“A little bit weird, like the people who live in them,” is how Home Town‘s Erin Napier describes her design style. And her Mississippi home, which she shares with husband and co-star, Ben, and daughter, Helen, perfectly embodies that sentiment.
Thanks to interiors photographer Alyssa Rosenheck’s new book, The New Southern Style: The Interiors of a Lifestyle and Design Movement, we’re getting an inside look at the Home Town star’s personal style and design ethos. “My taste never really changed,” Napier tells Rosenheck in the book. “Since I was old enough to know I loved home design, I’ve loved cozy Americana, worn wood, linen, slipcovered sofas. So I started making my dream home a real one.”
Like her, Napier’s home is steeped in casualness. “There is a smudge in the finish on top near the corner where Ben put his feet up after he finished, thinking the polyurethane had finally cured completely. It had not. I wouldn’t change it,” she says. “The art may be formal oil paintings, but it’s just to dress up the casual outfit the rest of the house is wearing,” she says.
For Napier, a home should reflect those who live in it. “I wish people wouldn’t worry so much about how other people are styling their homes,” she says. “It removes the individualism, which is what makes home so comforting.”
Commenting on “new Southern” style, the theme of Rosenheck’s book, Napier says the whole idea of modern Southern design embodies “a softness, a rumpled unfussiness, a ‘take a nap here’ coziness,” which is a far departure from the “myth that Southern homes are all frilly and fussy with roses and floral wallpaper,” as Rosenheck notes (see the author’s own take on the style in her Nashville home).
Rosenheck’s debut book features interviews with other design icons, like Bobby Berk and Leanne Ford, and is out now.
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