The clients needed to arrange existing furniture in their new home.

My clients moved from the Midwest into a sprawling ranch in Charlotte. With them came their traditional furniture and an oil painting they wanted to place somewhere in their open living-dining space. The painting featured an imposing buffalo in a natural setting.

Since the only upholstered furniture in the space were their dark leather dining room chairs, we decided to pull the color palette from the oil painting. I selected the pale blue as the main color, while including a hint of green. Because they had three active teenagers, we limited white to the window treatment.

My next decision was where to place the large armoire they had just received from their parents. I worked on a floor plan that allowed it to be at one end of the living space near the grand piano. Doing this allowed me to create a comfortable seating area where they could entertain friends on the other end.

To allow for the traffic flow through the space, I selected seating that was smaller in scale and with minimum exposed wood. Since a sofa or love seat could appear to be too large in the space, my clients selected the smaller scale wood settee instead.

Because they moved so much wood furniture with them for the dining area, we decided to mix in fully upholstered slipper chairs along with their leather-seat dining chairs. For the slipper chairs, we used a tone-on-tone pale blue silk in a basket-weave pattern.

The living-dining space opened onto a large covered porch, which meant we did not have to worry about sunlight when considering window treatments. Our direction was simply to be decorative stationary panels. The fabric we selected was a pale cream silk with vertical strips of delicate bamboo. They effectively pulled in the cream color of the clouds from the painting.

When it came to hanging their artwork, we selected the dining room wall for the buffalo painting. Placing it here added pattern and interest into the space while making it visible to those entering the house.

Because the living-dining space was quite long, that long wall is what you first see when you enter the house. The bigger challenge was how to put artwork on it. While my clients had a variety of paintings, none were of an appropriate scale to work here. Normally, a grouping of smaller pictures can be a solution for similar rooms, but they did not have ones that were the correct size and subject matter to work that way. What they did have were three unusual decorative metal pieces that they had no idea what to do with. By hanging all three of them horizontally

I was able to create a visually interesting art installation that was the correct scale for the wall. Additionally it added the interest and variety that we needed to bring the room together.

Teal Michel ASID, Interior Design, is a licensed, full-service interior design and remodeling firm, practicing throughout the Carolinas. She has a BS in Fashion Merchandising from Drexel University and and studied interior design at Central Piedmont Community College, where she received an AA in interior design. Teal has received several awards from the Home Builders Association of Charlotte and from the American Society of Interior Design. More information: www.tealmichelasid.com