With a laugh, interior designer Kelley Marquis admits it was a sad day for her daughters when she took over an underused room in her home’s upstairs loft. “We had our kids’ PlayStation and a terrible couch in there for a few years before repurposing,” she recalls. “But the mountains of samples and books that every designer brings home needed a more purposeful and permanent place to live.”

She set out to transform the space into her office. The house was built in the 1980s on a private wooded lot in Cary, North Carolina. “The room’s best feature is the original asymmetrical, triangular fixed window and pitched ceiling to match,” she explains. “I love, love projects that salvage as much of the existing architecture as possible, especially if there is some history to it. By keeping the original bookcases and layout, it was really just updating the finishes…which is to say, painting everything white (Sherwin-Williams Bright Ceiling White) and bringing in some interesting furnishings and, my favorite, vintage art and lighting.” 

With a laugh, she adds, “We designed it with all of my favorite colors…brown. The bookcases are a sampling of all my favorites, design books, cloches, things on things, a little taxidermy.” Since hardwood flooring wasn’t an option, she defined the desk area by adding a rug on top of the wall-to-wall carpeting. “It was an easy way to add texture and visual interest,” she explains. “I also really like the storage cabinets behind the desk—they’re much needed from both a practical and an atmosphere/mood perspective. You can never have enough storage, and the woven fronts help to soften the space.” To add a little bit of life, a low-maintenance Dragon Tree stretches towards the window. 

The result is a natural, textural space that feels refined but unfussy—and a perfect place to continue to grow her North Carolina-based design empire. “I love that I feel like I’m in a treehouse at home, but am still close to downtown,” she says. “Raleigh is such a cool spot on the East Coast… growing so, so quickly but still seems to be keeping its southern charm.”