STEP OUTSIDE THE GLASS DOOR OF A RECENTLY REMODELED HOUSE IN CARMEL VALLEY, California, and you arrive in a small open-air room with a tree canopy for a roof. A freestanding tub stands against a wall of stacked limestone, the stone the color of pale honey and faded ochre, already warm from the early sun. A brass tap is set straight into the masonry. A glazed blue-and-white stool holds a folded towel. Nothing about the scene announces the interior designer. It feels found, as if the wall had stood for a hundred years and someone had simply set a bath beside it.
That illusion is the effect the firm works hardest to produce, and it is their philosophy: You should not be able to tell that a J. Banks room is a J. Banks room. “Most designers have an aesthetic,” says Sarah Cunningham, the firm’s director of marketing. “But each of our designs is incredibly different, because we tailor the design specifically to the client. You won’t recognize it as a J. Banks space. What you’ll notice is the client’s identity and a sense of place.”
Sense of place is the closest thing the studio has to a signature, and for nearly four decades it has guided the work from the Lowcountry marshes to the hills of Tuscany and the oak valleys of coastal California.
In design, sense of place matters because a room registers before anything else in it, and the body settles or stiffens long before the mind has formed an opinion. A space that looks designed asks something of the people in it. It wants to be admired, and admiration is a kind of work; you stand a little straighter, you mind the furniture, you behave like a guest in your own house. A space with a true sense of place asks for nothing. It reads as inevitable, as though it had always been; that quiet permission is what lets a person exhale. The difference between the two is the difference between being impressed and being at home, and only one of them is worth living in.
This is the emotional logic beneath the studio’s whole approach: Get the place right, and the feeling follows, because a person who isn’t immediately confronted by design is free to feel rather than think.
The firm was founded in 1986 by Joni Burden, a North Carolina native who has spent four decades shaping interiors for homes, resorts and clubs around the world. What began as a regional practice has grown into a full-scale design house of more than 55 people, large enough to have earned recognition among the country’s Top 75 Hospitality Firms and Top 100 Design Firms, yet still close enough to its roots to feel like a single studio with a single point of view.
That reach now extends well beyond the Lowcountry communities the firm still calls home. J. Banks works nationally, from Charleston and Atlanta to Colorado and California, and internationally in Europe and Mexico. This past year, the firm opened a second office in Cashiers, North Carolina, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Plateau, a decision driven by its volume of work in the region and Burden’s ties there.
If sense of place anchors the work, the firm’s longtime motto adds to the magic: resort is home, home is resort. The studio splits its work almost evenly between hospitality and private residences and treats that balance as an advantage. The two disciplines feed each other. A club teaches the firm how a space performs under heavy use and how to move people through a room toward a view. A private home teaches it intimacy, idiosyncrasy and the texture of one family’s ordinary day. The residential work carries the finish you would expect at a five-diamond resort, and the hospitality work holds the warmth that makes a guest want to stay.
Getting to a sense of place begins, for this firm, with a sense of the person. Before a fabric is chosen or a floor plan is drawn, the designers want to know how a client actually lives. Where do they drink their coffee in the morning? What do they do with their family? Do they want a cozy living room or a formal one, and does the space need to flex with the household’s seasons? The questions are the raw material from which a place gets built, and the reason two J. Banks homes rarely resemble one another. The effortlessness is, of course, the most effortful thing the firm does.
A room that looks found is the product of a great deal of looking. Before committing to a palette, the designers spend time in the region a project belongs to, reading its light and its weather, noting the stone the local buildings are made of and how older houses there sit on the land. They track down craftspeople who already know the vernacular, the masons and weavers and metalworkers whose hands carry a regional memory no catalog can supply, and they commission custom pieces rather than buy their way to a look. Much of the work that produces the sense of ease never shows. It hides in the provenance of a tile, the patina deliberately left on a length of brass, the decision to repair an old wall instead of replacing it. The aim is to spend the labor where the eye will not catch it, so that what the eye does catch feels like luck.
Nowhere is the firm’s respect for place more literal than at Castello di Casole, the storied estate in the hills between Siena and Florence, now operated by Belmond. Here, the assignment was as much stewardship as design. The firm contributed original interiors and helped to revive a historic family compound as a resort, which meant the first task was learning what the place already was. It turned out to be very old.
Its agricultural roots stretch back to the Bronze Age. Etruscan artifacts found across the grounds are now on display inside the hotel, and for centuries it ran as a self-contained Tuscan village whose spirit still runs through the property today. The design problem here is restraint: How to bring in modern comfort without erasing the patina of a thousand years. The resolution reads as an old-world Tuscan estate softened by quiet contemporary luxury, with vaulted ceilings, warm terra-cotta and natural textiles honoring local craft, while Murano chandeliers and original stonework, arches and frescoes remain intact throughout. The firm did not polish the history into anonymity; it let the place keep speaking and added comfort to its language.
Closer to its new mountain office, J. Banks has become a defining presence in Cashiers, where the sense of place is the valley itself. The standout is the High Hampton Club, a new owner/resident element of the High Hampton resort property, a historical mountain resort dating to the Grand Resort Era of the 1920s. The firm’s interiors lean into a confident, eclectic spirit suited to the basin setting, with a palette of rich hues and layered plaids anchored by deep greens.
The tilework is extraordinary, almost Moroccan in its geometry, and windows and doors open the rooms to the landscape until the boundary between inside and out goes soft. The effect is bohemian yet thoroughly refined, with the surrounding mountains always the main event. That instinct for pulling the setting indoors carries into the firm’s 2025 Cashiers Showhouse, an exercise in refined mountain modern design. The designers worked with a tight, nature-drawn palette of warm neutrals, charcoal and, most of all, olive and moss green, threading that color through fabric, art and greenery so the forest seems to seep into the rooms.
High-contrast architecture provides the backbone, with espresso-stained ceilings and near-black floors set against creamy plaster and a sculptural white plaster range hood. The look is rooted in mountain materials and still distinctly current, luxurious but easy to live in.
Which returns us to Carmel Valley, and to the house with the open-air bath. It is the third residence J. Banks has designed for this client, after two homes for her on Hilton Head, and the relationship shows in how confidently the firm read her.
The homeowner is a busy executive and mother of three boys who works internationally and wanted a home base for entertaining and retreating with family and friends. She is also British, and that heritage became the project’s organizing idea: the ethos of a British manor house updated for modern living, with a current of England meeting Americana throughout. It is a Spanish-style California residence, firmly of its 1990s origins, that the designers updated alongside the architect and builder while keeping its Mediterranean character and tree-shaded grounds.
Interior designer Sharon Cleland, an Irish native with a strong sense of elegant British décor, led the effort to achieve the home’s eclectic, heritage feel. The resulting sequence of rooms is a tour through the firm’s range. The journey begins in a formal living room at the entry. To one side sits a kitchen styled to evoke an English country kitchen, with warm wood finishes, a breakfast bench, and rattan and leather in a rustic, Ralph Lauren-sort of key, backed by a hardworking scullery. Tucked nearby is a jewel-box bar closet in a delicious shade of cranberry.
Deeper in, a darker study wrapped in plaid serves as the family’s television room, a counterweight to the lighter rooms. Upstairs, the primary suite reads as a bucolic manor, with floral wallpaper rising behind the bed and a custom bathroom reached through an arched dressing area. A junior primary suite features a scenic wallpaper mural, and a nearby bunk room in moody blue holds the boys.
Outside, a pool house encompasses an outdoor lounge, a grasscloth-papered guest bedroom, a full outdoor bathroom and a light-filled meeting room. The home seems as though it was collected over generations, even though every inch of it was considered anew.
A Tuscan castle, a Blue Ridge club and a Spanish-style California manor have almost nothing in common to look at, which is the point. What they share is the feeling that each one grew out of its own ground and its own owner.
J. Banks brings the operational expertise of a hospitality firm and the intimacy of a residential designer to every commission, then steps back to let the client’s story take center stage. The relationships are intentional and long-running, and the firm keeps its designers fluent in the cultures of the clients it serves abroad. Nearly 40 years on, the ambition is unchanged. The goal is not to be recognized. It is to be felt—as identity, as comfort, as the feeling of being at home wherever you are. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
