Designer
Emerald & Oak
Interior design for historic homes, new construction, and full renovations.
Discipline
Interior design
Emerald & Oak designs interiors that hold up to daily life without flattening a house's character. The work runs from full-house furnishing and finish selection to targeted rooms — kitchens, primary baths, libraries — with a preference for natural materials, layered lighting, and millwork that reads as original to the house.
Representative work
- Historic kitchen reworks
- Whole-house furnishing packages
- Library and study millwork
Services
- Full-house interior design and furnishing
- Kitchen and bath design
- Finish, tile, and cabinetry selection
- Custom millwork and built-in design
- Lighting plans and fixture specification
- Art, textile, and furniture sourcing
Context
Working in Chantilly's pre-war housing stock
Interiors in pre-war houses fail for predictable reasons: rooms are smaller than modern furniture assumes, ceilings and window heads sit at heights that fight standard casework, original trim profiles get replaced with stock, and lighting is treated as one fixture per room rather than as layers.
Designing well inside this housing stock means working with the bones instead of against them — keeping the millwork vocabulary consistent, sizing furniture to the actual room rather than the showroom, using natural materials that age rather than finishes that only look right when new, and planning light at three levels so a 1930s living room is usable at nine in the evening.
The result should be a house that reads as though it has always been this way and simply had a very good century, rather than a period house wearing this year's palette.
Process
How a project runs
Step 1
Programming
How the household actually lives, room by room: where people land, what gets stored, who cooks, where the noise is, and what the house is failing at today.
Step 2
Concept and materials
Plans, elevations, finish palette and millwork detailing developed together so the tile, cabinetry, stone, hardware and lighting resolve as one scheme.
Step 3
Documentation
Drawings and specifications detailed enough for the builder to price and execute without improvising at the wall.
Step 4
Install
Procurement, delivery management and a staged install so the house is finished rather than merely complete.
Diligence
What to ask before you engage
- How do you handle millwork profiles when matching original trim?
- What is the lighting plan at ambient, task and accent levels?
- Are furnishings specified to the room's real dimensions and circulation?
- How are procurement, freight and installation handled and billed?
Service area
The firms featured here work throughout Chantilly and the surrounding 28205 corridor — Commonwealth Park, Country Club Heights, Plaza Midwood, Elizabeth, Oakhurst, Merry Oaks, Shamrock Hills and Windsor Park — and across the adjacent in-town neighborhoods of Cotswold, Myers Park, Dilworth, NoDa and Uptown Charlotte.
Questions
Emerald & Oak FAQ
What does Emerald & Oak do?
+
Interior design. Interior design for historic homes, new construction, and full renovations.
Does Emerald & Oak work in the Chantilly area?
+
Yes — Emerald & Oak works throughout the Chantilly corridor of east Charlotte and the surrounding 28205 neighborhoods, alongside the wider Charlotte market.
Why does historic housing need a specialist?
+
Pre-war Charlotte housing carries specific cost centers: knob-and-tube or undersized electrical service, cast-iron drain lines, crawlspace moisture, complex roof geometry, plaster, and original wood windows. Trades used to post-2000 construction routinely underestimate all of them.
Our Network
The rest of the group
Keep reading