Refining a lifetime of design in a Chattanooga home
From one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the winding streets of Lookout Mountain are spectacular in the light mist, a layer of fog wrapping the homes in a wintry stole.
Carter Kay is an interior designer who moved to Chattanooga from Atlanta to be closer to her family. Kay downsized in 2022 from a five-bedroom home in Chastain Park to a cozy, expertly designed (as you would expect) two-bedroom, two-bath cottage she shares with her husband, Forde. “It was fun,” she said of the challenge of translating a home filled with furniture and decor into a smaller footprint. “I didn’t need all that,” she said of the process of downsizing.
Kay has deep roots in the area: Her great uncle created the perennially popular tourist attraction See Rock City. A framed 1960 cover of “Life” magazine in her home features a crowd of onlookers at the Lover’s Leap overlook, including a six-year-old Carter Kay.
Her 1951 cottage home is a testament to mastering scale and color when decorating a smaller space. One of her best tricks is using oversized furniture to bring attitude to more modestly sized rooms, like the enormous armoire that commands center stage in her living room. Many of the larger antiques in her home, like that mega armoire, do double duty as storage space to keep the couple’s 2,447 square feet home clutter-free.
A lover of vignettes, every side table, console and coffee table contains a little story attesting to travel, life experience, a sense of humor expressed in objects and a love of beauty.
The Kays’ home is eclectic, filled with a variety of art — much of it abstract and by Georgia artists like James Herbert — and family heirlooms. A blend of stately antique pieces and decor that embraces quirkiness, the couple’s home displays a Southerner’s appreciation for eccentricity.
Unique in so many ways, the couple’s home does have some design throughlines, including a preference for shades of gold, brown and black to lend continuity and a blend of sophistication and warmth to the space. The metal artwork seen over the mantle was originally purchased for a client but didn’t quite work, so Carter decided to use it in her own space.
The Kays did very little in terms of renovations when they moved in, though Carter did replace the tile fireplace with a limestone mantle and surround. She also created a neutral backdrop for her detail-rich rooms by painting everything in one color: walls, ceiling, trim. “It made life so much easier,” said Carter. The two armless chairs covered in cork fabric in front of the fireplace were featured in an Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles show house before making their way back to her home.
“I buy things that I love, yeah, and I’ll figure out where they’re going to live,” said Carter of one of her collecting “rules.” An oversize armoire in her living room was purchased when her grandmother gifted her with some money and Carter headed straight to Atlanta’s William Word Fine Antiques.
“I do weird things for my kids. One year for Christmas, I gave everybody a skull,” said Carter, explaining the tiny skulls in this vignette shown alongside miniature leather-bound books on a bowfront chest in the living room. Testifying to the charm and serendipity of secondhand shopping, a vendor at Scott’s Antique Market with a box of little heads was the source of those tiny collectibles. This vignette also features a planter of creeping fig with a female figure handed down from her mother. The delicate woman presiding over the plant has seen better days, but that only adds to the piece’s character for Carter. “I mean, she’s already got all kinds of issues,” said Kay, “She has no hand. I know she’s missing her fingers. Poor thing.”
Mixed metals in this sunny dining room strike a sophisticated note. Barely visible hanging from the gold ceiling medallion above the table is a delicate, ethereal mobile from an Atlanta artist that Carter uses in place of a chandelier. The acrylic living room coffee table and dining room table base were designed by Carter’s first boss, Dotty Travis at Travis & Company.
Rich and moody, the powder room off the kitchen goes hard on the deep blacks and browns that have become a Carter Kay signature. “It’s very dark,” She admitted. “I’ve always had a lot of black.” Though the Kays’ home feels bespoke and rich, Carter also incorporates the occasional clever mass-market touch like the two simple black wireless lamps she found online that offer some targeted illumination in the powder room.
The small room leading to the powder room looks out onto the screened-in porch beyond and does double duty as a wet bar. The dramatic, textured wallpaper brings even more depth and drama to this vibey room.
Carter transformed a “sad” deck into a gorgeous screened-in porch featuring a stone floor and a tin roof so her family can enjoy the sound of rainfall overhead. Her contractor used leftover stone to create a small bench in her petite backyard.
Carter’s expert blend of the exotic and Americana is plain to see: with rustic wood siding adding a rustic touch, a metal lamp base offering edginess and two striking vintage chairs given hip new life with abstract black and white fabric. Design is not just work; it’s clearly a pleasure for Carter. Every year, she travels to Montana with 10 girlfriends to stay in a home she decorated for a client, where they hike, swim and sometimes tweak the design.
One of the subtle but significant renovations Carter did in the kitchen was to replace the shallow upper cabinets with more generous open shelves to display her plates (and make unloading the dishwasher right next to the shelves a breeze) and make the galley-style space feel less constrictive.
The narrow kitchen gives way to a keeping room with cozy overstuffed chairs and, beyond, a small kitchen table for a morning coffee with the perfect view of birds at the feeders outside. Cardinals are a favorite decorating motif and reminder of Carter’s mother and appear throughout the Kay home.
Carter played with scale again in the home’s primary bedroom, dominated by a king-size bed that commands prime real estate in the room but also gives it the grandeur and attitude of a luxurious New York City hotel.
Nestled in a corner of the primary bedroom, this cozy nook is an ideal place to settle in with a good book. Behind the reading chair is a shelf featuring family photos.
Carter created a pretty and functional vanity in her primary bathroom using a favorite technique of repurposing items and tweaking their original use. It’s advice she offers her clients, too, to use familiar objects in new ways. “Just think about what you own, and think about it a little differently.”
“My mother used this table in her dining room for a dessert service, and the needlepoint stool belonged to Forde’s mother, who used it in her morning room. Now my grandson pulls the stool to the sink so he can brush his teeth! We tend to keep our family photos in our private spaces, and in that way, we ‘see’ them every day when preparing for our day/night.”
In this guest room featuring Carter’s design sweet spot of black and brown paired with creamy walls, she displays her preference for pairing art with a variety of frame styles rather than making gallery walls too matchy-matchy with identical-style frames.
A wonderful catch-all space, the couple uses this room, said Carter, for “Forde’s office, flower arranging/watering and playroom for our grandchildren ... we love how we can use it for the whole family!”
The couple’s welcoming den features contemporary art and generous built-in bookshelves housing the one-time English major’s collection of books. Carter studied English and psychology at Tulane, and then design at Mount Vernon College in Washington, D.C. The psychology classes have come in handy. “It does help meeting new people, and kind of figuring them out,” said Carter. “It’s challenging. You are kind of empowering them to be able to express themselves.”
