Interior designer Laura Archibald has been designing for her clients Gracy and Scott Wooster for many years. When they came to her asking for a redesign of the study, she was eager to perform a makeover. The Woosters wanted to take the space from an ordinary neutral room to something bold and different. In fact, Archibald’s client came with a specific request – she wanted all the walls painted in a high-gloss lacquer. The challenge was deciding on the perfect color. “Not every color is great for a lacquer finish,” Archibald explains. “So it took us a little bit of time to land on a color that was bold and appropriate. We were looking at fabrics, and when we got to the pinkish-purple tone in the Osborne & Little fabric we considered for pillows, that’s when it hit us – magenta.”

The paint, which was a high-gloss paint that appears as lacquer, was a custom color mixed by Eastway Paint and is from Fine Paints of Europe. “I must have gone back three or four times to get the color exactly right,” Archibald recalls. From there, Archibald decided to go for a tone-on-tone look and chose to reupholster the existing sofa in a shade as close to the wall color as possible – a velvet fabric from Pindler. “I thought that sofa would be perfect in the nook between the bookshelves. The paint really sparked the rest of the room,” Archibald says.

A vintage ottoman in white vinyl brings high contrast, and Archibald chose a popular but perfect Stark antelope rug in navy blue. “The magenta and navy blue were really a beautiful combination of colors, and dark tones can still provide contrast without being opposites,” she says. A custom-made console table sits perched beneath the television, painted white with an Ashe wood inlaid on the top. Art by Herb Jackson of Hidell Brooks Gallery brings in the perfect amount of jewel tones to complement the room.

Vintage chairs flank the sofa that is covered in a Robert Allen cut velvet fabric, and hardware by Charlotte-based Addison Weeks was chosen for the built-in desk. “I thought the brass hardware with a turquoise stone was an ideal match for the bold colors in the room,” Archibald says.

“The colors in this room are jewel tones, redefined,” she continues. “Normally, I hear ‘jewel tones’ and see red, navy, and hunter green, but these are today’s hues, and it’s exciting to design with so much color.”