Step Inside the Mind of a Nashville Interior Designer—and One of Her Enchanting Music City Homes

Why do so many of us love looking through strangers’ lit windows on our evening walks, or take the chance to sneak to the upstairs powder room during a party? A person’s home says a lot about them. The wallpaper they chose for a bedroom may speak to their psyche; the hand-me-down credenza in the entryway may nod to their history.

So when the Nashville interior designer Stephanie Sabbe, who also owns the decor shop Heirloom Artifacts, takes on a home, she centers each decision deeply—obsessively—on the highly specific needs, hobbies, interests, and personalities of her clients. But inevitably, a little bit of herself gets in there, too.

In her new book, Interiors of a Storyteller, Sabbe reveals how these stories are intertwined as she cheekily curates tours through nine of her most beautiful projects. “My story isn’t directly related to each project; the connections are loose,” Sabbe says. “But I feel like sharing compels other people to share. When I open up, it encourages clients to open up about who they are and what they want in their house and life.”

Take the home on Parmer Avenue in Belle Meade, for instance, for which Sabbe teamed up with the architect Erin Cypress of Pfeffer Torode to execute a nearly top-to-bottom renovation. “The clients are in their forties with no kids,” Sabbe says. “They’re not formal. They have dogs and both of them hunt. They go to Montana some weekends for fly-fishing trips. They love to host.” 

Sabbe personalized everything in the house to their taste. Since one of the homeowners ties flies in his spare time, Sabbe placed an antique card table by a large window in the moody green sitting room. “We studied the lighting there to make sure he could see the twine,” Sabbe says. Across the room, a walk-in closet hides his supplies. Per the client’s request, Sabbe tucked a TV above the fireplace that can be covered by folding cabinet doors. “Turns out it is a small fireplace,” Sabbe wrote in a caption in her book, “and the proportional TV is literally the size of Michael Scott’s TV in the episode of The Office where he and Jan host a dinner party.” 

Sabbe made the kitchen the house’s focal point, with a massive island perfect for entertaining and a hearth-style gas range surrounded by millwork designed to look a century old. She and Cypress shifted the layout of all the appliances to make the space more open and welcoming. 

“I loved working with Erin,” Sabbe says. “There’s a different level of inner-home communication with a female architect. We’re two moms in the field. We’re the laundry-doers and the pantry-stockers. We’re good at navigating the home.” 

In the introduction to the chapter on the Parmer Avenue home, Sabbe writes that while she was working on this project, her mother—with whom she’d had a strained relationship for many years—moved in with her and her family in home hospice. Her breast cancer was spreading; it would eventually metastasize into her brain. Her telling of it is poignant, and heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny. In light of that context, each detail of her renovation storytelling takes on a deeper meaning.  

“I have lived here just shy of ten years and under this roof I have rocked my babies, kissed my husband, and ushered my mother into heaven,” Sabbe writes of her own home. “Though a home may look pristine from the exterior, a life well lived rarely is.” Sabbe’s new book and her body of work is a thoughtful and hopeful testament to just that.

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