Interior designCharleston, South CarolinaSince 2011
We design houses that feel collected over forty years, not delivered on a Tuesday. Limewashed walls, old wood, linen that softens with every wash, and a team that stays until the last picture is hung.
01The philosophy
Celia Ravenel opened the studio on Elm Row in 2011, after ten years restoring old houses up and down the peninsula. There are nine of us now, and one rule: restore before you replace.
Celia RavenelFounder & principal designer
02House tour
A 1794 single house south of Broad, put back together for a family of five and one elderly spaniel.
Keep scrolling
01
Cognac velvet, olive linen and the original heart pine floor, sanded once and oiled twice. The pleated lamp came from an estate sale on Wadmalaw; the armchair is new and pretends it isn't.
02
We kept the old cabinet boxes, rebuilt the doors in beadboard and painted everything Marsh Hen, a green-grey that goes nearly black at dusk. The brass bridge tap will darken where hands touch it, which is the point.
03
Morning light reaches this corner first, so we let it do the work: a block-printed sprig paper in Benne Seed, a pedestal table found in Summerville and the spindle chairs the family already owned.
04
Up under the eaves: a hydrangea paper, pinch-pleat linen and not one pillow without a ruffle or a scallop. Navy waffle wool for January, Belgian flax for August.
"The house finally feels like it's on our side."Margaret Hartley, Tradd Street Begin a project
03Services
Most clients start with the design hour and end up with the whole house. Some stop at the kitchen. All three come with the same people and the same standards.
Every room, every lamp, every hinge. We draw it, cost it, order it, run the trades and install it all in two days.
A kitchen, a primary suite, the parlor nobody sits in. Full drawings and a costed list you can buy through us or on your own.
Two hours in your house with a senior designer. Bring the paint chips and the arguments; we leave a written list of what to do next.
Week one · two hours
We sit at your kitchen table, walk every room and ask how you actually live: who reads, who cooks, where the dog sleeps. Then we measure everything twice.
Weeks two to ten
Floor plans, elevations and a sample box you can hold: real cloth, real paint on real board, real wood. Then a costed schedule of every piece, so nothing surprises you in month nine.
The last forty-eight hours
Everything is received, checked and stored at our warehouse in North Charleston, then installed in two days. You leave in the morning. You come home to beds made and pictures hung.
04Selected houses
We take on eleven houses a year, mostly on the peninsula and the sea islands, with the odd one in Savannah when the house is too good to say no to.
"Every house we take on gets a person, not a portal. Your designer answers the phone."
Ask about your house05Sources
Every project gets a box like this, posted to your door before anything is ordered: real cuttings, real paint on real board. These are the ones we reach for most.
Lime putty and crushed shell, brushed in crosshatch so the wall moves with the light all day.
Cotton, not poly: it crushes and softens like a good saddle.
Bright for a month, then honey, then brown where you touch it.
Washed twice before we sew it, so it never shrinks on you.
A narrow navy stripe for porch pillows and children's rooms.
Dense, resinous and older than the country. We patch, never replace.
Our house green-grey, nearly black at dusk.
Woven by hand in Kingstree, re-woven every twenty years.
Unfilled, so the small pits catch shadow and look like age.
Drawn in the studio from a scrap of 1830s paper found behind a mantel.
Heavy enough for January, open enough for March.
06In print
Ravenel has a rare gift: her rooms look as if the house grew them, slowly, over a hundred years.Lowcountry House & Garden · March 2026
"We moved in on a Thursday afternoon. By dinner it felt like we'd lived there for years."
Margaret Hartley, Tradd Street
07Begin a project
Sallie Manigault reads every note herself and replies within two working days. If it's a fit, the first conversation is a phone call. The second is at your kitchen table.