Ep. 170: Nashville Week: Ray Booth

This is the last day of our Nashville Week! Our guest this episode has many layers. Ray Booth is a designer, architect, bestselling author of Evocative Interiors, partner at McALPINE Design and this year launches his inaugural furniture collection with Hickory Chair and his first accessory and lighting collection with Arteriors. We talk to him about the design of his multiple homes including a home that rose from the ashes; Travelers Ridge. We ask him about decorating the mundane spaces, his love of light and drapery, and how to know when we have overfilled a room.

What You’ll Hear on This Episode:

• How Ray got his start with McALPINE and his journey from Alabama to NYC and back again.
• The backstory on Ray’s grand hilltop home, Travelers Ridge, in Nashville. He literally built the home from the ground up on the land of charred ruins.
• Ray shares how he makes use of the outdoor space using terraces and how he makes a 5200 sq ft home feel intimate using layers, texture, proportion, and scale.
• Ray likes to think of a home as a story using pauses and punctuation and uses things like screens, scrims, and curtains in the home to accomplish that.
• Ray likes to use lightweight and thin drapery in order to “activate” the windows in a room.
• Ray created “working pantries”, complete with a sink, as landing place for dishes and other things so the kitchen can remain the gathering place without having the messy stuff front and center.
• Round rugs get a bad wrap, but Ray thinks if you do them in a solid color it becomes a fun, graphic way to define a space.
• In terms of embracing or ignoring the style of a home, it’s important to listen and hear what the client is asking for.
• You want your design to have staying power, so we have to acknowledge where we are both location wise and architecturally. The design of Ray’s homes are heavily influenced by this.
• Ray hopes that people will seek more authenticity from their homes due to spending so much time in them during the pandemic. Our homes are such an extension of our inner selves.
• Ray considers light to be “magic elixir” and designs and builds to allow light into the home.

Mentioned In This Episode:

Ray Booth Design

Ray Booth Design on Instagram

“Evocative Interiors” – On Amazon

Travelers Ridge

Decorating Dilemma

Hi Amelia,

Great to hear from you again! Here’s what Ray has to say.

Let’s start with the drapery. A lighter drapery is going to allow the light to come in. If you have to have the blackout option, I would look to a Roman shade instead of the heavy velvet. I would encourage you to not put the patterned fabric on the lampshades. Lamps are for light, so I like the crispness and the brightness of a white shade rather than a gathered fabric shade. If you are going to use that accent fabric, think of doing almost a king-sized pillow with it rather than chopping it into smaller pieces. Color wise, I think your walls are really the opportunity to bring some color into the room. This will contrast with the white lampshades and lighter drapery.

Keep decorating and sending us your questions, Amelia!