How to Put the All-Important Final Touches on a Room

At first, renovating the old farmhouse was going well. The homeowners had brought the home up to date inside and out, using beautiful materials, and had purchased furniture. “But now that they were at the final stage, they were having trouble bringing it all together,” says Sandy Kozar, one half of the Knoxville, Tennessee-based design duo who were called in to finish and refine the entire home.

“Since they were builders by trade, they naturally had a pretty nice eye to begin with—but when it came down to all the finishing touches, they were overwhelmed,” continues Kozar, who is co-lead designer with Rachael Sheridan in Kozar Design Team, part of Decorating Den Interiors, a collective of individually owned and operated design firms across the U.S. “They knew they needed something, but it was never quite the right thing. They realized it was a better solution to work with someone.”

Kozar and Sheridan applied their expertise to the rooms as they already existed, occasionally removing a discordant decorative item or shifting some furniture. “It was well done, so the architecture and the finishes were really inspiring to us as we created the rest of the design,” Kozar says. Their work on the primary bathroom, which was replete with luxurious tile and countertops and a sophisticatedly quiet color palette, provides a window into how an expert designer’s eye can take any room from “not quite” to “just right.”

Kozar and Sheridan first drilled down on the color palette. “One of the clients’ main concerns was that the home felt disjointed, because they had a lot of red in spots and blue in others,” Kozar recalls “They wanted it to feel cohesive.” The designers took as their jumping-off point the tile of the shower and surrounding floor, which has a blue undertone. Luckily, the existing vanities cooperated: “They’re a soft dove gray with a blue undertone,” Kozar says. The countertop, with its rustic, “leathered” finish, “has a nice welcoming appearance and doesn’t show fingerprints as much as a glossy one would. For a relaxed farmhouse interior, it makes sense to have a soft matte.”

To tie the existing hard surfaces into a cohesive whole, the designers started with fabric, adding tri-pleat valances to windows that had previously been dressed only with unremarkable solar shades. Elaborate embroidered decorative tape brings in a little more blue, as well as welcome texture. Having already finished the design for the adjoining primary bedroom, the designers chose coordinating hues. “The bedding also has that steely-blue charcoal color, so it all felt like one unified suite,” Kozar says.

The stand-alone tub is a definite statement piece, but its isolation from the shower area was making it seem lonely. So the decorating team added a natural wool rug—“soft, forgiving, and pleasant to walk onto instead of the tile,” Kozar says—to bridge the divide, along with a side table to allow potential soakers to settle into their bubble bath with a glass of wine nearby. No detail went overlooked—the brief, after all, was to apply an expertly curated gloss to the personality-challenged room—even down to switching out basic terry towels for smooth, natural-cotton bath sheets finished with gray braid embroidery that ties in to the window treatments.

Opposite the wet area, the designers added a velvet-upholstered custom stool—a strong signal that this isn’t just a utilitarian bathroom, but a place to luxuriate. “It was a fun way to bring additional texture in while keeping the color palette narrow and defined,” Sheridan says. Even the vanity-top accessories, such as the tissue box and soap dispenser, were chosen with a “more texture, less color” philosophy in mind. Feather artwork now dresses up a formerly blank wall, adding a whiff of whimsy, while a trio of sculptural branches decorating both the vanity and the floor near the tub gently connect the opposite sides of the expansive bathroom.

In the hallway leading to the bedroom, a closet hides behind a farmhouse-iconic sliding barn door, and the team amplified the bathroom’s nods to nature by situating a live-edge bench beneath an oversize mirror. They selected the wood tone to match that of the frames around the vanity mirrors.

“It’s a step above the typical farmhouse,” Kozar sums up. “Farmhouse elegant, I would say.”