A South Carolina Home Gets a Colorful New Chapter

In the entryway of Charlie Smith and Louise Alexander’s Greenville, South Carolina, home, a pink banquette tucks neatly into the corner. Against a bouncy lotus wallpaper and springy yellow trim, the newlyweds often meet there for lunch dates during the week—in between Alexander’s anesthesiology shifts at the hospital—or for coffee before shuttling the kids to school. Alexander had the banquette specially crafted for her house in Nashville, before a job brought her to Greenville and fate brought her to Smith. “But it fits perfectly, as if it were made for this space,” says the couple’s interior designer, Whitney McGregor. “If I had it custom-made, it would have been the exact same dimensions.” Some things, as they say, are meant to be.

If it had been up to Smith and Alexander, however, they wouldn’t be in this home at all. Though beautiful and well situated in a verdant, hilly neighborhood south of downtown, it carried the heaviness of history. Smith had purchased the house in 2008, with his bride, Ashley. It’s where they brought their babies home from the hospital—first Charles in 2012, then Katherine in 2015. It’s where they watched them grow. It’s where, in 2016, Ashley discovered she had breast cancer, and after a few years in remission, in 2021, it’s where she passed away. Since then, it’s where the family has grieved.

After meeting and falling in love with Alexander, Smith wanted a fresh start. “We knew that a change would need to happen for us to come together as a couple and as a family,” he says. But the real estate market had other plans, and their search for a new home proved futile. “We ran into so many closed doors,” Alexander says. “But when you surrender, there comes so much surprise goodness.”

The first glimpse of hope on the housing front appeared a few months before their wedding in 2023, when Alexander fired off a Hail Mary email to McGregor to see if she was available to refresh Smith’s house. McGregor, who had met Alexander and Smith separately over the years, responded with an emphatic yes. What started out as a few tweaks to paint and light fixtures evolved into a seven-week makeover that transformed the foyer, living room, den, primary bedroom, kitchen, screened porch, downstairs powder room, playroom, and guest room—with a hard deadline of early June, when the couple would return from their honeymoon. “It was like a fire drill,” McGregor says.

The couple gave the designer nearly total free rein, though, emphasizing only that they wanted to inject as much color into the home as possible. “Something terrible had happened, and the house sort of felt frozen in it,” McGregor says. “But the family is so vibrant. They wanted to add more color and more life.”

To achieve the quick turnaround, McGregor opted to supplement pieces the family already had with vintage and secondhand finds. “There was not really time to overthink anything,” she says. A cheeky mirror from New Orleans’ Fleur added a touch of sass to Alexander’s antique pine chest in the entryway. A blue-and-white-striped slipcover over a vintage sectional lightened up the den. McGregor found a kidney bean sofa for the living room on Facebook Marketplace and splashed a soothing layer of green paint on the walls around it. “The green room is where the four of us come together as a family,” Smith says. “It feels so contained and safe.”

While McGregor orchestrated purposeful places the family could gather, she also crafted spots for solitude. The breakfast nook feels like a cozy café booth in the midst of the busy kitchen. The patio table could as easily host a homework session as a dinner party. Upstairs, McGregor left the children’s bedrooms untouched, but layered in whimsy with thick yellow stripes on the playroom walls. When eight-year-old Katherine first saw the house, she twirled through the rooms with glee.

Alexander and Smith took a slower approach, digesting every detail: the Greek key trim in the powder bath; the pop-art installation by Olivia Bonilla in the primary bedroom; the gallery of family photos leading up the staircase. “It took us hours to make it through the house,” Alexander says. “We were in such awe.” When she first glimpsed the screened porch, with its hot-pink and olive-green geometric quilt pattern painted across the floor, she burst into tears. “Pink is my favorite color, and green is Charlie’s,” she says. “Whitney had taken what she knew about both of us. To be in the deepest parts of pain and grief and know that there’s space for that…but now there’s also a space for hope and beauty. Color has brought so much joy.”