, hand-stenciling a bedroom mural and mimicking the building's basement millwork cutouts for her green kitchen cabinets.

Jean Liu (New York, NY): The Dallas-based designer created a quiet personal escape in a grand uptown Manhattan studio, utilizing the extra-thick walls of Joseph Pulitzer’s former Gilded Age mansion to create an acoustic refuge.

Markham Roberts: A masterclass in mixing styles, Roberts’s home is an eclectic, effortless mishmash that proves you have to truly know the rules of design history before you can successfully break them.

Cochran hopes readers walk away from the book remembering Dorothy Draper's philosophy that decorating should fundamentally be fun. You can follow him on Instagram at @samuelcochran and find American Designers at Home anywhere books are sold.

If you had the freedom to completely ignore timelines and expectations, which room in your home would you experiment with first?
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Elizabeth Lawrence, partner at the interior design firm Williams Lawrence, joins the podcast to discuss her first book, Decoration, co-authored with her partner Bunny Williams. The book functions as a collection of essays that groups rooms by stylistic similarities rather than presenting individual projects, drawing inspiration from vintage French design books. To encourage readers to slow down and step away from screens, the physical book features a photo-free, linen-textured cover and pages that alternate between matte cardstock and gloss finishes.

Rules of Scale and Floor Plans: While Lawrence believes most interior design rules can be broken, scale and a solid floor plan are the two non-negotiable exceptions. A strong floor plan serves as a roadmap that dictates the proper scale of the room's pieces, allowing you to confidently mix heavily carved antiques with clean, modern lines.

Shopping for Antiques: When out shopping, it is best to take a photo or a tear sheet of an item you love, even if it does not fit your current project, because you will likely find a place for it in the future.

Approaching Art: Art should be chosen for its personal meaning rather than simply to match a room's color palette. Artwork must be placed thoughtfully based on scale and medium, such as keeping delicate works on paper out of brightly lit spaces. Additionally, swapping out a heavy or dark frame for something simpler can completely transform a piece you thought you disliked.

Wall Brackets: Adding wall brackets to a gallery wall provides three-dimensional interest and breaks up the flatness of frames. Brackets can hold jars, plates, or sculptures, and they often add grounding symmetry to an otherwise asymmetrical layout.

Slipper Chairs: Small slipper chairs are versatile pieces that transition easily from a first apartment to a forever home. They can be placed in bedrooms for stacking books, covered in terry cloth for a bathroom, or used as supplemental seating in living rooms.

Chair and Ottoman Pairings: Pairing an upright chair with an ottoman creates a dedicated reading spot. This combination also provides a practical alternative seating option for guests who might struggle to get out of a deep sofa.

Hurricanes: A signature of Bunny Williams and John Rosselli, large hurricanes add necessary height and scale to coffee tables and dining tables. They also provide atmospheric candlelight, which can easily be achieved with modern remote-controlled, battery-operated candles.

Dining Chair Details: Because the outside back of a dining chair is the first thing you see when entering a room, Lawrence recommends embellishing it with custom embroidery, a ticking stripe, or a small check pattern.

Celebrating Artisans: Decoration features photography highlighting the chaotic, dusty workspaces of the craftspeople, painters, and upholsterers who make the designs possible. Lawrence notes that clear communication and pushing for custom samples lead to the best collaborations, citing one instance where a trusted artisan seamlessly reconstructed a three-foot lacquered jar that had shattered on a limestone floor.

You can purchase Decoration by Bunny Williams and Elizabeth Lawrence on Amazon via Rizzoli, and you can keep up with Lawrence's work on Instagram at @elizabethmlawrence and @williamslawrence.

What is one unusual antique or piece of art you have kept an eye on, even if you do not currently have the perfect spot for it?
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Designing with Vibe and Layers with Corine Maggio

California-based interior designer Corine Maggio joins the podcast to break down her strategy for adding warmth and character through strategic layering. The founder of Corine Maggio Design focuses her work on cabins, cottages, and historic homes, specializing in creating casual, deeply personal spaces that reflect the real lives of her clients.

The Four Pillars: Corine bases every project on a careful balance of the client's style, their everyday lifestyle, the home's architectural style, and the budget.

Visual Vocabulary: Rather than relying on design terminology like "modern," which means different things to different people, she requires clients to pull four to six inspiration images per room to establish a clear visual vibe.

Sequential Sourcing: After establishing a space plan to serve as a shopping list, she sources the most substantial pieces first—like a living room sofa—since they carry the strictest requirements. From there, she pieces the room together like a puzzle, using smaller additions like lamps or chairs to continuously pull the room's style in the desired direction.

The Rule of Contrast: Items sitting next to one another should always contrast in either color tone (light, medium, or dark), texture, or pattern scale to keep the room dynamic and prevent it from falling flat.

Envelop the Room: Avoid plain white drywall by applying architectural texture to the walls and ceilings. Corine utilizes paneling, tongue and groove, beadboard, wainscoting, and wallpaper to make rooms feel cozy and complete.

Embrace Patina: A home should not feel like a pristine showroom. Incorporating materials that age, scratch, and dent gracefully, like real marble, fosters a relaxed environment where families do not have to stress over spills or daily wear.

Subtle Accessories: When hunting for accessories at estate sales, look for textured, neutral items like paper mache bowls, woven potato baskets, or antique brass boxes. These items add layered depth and utility without demanding too much visual attention or overpowering the room's main features.

Design for Yourself: The most timeless, successful homes are created when owners stop worrying about trends or what their guests might think, and instead design exactly what they would want if no one else were ever going to see the space.

You can keep up with Corine's work by following her on Instagram at @corinnemaggiodesign or by visiting corinnemaggiodesign.com, and you can shop her favorite versatile entryway storage piece, the Ballard Designs Nina Apothocary Cabinet.

If you were to design a room purely for yourself with zero concern for trends or what guests might think, what is the first bold choice you would make?

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British architect and interior designer Ben Pentreath returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, A Year at the Parsonage, co-authored with his husband, Charlie McCormick. The book functions as a deeply personal visual diary of the 15 years the couple spent living in an 1820 Regency house in Dorset, England. Rather than staging polished lifestyle scenes, Ben and Charlie photographed the book themselves, capturing authentic daily moments, the evolving interiors, and the passage of seasons in Charlie's beloved garden.

Ben initially rented the Dorset parsonage in a rundown state, complete with black mold—a condition he prefers, as it allows for updates without feeling guilty about tearing out a previous landlord’s expensive renovations. Nestled in an unspoiled estate village owned by the Williams family for nearly 300 years, the home began with neutral pale gray and white walls due to a lack of time and budget. Over the years, the home's palette shifted drastically:

The dining room was painted "Victoria Plum," a 1960s purple inspired by David Hicks that looked magical by candlelight but made guests look ill during the day. It was later painted bright sky blue and eventually wallpapered for a Morris & Co. photoshoot.

The kitchen transitioned from white to Farrow & Ball's burnt orange "Wet Sand," then to a high-gloss bright yellow that felt like living inside an egg yolk, before finally returning to white.

While Ben stresses that architectural and structural decisions should be thoroughly planned, he believes interior decoration is easily overthought.

Embrace Change: Repainting a room is an inexpensive and fast way to completely shift a home's energy.

Physical Inspiration: To avoid losing digital inspiration, Ben prints out his phone screenshots, cuts off the social media logos, writes notes on the back, and pins them to his office wall to discover his personal style over time.

The Soul of a Room: A room's true character comes from its people, pets, and the practical comfort of daily life, not from perfectly color-matched piping.

When the Williams family decided to sell the Dorset estate, Ben and Charlie embraced the change and moved to Scotland. They purchased a mid-18th-century home called Westness on Rousay, an Orkney island with only 200 residents. The unspoiled property features a ten-acre garden where Charlie is currently clearing an overgrown Victorian walled space to cultivate vegetables.

Have you ever experimented with a bold paint color that looked vastly different in the daylight than you originally intended?

Please send in your decorating dilemmas to podcast@ballarddesigns.net so we can help you with your space! Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.
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