When the owners of a home in upscale Winter Park, FL, approached John McClain of John McClain Design asking for a Mid-Century, gray-heavy space, he took their vision and infused it with his own design style — including some of his own designed pieces. Take a look at how he brought this living room to life with pattern and color.
1. This was fun because the client had a really good eye for art. They moved from Chicago — they had a really big loft in Chicago where they had a lot of art. With clients like that, I adore it because art is so personal and it’s so hard to predict what someone’s going to love until they see it. So we did what we always do and we gathered all of their art collection together and we just started sorting through it all and we spaced it throughout the house. We did add a couple of pieces to a few different rooms, but that piece in particular in the living room was their piece and we were able to really spawn all of the accessories off of that.
2. For me it’s really great to look at this room and see that the coffee table is my design, the light fixture is my design and the bookcase near the piano is also my design. It’s fun to be able to incorporate these things that I designed out of my own head for clients rather than pulling in a piece that everybody has from a big box store. It’s always fun to just make a room feel collected and to feel like it’s a representation of my design philosophy and also a representation of our client’s needs.
3. We have a very neutral, almost tribal design on a rug and it’s a monochromatic kind of tone-on-tone feel of grays and taupes and browns, and that’s really what they wanted. But the pattern of the rug is, again, it’s almost tribal and very contemporary. So it’s not a “traditional” Mid-Century rug, which adds to the interest of the room. But the goal we had with this and every space is to give layers. You need to look at the space and it has to feel like it was collected and layered over time, and by bringing in a few new pieces with some of the things they already had, that’s what allowed us to do that.
