Traditional interior design for a Dallas home

What makes a room traditional

Traditional design draws on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American rooms, filtered through a century of American houses. It is less a set of rules than a set of habits that most people recognize at once:

• Symmetry and a clear center. A fireplace, a window or a sofa wall anchors the room, and furniture is arranged in balanced pairs around it.
• Architecture you can see. Crown molding, casings, baseboards with some height, paneled doors, and often wainscot or paneling — see wall paneling, ceilings and trim.
• Furniture with classical lines. Turned or tapered legs, rolled arms, camelback and wingback shapes, wood tones with depth rather than a single flat finish.
• Layered textiles. Lined drapery, a patterned rug, upholstery in more than one texture, and trims used with restraint.
• Collected objects. Art, books, porcelain and family pieces that look as if they arrived over years rather than in one delivery.

None of that requires a particular period of house. A traditional room can be built into a newer home, as long as the trim and the proportions are given the attention an older house would have had from the start.

Why traditional rooms go stiff

The complaint people bring to a first meeting is rarely that a room is traditional. It is that the room feels formal, dark or unused. The usual causes are specific and fixable:

• Everything matches. A suite of furniture in one finish, bought at once, reads like a showroom. Mixing two or three wood tones and one painted piece makes the room feel collected.
• Seating built to be looked at. Shallow, hard sofas and chairs nobody chooses to sit in empty a living room faster than any style choice. Seat depth and cushion fill matter more than the silhouette.
• Too many small things. A traditional room can carry a lot, but not a lot of little. Fewer, larger pieces and grouped collections calm it down — see styling shelves and surfaces.
• Heavy windows. Drapery that blocks the light, or valances layered on top of swags, darkens rooms that were designed to be bright. Hung high and wide, drapery makes the window larger, not smaller — see the window treatments guide.
• One overhead light. A chandelier alone flattens a room. Lamps at several heights are what make a traditional room glow in the evening.

Start with the architecture

In a traditional house, the shell is the most expensive thing to fake and the cheapest thing to keep. Before choosing a single fabric, decide what the room is built with and whether it is worth restoring.

Many Highland Park and University Park houses were built from the 1910s through the 1930s, in Tudor, Colonial, Mediterranean and Georgian revival styles, and most have been altered since. Original hardwood floors, doors and hardware, plaster walls and trim profiles are usually worth keeping and matching, because they were made better than they would be made today. Where trim has been lost or replaced with something thinner, restoring the original profile does more for the room than any piece of furniture. The detail of what to keep, and why, is in the Highland Park renovation guide and in renovating an older Park Cities home.

In a newer house, the same principle runs the other way: if the rooms have thin, builder-grade trim, adding proper casings, a deeper base and a crown in the main rooms is often the first and best money spent. Built-ins drawn to the trim of the room, such as bookcases either side of a fireplace or a window seat in a bay, give a traditional room its sense of permanence.

Furniture, fabric and scale

Traditional rooms in Dallas houses tend to be generous, and the most common furnishing mistake is under-scaling them: a small sofa floating on a small rug in a large room. Plan the room on paper before buying, with the walkways, the conversation distances and the rug size drawn in. The method is in space planning and furniture layout.

A few habits that keep the furniture working:

• Buy the upholstery for the way you sit. Classic shapes are available with deeper seats and softer fill. A sofa can look like an English roll-arm and still be somewhere you read for an afternoon. See choosing upholstery and fabrics.
• Mix the case pieces. An antique chest, a newer upholstered piece and one painted or lacquered table give the eye somewhere to rest.
• Choose fabrics that can be used. Performance velvets, linens with a tight weave and wool blends look traditional and survive children, dogs and Texas sun through west windows.
• Size the rug to the furniture, not the floor. At least the front legs of every seat in the group should sit on it — see the area rugs guide.
• Keep the pieces you love. A family table or a chair with a history usually belongs in the plan. Recovering, refinishing or simply moving it to the right room is part of the design.

Color and pattern

Traditional does not have to mean brown, burgundy and hunter green. A traditional room can be built on warm whites and soft neutrals, on clear blues, or on deep colors in one room where they belong, such as a library or a dining room that is used mainly in the evening.

The workable rule is one dominant pattern per room, a second at a smaller scale, and solids or textures around them. A large floral or a toile on the drapery, a small check or stripe on two chairs, and plain linen on the sofa reads as considered; three large patterns of the same scale fight each other. Test paint on the actual walls and look at it morning and evening before committing, because the same color reads very differently in a north room and a west one. The process is in choosing paint colors.

A traditional room also benefits from one quiet surprise: a contemporary painting over a classical mantel, a modern lamp, or an unexpected color inside a bookcase. It is the detail that makes the room look chosen rather than copied.

Lighting a traditional room

Lighting is where traditional rooms most often fall short. A good plan has three layers: general light from the ceiling, task light where people read or work, and accent light on the art, the bookcases and the architecture. In practice that means a chandelier or ceiling fixture on a dimmer, table and floor lamps at seating height, and picture lights or concealed lighting in the built-ins.

Warm color temperature and dimmers on every circuit matter more than the fixtures themselves. The full approach, including how to plan circuits before a remodel, is in the lighting design guide.

Kitchens and bathrooms in a traditional house

The rooms that most often need to change in a traditional house are the ones that were planned for a different way of living. Kitchens were service rooms at the back, and bathrooms were few and small. A remodel that respects the house usually connects the kitchen to the breakfast room, keeps the original pantry, and borrows space for a larger primary bath from a closet or a bedroom rather than adding on.

The finishes follow the house. Inset or framed cabinet doors with simple panels, unlacquered or polished nickel hardware, a calm stone counter and a tile chosen to suit the age of the house sit comfortably in a traditional home; a highly styled contemporary kitchen fights it. See kitchen cabinet styles and doors and butler’s pantry and scullery design.

When the remodel involves walls, plumbing and permits, the design and the construction work best as one job. At Chateau Concepts, Jan Revels designs the room and can run the build as general contractor, so the trim profiles, cabinet details and finishes in the drawings are the ones that end up in the house. For Highland Park specifically, see Highland Park home remodeling.

Traditional or transitional?

Many people who describe their taste as traditional actually want something closer to transitional: classical proportions and architecture, with cleaner furniture lines, fewer patterns and a lighter palette. The difference is a matter of degree rather than a separate style, and most homes land somewhere between the two, room by room.

A useful test is to collect photographs of rooms you like and look at what they share: the trim, the furniture legs, the amount of pattern, the wood tones. That usually settles the question faster than a label. The guide to finding your interior design style walks through it, and bringing those photographs to a first consultation makes the meeting far more productive.

Jan Revels

ASID, American Society of Interior Designers, Allied Professional Interior Designer · Chateau Concepts, Dallas

Jan has practiced interior design in Dallas since 1997 and founded Chateau Concepts in 2001. She holds a BFA in Interior Design from the University of North Texas. She designs and general-contracts residential and commercial projects across the Park Cities, Preston Hollow and North Dallas. Read her full profile →

Written and reviewed by Jan Revels before publication