The owners of this Boston Hill home needed a space for displaying artwork and entertaining, but the living room's high ceilings and long, narrow floor plan made the design tricky. Designer Rhea Arnot installed a custom hand-knotted rug from India and balanced the space using dramatic red furniture with a contemporary look.
A good designer is usually known in the industry for a specific style or skill—I’ve met designers who decorate with a minimalist’s restraint and others with a flair for accessories. I’ve met kitchen designers and bath designers and lighting designers.
There are designers, though, that become known not just for one but for multiple talents, and Rhea Arnot—as rug designer, furniture designer, interior designer, and more—has made a name for herself excelling where her clients need it most.
It’s no wonder that Arnot brings a varied repertoire of skills to her design business. Her careers over the years have polished her talents. Arnot started in the working world as a potter and also dabbled in jewelry making, selling her pieces at craft fairs. In later years, she headed to the Maryland Institute College of Art as a full-time undergrad seeking an interior design degree. After graduation, Arnot, feeling that she was “too old” to begin at the entry-level in an established firm, formed her own design firm, Arnot & Associates.
This Chinese hand-tufted series stretched almost 30 feet. The geometric pattern of the center rug offers visual relief between those on either side, which are similar but not a perfect pair.
As seedling businesses tend to do, Arnot’s started slowly; her first break came when a friend asked for her help with a lighting project. That small request turned into a four-room undertaking, and when all had been done, the project was so perfectly appropriate to the house that it was recognized with an award from the American Society of Interior Designers. “And so my small business grew.”
Arnot prefers to work with a variety of design styles—“I love different interiors,” she says. Working carefully with the building’s architecture, she strives to create a continuous flow throughout. “You should feel like you are in the same house all the time, not like you are going from one house to another as you move from one room to another.” Her spectacular use of color and smart treatment of space lead to exceptionally designed rooms. Arnot approaches her designs from the big picture inward, focusing on details last. “Homeowners get overwhelmed, because they start at the wrong end,” she notes. “So I teach a little class in interior design,” showing clients designs that best suit their home environments and offering them the vocabulary to articulate what they want. “Most people know what they are looking for but don’t know how to express it or produce it.” Knowing that clients sometimes want designs that aren’t appropriate to their houses, Arnot helps them work towards styles that will coordinate with their space and light.
One client, for example, was having trouble with a sitting room—the tall, skinny, long space had terracotta-colored walls and sat adjacent to a gray hall. “They couldn’t figure out why the room was never working,” Arnot says, “so left it to me to do what would work.” Realizing that the tones weren’t best for the room, the rug was too small, and the furniture arrangement in the room’s center made for awkward living, Arnot drew up a design that was better suited to the space. The owners needed a place for sitting, a good space for their art, and lighting; the client also wanted a place to read in the evenings, even though the room is primarily a public space.
To develop the design for this large rug, Arnot purchased $50 worth of fruits and vegetables, arranged them on her office floor, and photographed them from the top of the ladder.
The nearby gray hallway and the colors in the owners’ Grace Hartigan painting meant Arnot had some parameters to work within. “The wall color almost had to be a bronze beige tone. Then you are left with red, which is where the furniture is.” Simple walls and furniture let the artwork speak for the space, while a pair of fun chairs in red and black fabric offers additional seating. (A testament to Arnot’s knack for understanding her clients’ tastes, the homeowner just happened to own a jacket with a similar-looking pattern to that on the chairs.) To give the home continuity, the dining room is accented in red, and custom rugs in the hallway tie into the sitting room, appearing like enlarged versions of the chair fabric.
Arnot is careful never to use the same fabric among different clients. Homeowners agonize over fabrics, she explains, and it would break a client’s heart to walk into a friend’s house and find that they’ve used the exact same fabric. Instead, she works to discover a range of materials, colors, and patterns that please her clients. “I don’t scheme from the beginning—I gather piles of things for them to look through and listen to what they like and don’t.”
Furthering this “no-repeats” philosophy, Arnot has become adept at designing custom rugs and furniture, mostly tables and large case pieces. “My start in the rug business was accidental good luck,” she says. “Rug reps were always telling me what I could do with their products, and they said I could design my own.” So when a friend enlisted her to develop a rug, she was up to the challenge.
Arnot has now spent more than a decade working with Stark Carpets, creating one-of-a-kind pieces for her clients. She has designed Chinese hand-tufted rugs, which are very elaborate and colorfully detailed, since they are put together one thread at a time; Tibetan rugs, which are hand-knotted but looser, so they don’t have as much detail as the Chinese hand-tufted; Wilton rugs, which are woven in England on 27″ looms; and traditional floral rugs. Her designs have ranged from fanciful cartoons like a purple and green fish with lips to abstract color designs for modern interiors to vivid florals like a quilt-inspired flower basket.
Inspired by artist Hans Hoffman, this Chinese hand-tufted rug features an abstract design with no circles, squares, or recognizable objects, at the request of the owner.
“When clients hire me to design a rug, I ask them to tell me only one thing they would like to see and then allow me to just look around their home,” says Arnot of her process. Then she creates a design from something in the house that interests her, pulling from the homeowner’s collections and hobbies and taking sizing cues from the space where the rug will rest. Arnot explains that the initial idea for a design comes to her within about 15 minutes of looking through the house, but that usually isn’t the design she runs with. “I let it percolate through my mind,” she says, admitting that there are nights when she lays awake, thinking up new designs.
“I love the custom business,” Arnot says. “It’s interesting to see what you come up with—the creating is one of my favorite parts of the job.” Which is no surprise, since this do-it-all designer has spent her life producing crafts, furniture, jewelry, flower arrangements, rugs, and interiors.
Lauren Brooks is the Assistant Editor of ChesapeakeHome.
Contact:
Arnot & Associates: 410-234-0450
Additional Resources:
Stark Carpet Corporation: starkcarpet.com or 212-752-9000
