Text Karen Carroll
PHOTOGRAPHY Brian Bieder, Phillip Ennis, Emily Followill
This Atlanta designer creates timeless interiors that showcase the importance of editing, an appreciation for traditional style with a twist, and her love of color and a good white paint.
Southern Home (SH): Your roots are in the Midwest, where you had a successful design business. But you’ve lived in Atlanta for almost 20 years now, and your career has been on a meteoric rise ever since. How has living and working in the South influenced your decorating point of view?
Suzanne Kasler (SK): In Indianapolis, I had a commercial design firm, but when my husband and I moved to Atlanta, I decided to focus on high-end residential. In the South, people really, really decorate their houses—it’s different from where I was brought up. There’s such an appreciation for tradition. I’ve been able to bring a modern sensibility into that aesthetic and still maintain what I call a foundation of tradition. I’m an interior architect by training, so I’m very concerned with getting the architecture right first.
I always want there to be an ease and a prettiness to a room. Ultimately I’ve been able to create my own sense of Southern style, although I really wasn’t consciously thinking that way all those years ago.
