Slow Style Home: Decorating Personal, Meaningful Interiors

Mastering the Mix of Colors, Patterns, and Heirlooms with Maggie Dillon

·27 min·2 clips

Designer Maggie Dillon reveals how to mix bold patterns and heirlooms without overwhelming a room.

The episode begins with host Zandra introducing the Slow Style Home podcast's mission to help listeners create personalized, sustainable homes without relying on trends. She mentions a Style DNA quiz on the website to uncover design preferences. Guest Maggie Dillon, a designer featured in House Beautiful, joins to discuss her expertise in mixing patterns, colors, and eras. Maggie explains her approach to pushing clients outside their comfort zones, citing an example where a client's husband disliked plaids, leading to a compromise with plaid chairs instead of sofas. She details how she helps clients visualize patterns by spacing fabric samples in a room rather than just on a mood board. The conversation turns to incorporating heirlooms, with Maggie describing a project where she added a dramatic skirt to a client's grandmother's dining chairs to modernize the set. They discuss the Bloomsbury aesthetic, characterized by bold pattern play and mixing unconventional colors. Maggie walks through specific rooms: her guest bedroom with slate blue wallpaper, a jute rug, and leather side tables; a living room with Kit Kemp mural wallpaper, a plaid sofa, and a massive heirloom mirror; and another room with framed Gucci heron wallpaper panels and symmetrical seating. Throughout, Maggie emphasizes using solids and neutrals to ground patterns, mixing textures like leather and jute, and balancing new and old pieces. Zandra highlights the importance of creating conversational spaces with varied seating. The episode concludes with Zandra encouraging listeners to view photos on the website and leave reviews.

As heard by us

A guest bedroom makes pattern mixing feel legible through scale, tone, wallpaper, and symmetry.

Design advice is most useful when it has to work in a real room, and this review keeps the test inside Maggie Dillon's guest bedroom. Zandra presses on how a medium-scale wall pattern, an almost egg-shaped headboard, three pillow patterns, and two patterned benches can feel…

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Why you'd press play

Want a bold guest bedroom to feel happy and layered instead of overwhelming?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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