By Gillian Drummond
Life In Our Foothills, July 2015

Twice in the past two weeks I have had conversations with both clients and friends about how formality, informality, elegance and luxury are expressed in an interior. Are they mutually exclusive or inclusive?

To start, let’s look at what this means. Formal means done in accordance with rules of convention. I think, to many people today this means traditional, which is a synonym for the word formal. This came up when I showed a client my dining room, which has a beautiful, old mahogany table and sideboard. She commented that my dining room was very formal. To me it is not. It is warm and inviting, sophisticated and dramatic at night but very comfortable for long leisurely Sunday lunches or a wonderful place to sit for a long chat with a glass of wine after dinner. I enjoy it every morning for my breakfast. It faces east and south, so is light and bright and cheerful in the morning. So, yes, I suppose it has a formality to it but it is also a comfortable place in which to be casual.

To many the opposite of formal is casual. However, casual does not mean that your room cannot also be elegant and have touches of luxury. Let’s take a dining room again. An old pine farm table can make a wonderful dining table; if the table has been waxed for years to bring out the patina and richness of the wood it can bring a warm glow to the room. Dining chairs can be wood as well, hopefully a different wood not matching the table. They can have a beautiful, luxurious fabric on the seats or on both the seats and backs to add comfort and color. A mixture of styles and woods in the furniture adds depth and character to a room and makes it much more interesting.

Coco Chanel once said, “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.” No truer words were ever spoken. How often do we relate luxury to the thought that it must be expensive to be luxurious? I believe true luxury must have quality to it, but it can be as simple as the sight and scent of beautiful flowers picked fresh from your garden as you enter a room. In the movie “My Fair Lady” Eliza sings, “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cool night air with one enormous chair, now wouldn’t that be loverly.” To her that would be sitting in the lap of luxury. Your rooms, whether they be formal or casual, can have true luxury in them. It is up to you to define what luxury means to you and how you express it.

A quality sofa is one way to provide either formal or casual luxury. The United States makes the most comfortable upholstery in the world, and a lot of it is made right here in North Carolina. A good quality sofa is an investment for a lifetime. It will have a good solid frame and can stand up to a great deal of wear and tear. It can be slip covered for easy cleaning. If you have children and animals, eventually it can be recovered. You might then decide to change your style or want to change the colors in your room. The seat cushions can be easily replaced if they need to be. A comfortable sofa is the ultimate in luxury and a place where I entertain friends, watch television, read a good book or take a nap. This is the one place in a budget that I never advise skimping. For my clients on very tight budgets, I often recommend buying a very good quality second hand sofa and slip covering or recovering it rather than buying new and getting lesser quality.

Elegance is the other word that is often associated with formality and tradition. Elegance is gracefulness, simplicity, a restrained beauty of style, and a tasteful richness of design elements. All these attributes can be included in any room, no matter the style or period. A modern room can be elegant, a formal room should be elegant, and a casual country room can have elegance to it.

The picture I have selected for this article shows a comfortable room that has all the elements I have been talking about. The sofas are upholstered in soft, rich beautiful leather, a touch of luxury. They are also made by Hancock and Moore, which makes very high quality, beautiful upholstery. The architecture of the room with the high ceilings, lots of windows and natural stone bring the outdoors in and keep the room from being too formal. However, the modern style of the sofas mixed with some antique mahogany furniture and a lovely old rug gives the room a feeling of elegance and continuity or tradition.

All these elements should be brought together to give us beautiful, comfortable, practical and livable rooms. The desire for these qualities in our lives is innate and essential to our well-being.

Drummond House Interiors is located in Tryon, N.C. Please see our website at drummondhouseco.com or call us at 828-859-9895. We would love to work with you. •