Text by Bethany Adams
Interior designer Anna-Louise Wolfe saw her historic 1920s home in Atlanta, Georgia, as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to create the bachelorette pad of her dreams. As a single woman with no one else’s tastes to accommodate, she embraced the season of life with enthusiasm—and a clear plan of attack.
“My starting point for the design was actually in the living room,” Anna-Louise says. It was a discontinued Cowtan & Tout chintz that covered a pair of wingback chairs previously belonging to her grandmother. “I actually already had them in my previous home, and I loved that fabric so much,” she says. “So, I kind of decided to play up more of the secondary colors versus the main color you see, which is the red.”
Luckily, the print played perfectly into a palette ripe with feminine pinks and complementary shades, which Anna-Louise used to pull together her existing pieces and new features designed for the space—like the bookshelves in the living room. “All the books came with me,” she says. She had the shelves built to accommodate her collection and backed the whole thing with bubble gum pink for a splash of contemporary color.
Switching up the colorway, the kitchen served as a backdrop for her blue-and-white china collection, showcasing it against a high-contrast Greek key wallpaper. Anna-Louise introduced balance with white cabinets and antique pieces, like the English pub table that rests below a wall display of dishes. Originally a square table featuring four carved legs, it was cut in half for a project her former boss worked on.
While the dining room features mostly new furnishings, Anna-Louise did incorporate reupholstered antique French chairs and a portrait of her late aunt. The standout color palette draws from the pinks she used in the living area, but it leans into bolder deep purples pulled from the ikat fabric on the table. “I thought that was a fun juxtaposition against the very traditional chairs and doing the traditional-style table to do a more contemporary fabric,” she says. “One fabric kind of led to another fabric, and then I pulled all the colors from there.”
Anna-Louise’s bedroom embraces the fun and feminine style she was able to indulge in for the home’s design, rendered dreamy by pale-blush hues and floral motifs. “I thought this was my chance to have a pink bedroom, because I figured, once I was married, that a guy wouldn’t necessarily like that,” she says. She also jumped on the chance to use Cowtan & Tout’s Bowood pattern, which she has always loved. “I kind of just took the two things I knew I wanted to do and put them together.”
By the time she was finished with the home, there was a clear winner for her favorite space. “The sunroom [is] my favorite room, because it has those metal windows on both sides, and it gets the most wonderful sunlight,” she says, noting it’s especially lovely in the morning. Building around a camelback sofa that belonged to her grandparents and was reupholstered in a Lee Jofa fabric, she dressed the space with playful patterns and fresh shades. A coffee table from Scott Antique Markets tones down the brighter selections, and vintage bamboo chairs inject a touch of Palm Beach style.
“I like having the sense of history and the traditional, then adding in some of the contemporary just to keep it fresh and in today’s time,” Anna-Louise says. In the case of this design, that philosophy lent itself beautifully to the designer’s personal tastes, her family pieces, and the history of the home itself. It also turned out to be charmingly effective in creating a space that would be delightfully hers, and hers alone.
