Trehel Tailored Homes and Amanda Louise Interiors collaboratively create their clients’ forever home
When a couple decided to build a custom home instead of renovating one they bought from family, daily dog walks through their August Road neighborhood provided ample design inspiration. A friend then revealed that Matt Ruth, team leader at Trehel Tailored Homes, had built nearly every house they admired.
Seeing Ruth’s residence sealed their decision to hire him to design and construct a house for themselves and their two sons. Amanda Louise Campbell of Amanda Louise Interiors was a natural choice for its interior design, as the couple had already worked with her and her team on single-room projects.
Through a well-planned layout, custom touches, layers of texture and pattern, and incorporating the homeowners’ favorite colors, Ruth and Campbell collaborated on creating a forever home as functional as it is beautiful. And while it was a lengthy project—the planning phase to welcoming the family home took two years—everyone involved called it fun.
“It was one of the best build experiences my team and I have had,” Campbell says. “The knowledge Matt has, but also the willingness to collaborate, was nice.”
“There wasn’t [one] thing that we couldn’t solve between the two of us,” Ruth adds.
The homeowners’ trust in Ruth’s and Campbell’s talents allowed the pair to make bold design decisions and solve problems when necessary. “That was such a luxury, which made for magic here,” Campbell says.
That magic is evident in myriad details, from the simple but substantial crown molding and symmetrically placed windows and chimneys—one is faux to match the functioning one—to the custom hutch and the decoratively painted dining room floor that is echoed in the olive-green-hued front rooms.
One of these functions as an office, while the other is a library with three walls of built-in shelves and plush seating for watching TV or reading. The family’s two dogs even got a posh hidden kennel, created from unused space under the adjacent stairwell.
The four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath layout neatly mixes open entertaining spaces with cozier spots for everyday living. Both were on the homeowners’ wish lists.
A welcoming center-hall foyer links the front rooms and leads to the kitchen and living room. The combined space connects to the dining room via a wide cased opening; on the other side, bifold doors open to the vaulted-ceilinged, all-season porch.
Ruth tucked functional spaces—the mudroom, pantry, entertaining nook, and stairwell to the second-floor en-suite bedrooms and baths—into a back hall. “You can come in the front and not even know they’re here,” he adds.
The primary bedroom’s airy vaulted ceiling, the living room’s antique-inspired custom benches, and other built-in textural touches help infuse charm into the newly built spaces. The first floor’s 11-foot ceilings allowed for dramatic lighting, such as the foyer’s three orb-shaped chandeliers and the dining room’s woven fixture.
From the patterned wallpaper in the secondary bathrooms and buttery paint on the kitchen island to the library sofa’s pink-striped fabric and original artwork by local artists in every room, Campbell’s team infused the house with a casual elegance.
“We weren’t trying to do anything that wouldn’t feel usable,” she says. “I think the sweet spot is when you can be comfortable in a space, but it can also dress up to meet whatever occasion you’re hosting.”
Forever Home Photo Tour
Campbell and her team created impact in the center-hall-style foyer by hanging three orb-shaped chandeliers from Ballard Designs, adding a custom skirted console whose colors are reflected in the Teresa Roche painting above it, and placing a custom hutch across from the dining area. “This is one of my favorite moments in the whole house,” Campbell says.
The office and library are sister rooms off the foyer because they are related but not identical, Campbell says. The library is a cozy spot to curl up with a book or play games, while the office is a quiet place to get work done. Both rooms are olive green, which helps ground the home’s bright colors.
0428: In the library, Ruth creatively turned unused space under the stairwell—in the adjacent hall—into a built-in dog kennel, complete with a sliding decorative mesh door.
Campbell layered the open dining room with pattern and texture through a large-scale woven chandelier from Troy Lighting, rattan dining chairs, shiplap wainscotting, and block print-style wallpaper. To add more interest, Atlanta-based decorative painter Hayden Gregg painted the floors in a classic pattern.
The second-floor landing became the perfect spot to display a gallery wall of memorable family photos and artwork and the family’s extensive book collection in Cornish Custom Cabinetry’s shelving. Campbell and her team added an antique sconce and selected green for the stair spindles.
Campbell and Ruth collaborated to add a ledge next to the tub in the primary bathroom, which is located over the porte-cochere. “That nook, with the shape of the room, was deep. We were trying to figure out how to pull it out a little bit,” Campbell says.
Campbell selected fabrics to make the open living room feel as cozy as possible and filled the space with varied seating options for the homeowners’ regular gatherings.
Opening the accordion doors that connect the living room and porch, along with the screens on the porch’s large windows, helps both spaces come to life.
“We knew we wanted a built-in component here,” Campbell says of the benches with storage drawers on either side of the living room’s fireplace. Cornish Custom Cabinetry built the pair from an inspiration image of an antique bench and “replicated the bird pattern perfectly,” Campbell says of the scrollwork.
Campbell and her team designed the two boys’ rooms to reflect their current interests through wallpaper, artwork, and decor, while classic elements like the wainscotting ensure the spaces will grow with them.
Campbell selected the same floors, cabinets, and countertops in the boys’ bathrooms but made each distinct through wallpaper, textiles, and mirrors. “You could easily change the wallpaper and make it feel like a completely different space,” she says.
The windows above the kitchen’s farmhouse-style sink slide open, allowing food to be passed easily back and forth from the grill.
