Ray Booth Design

When our clients moved from the home where they raised their children, the goal was not to make their footprint smaller. Instead, we reallocated space to focus on how they want to live today, creating generous rooms designed for hosting friends and gathering family. We started fresh with the furniture, choosing pieces with proportions that invite you to sit back, throw your legs over the arm of a chair, and stay awhile. After all, the best rooms are the ones that encourage us to slow down and engage with one another.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE
Architecture: The Pursley Dixon Studio
Photographer: Emily Followill Photography
As featured in: Southern Home Magazine

Happy Labor Day weekend from this Palm Beach house.
This project is a reminder of what slowing down actually looks like, which is more or less what long weekends like this one are for. The clients came to me wanting a complete renovation of a 1980s home on the Intracoastal, but what they really wanted was a retreat to land. So I opened the house up to what was around it: a wall of accordion windows in the living room, a colonnade running out to a covered outdoor dining room, and a palette drawn from the water and the sky just outside every window.
On every project, I ask the same question. What does this site offer that is different from anywhere else? Long weekends are the reward for getting the answer right.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE
Renovation Architecture: Ray Booth Design, McALPINE
Photographer: Eric Piasecki
As featured in: Interiors Magazine

We believe a house owes its inhabitants a true reflection of themselves. When we studied our client’s joyful disposition and her signature habit of always dressing in white, it became our North Star for this Nashville home. Every corner was designed to mirror that same light spirit, from the bright architecture of the main salon to a Dutch door built for a very happy golden retriever.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE
Architecture: McALPINE
Photographer: Simon Upton Photography
As featured in: Traditional Home

I am joining the incredible for Reflections on Design, an intimate conversation and book signing in the showroom, sponsored by . We will be reflecting on the evolution of our work, our creative journeys, and the client relationships that have shaped us, celebrating the release of Jay's Modern Classic: Tailored Homes, Timeless Style and my own The Expressive Home: Architecture and Interiors. September 24th at 3:00 PM, Suite 413 in Atlanta, Georgia. I hope to see you there, link to RSVP is in bio.

I don't put a piece in my own house unless I would defend it under oath. This is my home, room by room: the kitchen I cook in every morning, the table where my family eats, the chair I sit in and stare at nothing before bed, even the fireplace where we still burn real wood on cold nights.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE
Architecture: Ray Booth Design, McALPINE
Photographer: Simon Upton

A ladder in a library isn't really there to reach the top shelf. It's there to remind you the room goes further than what you can see from the floor. We designed this one floor to ceiling so the framed pieces stay low and still, at rest, while the books climb past them into the shadow above the sconces. Architecture is how we see, and a library is the one room where we get to design for curiosity instead of comfort. The ladder is just punctuation... the real idea is that a room can ask you to climb before you have even opened a book.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE
Architecture: McALPINE
Photographer: Eric Piasecki
As featured in: MILIEU Magazine

I think of powder bathrooms as the jewel boxes of a home. They're mighty in the minuscule: four walls and no one lives in there long enough to get tired of it. That's exactly why it's the one room where I encourage being bold. The wallpaper you'd never commit to in a living room, the marble that's almost too much, a single perfect sconce. Every one of these came from a different house, a different client, but the instinct was the same: give people one small, saturated moment they don't expect. Editing is the key to happiness everywhere else in the house. In the powder bath, I get to break that rule on purpose.

Interiors: Ray Booth Design of McALPINE