Creating serenity, ambience, style & flair

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Serenity, ambience, style and flair are design elements that can not only make your home a utopian retreat from the world, but a place to celebrate your very take on life, your distinctive personality and worldview. How do you achieve these elusive qualities, and what do they mean for a room? When you walk in a room that’s balanced and soothing, it exudes serenity. Add to that a distinctive atmosphere that imbues feeling and you’ve got ambience. When a room has style, it has a beauty and grace. And with flair — you know it when you see it, a room with a genius or a natural gift.

We asked an antique dealer, owners of home furnishing boutiques, a manager of a kitchen and bathroom gallery, a supplier of marble and granite and a developer in the Triangle how they would achieve serenity, ambience, style and flair. Their answers are as distinctive as their personalities and their personal offerings. Larger than life Raleigh antique dealer George McNeill with a style he calls elegant leisure outfits a room with a different vision than say Mack and Pam Thorpe, owners of the Rusty Bucket in downtown Apex who are partial to down home country.

High-toned McNeill has a self-described “gilt complex” and scoops up antiques at New York’s Christy’s and at Palm Beach estate sales. The Thorpes took down Fuquay-Varina tobacco and hay barns and used the seasoned wood to fashion a charming country store, The Rusty Bucket, complete with beamed ceilings and brick walls and filled with rustic antiques and country Americana.

Wade Adler, manager-developer of 12 Oaks, the 680-acre golf-course subdivision in Holly Springs, emphasizes the nature of the development when he talks about serenity, ambience, style and flair.

Christine C. Tingen, builder sales manager of Ferguson Bath, Kitchen & Lighting Gallery in Raleigh, works with lighting and kitchen designers who search out the design styles of their clients before coming up with dream rooms.

Manager and craftsman Henrique Dias of Stone World Marble & Granite of Raleigh talks about the skill involved in crafting a countertop, fireplace or table from fine marble and granite his business imports from all over the world.

Chris Kirk, owner with his brother and mother of Kirk Imports of Raleigh, fills his 40,000 square foot showroom with furniture from buying trips to High Point, Los Angeles and outposts around the world. Along with buying living room, dining room, bedroom, including children’s bedroom furniture in traditional, contemporary and transitional styles, Kirk scoops up unique finds from across the world in his work as a direct importer.

“Art has to stabilize a room, give it depth and meaning,” says McNeill, who envisions on the wall above the fireplace a landscape by James Daga Albinson, a realist from Sag Harbor. He recently brought the painting home to Raleigh from Christy’s.

Adler of Holly Spring’s 12 Oaks Community paves the way for tranquility with 20 miles of tree-scaped sidewalk along rolling hills lined in houses of southern classic styles: Colonial, Greek, Southern Antebellum Revival and Victorian, all with inviting front porches. It doesn’t hurt that meandering through the neighborhood is a Jack Nicklaus golf course, named one of the top 10 new private courses in 2009 by Golf Digest.

And it’s true to the period. “You’re looking for that utility,” she says. “One hundred and fifty years ago our forefathers had to be judicious about using their resources. They had to be utility minded.”

Timeless treasures like the American country sofas and wing back chairs from Johnston Benchworks transport ones mood to a port of calm. The family company in North Wilkesboro maintains the Appalachian tradition of making its furniture by hand.

Round it out with rockers by Troutman Chair, another old-time North Carolina furniture maker that features joint construction, and add a few rustic antiques the Thorpes scour up on buying trips in Ohio and Pennsylvania and you’ve got laid-back down home ease.

You do want to have personal touches, says Pam, who suggests a handmade quilt to cozy up a sitting area and for charm. The shop features the works of local artisans including quilters, jewelry makers, needle-crafters, potters and even makers of homemade jellies and sauces.

“It’s so nice to walk in the house and you’re greeted with this warm, cozy smell,” she says.

In the wintertime, Pam bakes cookies and brews cider on the Elmira Stoveworks Appliances, 1850 reproductions the store sells that were made in Ontario, Canada. The air is laden with spice and butter and stops customers in their tracks whom Pam restores with free goodies. Through layers of lighting, Ferguson’s Tingen brings ambience to Triangle kitchens with a bold illumination. Lights are placed under cabinets, added as drop-down pendants above islands, located in recessed spaces overhead and over work spaces and prep areas. Craftsman Dias says he created an ambience of elegance by installing creamy white carrarea Italian marble in a foyer. It makes an immediate statement and sets up an expectation for quality.

“It’s almost like creating a themed room,” says Kirk of an ambience made palpable from scenic effects. He chooses from Kirk Imports’ inventory the Old World British Colonial appointments, Moroccan styles or Key West-inspired furnishings to create the sensory feel of the room.

“It’s a very different ambience like walking into a completely different place, a suggestion of travel, says Kirk. “A lot of people do these sorts of rooms when they have traveled some place and have been to other countries and want to emulate it in their house.”

“Style is not fashion,” says McNeill, who follows antiques like a commodities trader, but banks on beauty’s timelessness and shows off the period pieces he acquires in his Atlantic Avenue shop. “It’s God-given, either you have it or you don’t.”

The Rusty Bucket creaks with style, from the timbre of vintage planks underfoot to the 1930s pickup truck Mack restored and often parks on Salem Street, the historic district’s main drag.

Sixpence Accents also features style arbiters.

From the colorful, contemporary stretched-canvas giclees to the realism of the originals and water color animal and floral landscape prints by Susan Crouch of Statesville, the 20 artists of Sixpence Accents offer their own individual takes on reality that can be used to transform a room, says Shore.