Meaningful Artifacts

For the second year in a row, Frances Reath Merrill ’96 has landed on Architectural Digest’s list of the world’s top 100 interior designers and architects. Her work, as they describe it, strives for warmth, elegance, and personality, and is “characterized by an audacious yet controlled layering of pattern and color.”

 

As it turns out, there is a long, colorful thread connecting the decor Merrill chose for her dorm rooms at St. Paul’s School, her studies in creative writing, and her position among the best in her industry.

 

A voracious reader as a child growing up in Greenwich Village, Merrill loved immersing herself in different worlds and trying to determine what drives characters. That curiosity in exploring how things fit together helps her now when trying to figure out what will make her clients feel most at home.

 

Entering the world of SPS, Merrill lived with peers whose rooms showed her just how varied a sense of home can be. And, in the School’s structured atmosphere, those rooms were the singular space they could control and personalize — one’s choice of bedspread spoke volumes.

 

“That’s something I carry with me, the sense of what a comfort a space that really feels like yours can be,” Merrill says. “It’s a place to retreat to, where you can refresh and recharge so you’re able to face what needs to be done in the world.”

 

The importance of such a retreat has perhaps never been greater than during the pandemic, when many have inhabited their homes in deeper and different ways. Yes, people want more doors now, but what they really want, Merrill contends, is a haven that feels comforting. The studio she founded in 2009, Reath Design, specializes in creating those havens through visual storytelling that is a little quirky and highly personalized to a client’s functional and emotional needs. Inspiration can come from anywhere — travels, a father’s desk, the pattern of a vintage coat — and to find it, Merrill and her team ask a lot of questions.

 

“I like getting to know our clients and learning how we can make their house something that tells the story of how they live in that particular space,” Merrill says. “It really comes down to figuring out what the story is and what is the right kind of world for this house and these people. If you have a strong narrative from the beginning, then when you’re trying to figure out if a tile or light fixture works in this world, it’s a lot easier.”

 

Ideally, Merrill’s clients plan to remain in their homes long term and already have meaningful artifacts that, in her hands, become art that is compatible — and comfortable — with life.

 

“What makes a house beautiful is to have artifacts that mean something,” she says. “I love when people come with a lot of their own things because we aim to create something that doesn’t look like it was designed but could have come together in no other way. The best reaction is if someone walks into the house and tells our clients, ‘This looks exactly like you,’ as if we weren’t there at all.”