The New Traditional
Reinvent | Balance | Define Your Home
Darryl Carter is a leader in the design world, recognized for his restrained, distinguished, and livable environments. Known for seamlessly mixing the modern with the classical, Carter presents a comprehensive guide to creating a home that balances individual comfort with a timeless aesthetic.
Comfort is the essential element of a successful interior, but also the most elusive. Too often our design decisions are driven by others. In The New Traditional, Darryl Carter encourages you to be true to your own lifestyle. More than a stunning book, this is an accessible resource for making an elegant, inviting home, responsive to the people who live in it every day.
A fresh take on American design, Carter’s work has been lauded as the New Traditional for effortlessly blending classic and modern elements to create personal environments. Patinated furniture, subtle textiles and lighting, and chalky washes of color are among the details that transform a house into a home. Carter explains how you can translate these details into inspired and always calming surroundings. Ignore the obvious. Redefine a dining room so that it doubles as a library by lining the walls with bookshelves and using wing chairs in lieu of dining chairs. Stain wood floors white to create a greater sense of space. Build rooms around art. Carter shows that designing your home is a process to be enjoyed.
Darryl Carter's New Traditional Style
By HGTV
Gain valuable insight in how to best develop rooms throughout the home. Indulge yourself here with a taste of Darryl Carter's The New Traditional.
Furniture designer Darryl Carter uncovers his clients’ common classic vocabulary, melding their tastes into soothing, understated timeless environments. The guiding principles and careful decision-making behind Carter’s impeccable aesthetic are revealed in his beautifully illustrated first book, The New Traditional (Random House/Clarkson Potter).
ADAPT – Make Your Home Work for You
Oft-confusing decisions about style become secondary when you define your ultimate goal as comfort, with rooms that are consistent with the way you really live. Re-thinking your home might even avoid the disruptive prospect of having to move in order to accommodate change in your life.
+DEFINE – Identify Your Style, Then Forget the Rules
Steer your design process with a personal design vocabulary that defines your unique approach to style. Natural, rustic, masculine, feminine, geometric, free flowing. What are the shared characteristics of the things and homes you admire and on the pages you tear from magazines? Let these elements guide the planning of your home. Groupings of pieces with a shared vocabulary have a lasting quality; they also can be easily moved about the home as your needs may change.
+BLEND – Use Continual Color and Space Planning to Achieve Flow
Judicious use of soft, muted color imbues a home with a sense of calm and amplified space. In Darryl Carter’s hand, muted color gradations on surfaces, furnishings and fabrics unfold naturally, flowing almost imperceptibly from room to room. Unlike trends that are soon outdated, low-key neutral classic hues endure.
+FOCUS – Collect with an Eye Toward Visual Harmony
Be it china, antique books, ironstone or shells, collections help personalize our space. In assembling a display, remember that “opposites distract” and “like-kind,” says Darryl Carter. A collection and display of items with shared purpose, form, and color – such as china, all with blue patterns – read as a singular composition that is visually harmonious. Arranging items together in a contained area, such as a bookshelf or hutch, unifies further. Carter also considers the balance and flow of scale.
RELAX – Know When to Stop
You’ve layered muted classic color, added just the right comfortable, practical and visually appealing furniture and accented with objects for textural interest. Your home is relaxing and truly suits your lifestyle. The decorating is done. To retain the inviting feel, resist the impulse to continue to fill every square inch. Remain alert, however, to evolving needs that rouse, again, your creative spirit.
Learn more about Darryl Carter and The New Traditional:
Darryl Carter
Thomasville
Buy the book