A new Greek Revival–style house by Amelia Handegan in South Carolina is airy and gracious, thanks to refined antiques and charming architectural details like moldings and chair rails.
Editing a decorating magazine, especially one like Veranda, is in many ways the highest kind of education. It’s an incomparable perch from which you get to see the best the field has to offer. There are the serene oases in which every yard of linen, every plush seat back, every gracefully placed chalky lamp seems calibrated to take you far, far away. Or the intensely personal tours-de-force that dazzle you with leopard-print needlepoint, chinoiserie pelmets, lacquerwalls so slick that they reflect your face back at you like a mirror—and you can see yourself grinning from ear to ear with the dizzying deliciousness of it all. And then there are the gorgeous and beautiful iterations that fall somewhere in between, homes that split the difference between fireworks and poetry to land on something that reads like a biography and sends you on your way thinking that, yes, maybe you should try marble door casings, or mixing ikat with stripes, or lining your living room in loden green velvet, or hanging curtains with swags, or painting every room white . . . I could go on and on, but I don’t have to, because all those lessons are here on these pages and they’re our gift to you. Happy decorating.
—Clinton Smith
