Never does the saying “everything’s bigger in Texas” feel more apropos to designer Kimberly Paulus than when she’s working with a client who’s just arrived in the state. “People move from different parts of the country, and they come down here to discover that 20-foot ceilings and large spaces are our norm,” explains the Houston-area professional, who’s part of Decorating Den Interiors’ network of individually owned and operated interior-design companies. “It can be very exciting, but also a challenge.”
More often than not, notes Paulus, these homeowners tell her things like, “Oh, my gosh, we loved it when we bought it! But now we have to fill it.” Luckily for them, she’s more than prepared to help. “If you’re going to have this amazing, dramatic space but nothing to look at, then you won’t look at it,” Paulus explains. “It just becomes an empty chasm.” Below, she shares her tips for making guests take notice.
Room by Samantha Stiglitz
START HORIZONTALLY
“I feel scale is one of the biggest mistakes that we see people make,” Paulus says. When choosing furniture for the floor space, you want to measure twice, buy once. Sometimes the misstep involves pieces that are swallowed up by a spacious room, while other times it’s the furnishings that are too large for the space.
To avoid this, she creates two-dimensional layouts for clients using computer-aided design software—but some painter’s tape and a tape measure can do the job nearly as well, Paulus says. In her planning, she goes by this rule of thumb: To make the best use of a large floor plan, you want either wider furniture (longer daybeds, for instance), or more furniture—say, a living room with a sectional setup for streaming-and-chill nights, plus an armchair for a reading nook in the corner.
THEN LOOK UP
Quite simply, says Paulus, “you have to think taller.” For instance, if you fall in love with a cabinet that’s not quite high enough for the room, consider building more drawers on top of it.
You might also dream up other ways to increase the altitude. In one of Paulus’s current home designs, “we’re putting in large floor plants, tall floor lamps, and floor-to-ceiling drapery,” she says, adding that she didn’t place the drapes above the first window line, but extended them to the ceiling. “We’re thinking about that vertical integration the entire way through, to make sure we’re not cutting our designs in half,” she adds.
Room by Kimberly Paulus
KNOW WHAT YOU’RE WORKING WITH
Ideally, Paulus says, you want to look at your walls as one cohesive piece, instead of just trying to fit things in one at a time. The key is keeping proportions in mind. “It’s just like when you’re looking at a floor and deciding what size rug to put on it,” Paulus explains. “With a huge wall, you want to create an area of interest that’s proportionally appropriate.”
In a living room she worked on recently, this ethos translated into six textured canvases on one wall and three midsize sculptural pieces on another. But one enormous commissioned painting would have worked just as well, she notes. The question you want to ask, says Paulus, is this: “How much of this wall do we need to fill for it to feel the right scale?”
Room by Valery Huffenus
NO NEED TO COVER EVERY INCH
As much as you want to draw eyes up by giving guests something to look at, “negative space can be just as important,” Paulus stresses. In the room with the six canvases, she intentionally left the wall opposite them blank. “I always tell people you don’t have to put something on every wall,” she says. “We don’t want things to fight.”
Room by Angie Palmer
EMBRACE LAYERING
Supersizing decorative elements like drapes accomplishes two goals, she says: It emphasizes the impressive expanse of the walls, and it helps dampen the reverb that tends to occur in cavernous rooms.
“People are always like, ‘I want my home to feel warm,’’’ Paulus notes. “Well, warmth comes from what you see, but also what you hear. So if we can soften the acoustics of the space through textiles—adding more rugs, bringing drapery up—we can lessen that echo and make it sound warmer.” And that makes it all feel warmer as well.
Room by Marina Pavlova
CONSIDER FEWER, BIGGER PIECES
One of the more subtle tweaks Paulus made to her clients’ living room design was removing more than half the shelves from its impressive built-in. That might seem counterintuitive, but she begs to differ.
“People think, ‘Oh, it’s bigger, I can put in more shelves,’” she says. “But they actually make it feel smaller. When you step away from it, it feels like you’re looking at shutters, instead of the massive built-in that it is.”
So she recommends doing more with less—fewer shelves that are much thicker than standard ones, say, or the sort of greenery and objets d’art that command attention. “Less is more in this case, but it’s larger accessories,” she says. “You want big things instead of trinkets. Everything scales up.” After all, she points out, this is Texas.
