Not every house asks to be left alone, but this one did, and interior designer Janie Hirsch was smart enough to listen. The lakeside retreat she recently completed for a client in Lake Keowee is the kind of project where the designer’s best instinct is restraint. It’s elegant, personal and comfortable all at once, which anyone in the trade will tell you is the hardest thing to pull off.
It is also, in many ways, the kind of project Hirsch was born to do. Growing up with a father who was both an architect and a watercolor artist, she came into her craft already attuned to the relationship between structure and beauty, between a space and the light that moves through it. She studied interior design at Louisiana State University’s School of Architecture before beginning her career at a lighting design firm in New York City, where she learned early on how profoundly light shapes the way a room feels. That education in light has stayed with her, and it shows.
After New York, Hirsch landed in Atlanta and spent 14 years working with a homebuilder, designing model interiors where the goal was to help families imagine their lives unfolding in a space. That work sharpened something important: her ability to listen. Not just to what clients say they want but to how they actually live. J. Hirsch Interior Design, now in its 18th year with clients across the Southeast, was built on that instinct. Hirsch considers her style classic with a French influence, elegant but with an inherited quality, as though the rooms have accumulated meaning over time rather than being assembled all at once.
This house was already a remarkable starting point. Designed by celebrated Atlanta architect Keith Summerour, who has built his reputation on structures that seem to belong to the land they occupy, the home carries a deeply French sensibility in its bones. Wide-plank floors run throughout. The family room reaches upward with soaring ceilings and warm wood trusses overhead. The kitchen has the personality of a French farmhouse kitchen that has been lived in and loved. Arched niches flank the fireplace. A carriage house sits above the garage with its own lake views. The architecture did not need to be improved upon; it needed to be honored.
Hirsch understood this from the start. Her client, who had previously worked on her mother’s house with Hirsch, came to this lakeside retreat with a clear vision: color, pattern, comfort and a design that would keep the lake views the home’s true centerpiece. This is a second home, an escape from city life in Peachtree Corners, and the client wanted to feel it. “She wanted it to be bright, fresh and happy, with lots of pattern and color,” Hirsch recalls. Keeping a design happy and fresh while staying out of the way of a spectacular natural setting is a harder balance to strike than it sounds, and it is precisely the kind of problem Hirsch is good at solving.
Her approach was to work with a palette rooted in the traditional colors of French interiors: the soft blues, warm creams, gentle greens and quiet tans that have grounded French country and French Provincial design for centuries. These are not trendy colors; they are colors that have proven themselves over generations because they mimic the natural world: water, stone, sky and foliage. Against the rich warmth of the home’s wood trusses and wide-plank floors, and with the green canopy of trees and the glimmer of the lake always visible just beyond the windows, the palette feels like a continuation of what is already outside rather than a departure from it.
The foyer sets the tone for the rest of the home. A commode in aged blue-gray with a marble top anchors the entry, topped by a tall gilded trumeau mirror that bounces light into the space. The combination is unmistakably French, refined but not too formal, and it prepares you for what is ahead. As we step down into the house from that entry, with the stairway rising to one side, the family room opens before us.
In the family room, Hirsch worked to create a space that is genuinely functional for family and friends who gather here to watch movies, play games and simply be together. She made sure there was seating for everyone, including a generous chair-and-a-half that invites two people to share it, and small benches behind the sofa that can be pulled forward to the fire in winter or rearranged as needed for extra seating. It is a room designed for real life. The curtains are a lovely Schumacher linen print in blues and greens, a large-scale floral with acanthus leaves that is both grand and organic. Above the plaster fireplace, which carries an old-world quality in its distressed finish, a dark, ornately carved antique mirror reflects the room and the beamed ceiling back at you. Arched niches flank the television, with dark shelves dressed with framed photographs and small objects that tell the story of the family that lives here.
The kitchen already had strong bones and a strong personality. Hand-painted European tiles in blue and white line the backsplash behind the range in a pattern that could have come from a kitchen in Lyon or Marseille. White glass-front cabinets hold a collection of blue-and-white ceramics. Hirsch kept her hand light here, updating the window treatments with a Thibaut linen print featuring birds and botanicals, reupholstering the dining chairs and refreshing accessories.
Because the house has no formal dining room, the kitchen-dining area serves as the heart of daily life, by design and by intention. An oval dark wood table surrounded by Windsor-style chairs sits in a sunny corner framed by nature-print drapes, with a wrought-iron chandelier overhead. It’s informal in the best possible way.
The primary bedroom received more significant attention. The client had purchased the leather bed from the home’s previous owners, an extraordinary piece with an arched headboard and looped wood frame that evokes the warm French heritage of the home. Hirsch built the room around it, using accessories and textiles to bring feminine counterbalance to the masculine bed frame. Drapery in a tone-on-tone woven damask in soft blue adds both texture and femininity. A pair of French chairs from Huff Harrington sits in the window, with a chunky textured round stool tucked between them in place of a side table. The pale blue damask throw pillows against the white bedding feel fresh and soft. A French chair draped with a white cashmere throw sits near the window overlooking the trees. It is a room that invites you to take a deep breath, exhale and sit down.
The office, which could easily have become a spare room of no particular character, is instead one of the more charming spaces in the house. Hirsch placed an antique-style desk in front of the large windows, where the view of the garden and terrace outside floods the space with natural light, a quiet nod to everything she absorbed early in her career about what light does for a room. A daybed dressed in a mix of patterns, including a Schumacher fabric based on an 18th-century design of seedpods and botanical motifs in blues and greens, provides both extra sleeping space and a reading spot. Hirsch’s knack for mixing prints makes this vignette look like someone with good taste has been collecting things they love for years.
The client has two adult children, and there are two bedrooms upstairs that share a bath. The daughter’s room was built around a hydrangea-print fabric that the client fell in love with at first sight. It is a bold, joyful print in French blue and green that’s used on the duvet and matched to drapery in the same pattern, making the room feel as if it’s wrapped in a garden. A white iron bed from Virginia-based Worthen anchors the space. A sleeping alcove tucked under the eaves adds a storybook quality and is fitted with a custom mattress and dressed in blue-and-white pillows and a brass task sconce.
The son’s room was kept more masculine and streamlined, with a second iron bed from Worthen, French blue walls, Roman shades in a blue-and-white stripe, and simple gray-blue bedding with gingham and geometric accent pillows. Both rooms are cozy, comfortable and designed for the young adults who use them.
The guest suite in the carriage house is its own complete world. Hirsch selected an Oriental rug in blue tones and furnished a sitting area with comfortable chairs and practical touches such as a wine fridge and coffee maker, which give guests independence. The iron bed is dressed in soft gray-blue linens with gingham and green geometric pillows, and the room has its own view of a different part of the lake. “Everything here is new, and we had fun making it fun and fresh,” Hirsch says. “When someone comes to stay, they have their own space and everything they need.”
Throughout the project, Hirsch worked with a carefully curated group of resources. Much of the furniture came from Hickory Chair. The fabrics leaned heavily on Schumacher and Thibaut. French antiques and accents came from Huff Harrington, Jacqueline Adams Antiques and Eloquence. The whole house was repainted in a family of Benjamin Moore colors, the neutrals warm and light, the accents in those consistent blues and greens that run through the home like a quiet thread.
What Hirsch achieved in this home is something worth paying attention to precisely because it doesn’t call attention to itself. Her instinct, developed over 30 years of practice and a career that began by understanding how light enters a room, is to work in the service of what is already there. The windows are not covered. The views are not upstaged. The rooms are comfortable enough to really live in but beautiful enough to stop you in your tracks. And the French sensibility running through the whole project, in the palette, the furnishings, the antiques, the textiles, the general ease with pattern and color, gives the home a consistency that feels organic rather than orchestrated.
It is, in the best sense, a home that knows what it is. And knowing that, it does exactly what a good lake house is supposed to do: It makes you want to stay. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
The foyer sets the tone for the rest of the home. A commode in aged blue-gray with a marble top anchors the entry, topped by a tall gilded trumeau mirror that bounces light into the space.
