Everyday Spaces: Morningside Apartment

Designers: Jack Dulin & Taylor Camacho

Who are you?
My name is Taylor Camacho. I work at Ann Mashburn, and I'm a senior stylist in the shop. I’ve been there for about four years, so more than half of our time living here in Atlanta. I’m originally from Springfield, Illinois, actually, and have been living here with Jack for close to 8 years now. We moved here to pursue our careers after we graduated from the University of Kentucky, which is also where we first met.

I'm Jack Dulin. I work in public relations for a New York-based agency. I am from Charleston, West Virginia, originally, and in my free time, I like finding new music and hanging out with Taylor and our dog Stevie.

How would you describe your style?
Taylor- So, when we moved to this apartment. I think one of the most exciting things for me was pulling together a lot of images. I'm such a big user of Pinterest. I joke that I’ve perfected my Pinterest algorithm, thanks to how much time I spend on it collecting and searching images. Thinking back to the images I would pull, I would say my style was very influenced by the fact that we live in a 100-year-old space, older, lived-in homes from the countryside mixed with naturally-lit historical-looking apartments from older European cities: I wanted it to look like a good mix of our personal style as well as very heritage-esque. Something lived-in and both light and bright. I have a very sweet friend who loves to refer to our place as “very Copenhagen,” -which, to her credit, is spot on with some of the Nordic apartments I was influenced by on my mood board.
I would say there's a little bit of that Nordic influence, not in the sparse over-minimalist way, but just in the more playful aspects of their style, if you’re familiar with that home brand HAY from Copenhagen, I would say that that is a big inspiration in the type of nordic interior style I lean towards.

Jack- I have a hard time with this question because it's so hard to kind of categorize stuff, you know? So, I will say things that communicate in some unspoken way to my sensibilities. More often than not, that translates to well-made, thoughtful pieces made of natural materials and fabrics.

Taylor- Jack’s very practical when it comes to things. He likes everything to feel useful, and I think we both lean into that. When we are making any home purchase we always ask, “How are we going to use this in the home?” Not to say we don't have a tchotchke here and there, but you're not going to find a lot of that.

Jack- Taylor will sometimes get something, and I'll be like, “Why?” [laughs] Then, after a while, I learn that she had it right all along! I don't think there's a single thing in here that she's bought that I haven't learned to like in some way or another, even if it's not the most useful thing. I feel like this is a guy thing, but a lot of times, you're minimalist, not necessarily in an aesthetic way, but by way of, you just don't get a lot of things. If I were living solo, it'd probably be pretty bare bones in here and maybe unwelcoming. She makes a place a lot more welcoming and a lot nicer. That's the goal.

Taylor- I think if anything, being the millennials that we are, we're certainly influenced by mid-century style, whenever I'm searching, say furniture, on Facebook Marketplace, or wherever, I’m leaning into first looking at mid-century, and then seeing where that takes me, then just kind of going from there.

Jack- My North Star is Frasier's apartment. Which may be a little cold and barren, but then you got that old lazy boy in there from his dad, you know? It kind of looks cool after a while.

How did you become interested in design?
Taylor- It feels like such a natural extension of who we are. We're both in creative zones. Mine is more hands-on with styling clothing. While Jack’s is obviously the written word. I just really wanted a space that felt like what we wear, what we do, and how we socialize. I love hosting so I wanted to make sure our place was suited for having people over. That alone was inspiration enough.
It has felt like a reflection of my personal style. I lead with clothes always because that's what I do for work and it's what I do outside of work. I express myself very much through what I wear. My goal with getting into interiors was to make this apartment feel like an extension of my and Jack’s personal style and that it matched us on any given day.

Jack- When I was in high school, I wanted to be an architect. My parents went to Virginia Tech, and they took me to this thing called Day in the Life of College Admissions, where alumni's kids can go, and there are these seminars major by major for potential students. So I went to the architecture ones. They started talking about prerequisites and GPAs and scores, and I was like, “Alright, I'm never going to be an architect.”
I switched over and thought about journalism for a bit but ended up in PR and communications, so it worked out well. But those interests stuck with me. A big thing in high school was that my friends and I were really into Virgil Abloh. He was a classically trained architect, but I don't think he ever worked in architecture professionally. He had a blog called "The Brilliance," and it just kind of evolved from there, and luckily, I met Taylor who was also into that kind of thing and doesn't think it's weird.

Taylor- Jack’s like our base layer. He likes randomly telling me about furniture an architect he discovered or some new interior design collaboration he’s heard of where he's my base layer of knowledge, and then I get going from there with finding individual styles.

Jack- I’m the Rhythm guitar, and she’s the lead guitar.

What are you trying to capture in your design?
Jack- I think it's more of an art than a science. Like if you think of design and art as a language, which sounds pretentious, though I do, things have a way of speaking to you.
Even when I put on an outfit in the morning, I feel like there's something in my brain that when I feel comfortable and it works, something just clicks. I think that's the same thing with personal style in your home and design. We're pretty intuitive in knowing what feels good to us. I get this could go the opposite way, but trust your gut. Or build a knowledge of what you like and what you don't like before you go about buying anything. This goes for clothing and your home, but buy the best you can afford.

Taylor- I think for me, I just want to make everything look natural. I'm just trying to capture; I think I said this at the beginning, something that feels very livable and makes it feel authentic. That's why we have so many used things. I just wanted to capture “us.” We’re generally happy people, so everything is kind of bright and light, and we live in a light atmosphere. We like color, natural color. We don't have overhead lighting. We have lamps with warm light, and the blinds are always open, and everything that we get should complement a space like that.

Foundational space you build your space around?
Taylor- I would say, if I'm just thinking back to building this out, the first thing that we got new to go in the space is the chair in the corner of the living room. (It’s a vintage Hans Wegner-inspired chair) Everything from there kind of ended up going around that. I think that's very baseline for anything else we added in, we began with, “How do people sit and gather in a space that feels good?” Then, how to build out around that. From there, I'm so color-focused, so then I played with the colors in the room, and I'm very into tone. For example, it’s a very warm wooden chair, so we're definitely gonna do something warm in here. Then, piece by piece it all kind of came together.

What’s your favorite piece in the space?
Jack- I think it's the chaise lounge, which we are pretty sure is a Le Corbusier replica. It’s a very good place to get horizontal, and just decompress, it's by the window, and you're getting a lot of good light over there. It's very practical.

Taylor- What’s funny is that I bought that on my 29th birthday last year as a birthday present for me.

Jack- It’s a good example of something we talked about when she first got it, I was not that crazy about it. I was like, “It's kind of industrial looking.” It's got these big bars underneath. But it's grown on me, and I love it.

Taylor- I don't spend enough time in our guest bedroom, but I think that the yellow awning stripe bed cover in that bedroom makes me the happiest. That’s not a piece of furniture by any means, but that whole setup and what it does to that room just makes me really happy. I would say, for furniture, I do love the credenza that our TV is on. That was one of the first things we bought as a couple. After we got back from our honeymoon, we had wedding cash, and we went to Atlanta Used Furniture. It had a nick on the corner that I've covered up with things over time. The candles are over it now. It's obviously mid-century with the Astro cutouts and the quirky handles. I ended up finding some creepy old family photos in it. Like, really old black and white pictures. So, there's a little story to it, and I was like, “This thing just keeps getting better and better!” So, I love it. It's the pièce de résistance of the living room.

What’s a small detail in design that you love?
Taylor- I love playing with color. I think there was an era of slightly more muted things, like a lot of minimalism was coming up. I felt what was there as an offering for me to purchase within my price range didn't feel the most authentic. So, I turned this corner into finding vintage pieces instead. You can find things in funkier or more vibrant colors when you’re shopping for pieces from other decades. I love it when there are funky colors in interior design. I repainted our dresser, and I did the knobs with this little cobalt-blue floral design. I could have just left it all white, but I wanted to do something else with color to bring the space together and have this subtle focal point that, if you move too fast, you don't notice it. But if you notice, it's like, “Oh! that's kind of cool there.” That makes the space also feel authentic to a person.

Jack- This is something that's hard to detect, but when things in your home are made with local materials. It's hard to do a full house or apartment that way, but there's this great little book I found that is basically like Japanese folk architecture and its influence on Frank Lloyd Wright. He'd only use local wood. Folk architecture argues that there's a human connection to these natural materials sourced from where you are. One of our favorite things about our space is these are original wood floors. It's Georgia wood. The last agency I was at, a lot of our clients were in architecture, engineering, and construction. We had this one client, and they were a large tile and floor coverings event. But as a part of that event, you had all these small family-owned Spanish and Italian ceramic companies. The way they approach their product could be as simple as floor tile. But it was so methodical and circular, and they only used local clay. So, now, everything I look at in the home, I'm like, “Is it a natural wood?” It's impossible to go fully natural unless you've got a lot of resources at hand, but we try our best to find natural and local materials.

Design Hacks?
Taylor- I’d say, when it comes to pieces of furniture, I think one of the biggest and most satisfying things I did for this space is repaint pieces. My advice will always be, “Don't give up on a piece of wood furniture because it can always be changed.” If you bought it at a different time, but now you feel like the wash, or maybe the details you wanted aren’t there, don’t give up on it. I felt that way about ours when we moved in here and sanded them all down and repainted everything. That was such a big hack personally and helped make me enjoy my things longer and give them more of a lifespan, but trying not to give up on it, and it made me think more strategically and critically about how I can make a piece feel better suited for me at that time in my life. There was a time in my life when I liked it as it came, and then now I’m asking, “How do I make it evolve?” I think that there are a lot of ways you can do that with little details, especially in wood furniture and changing out knobs and all of that. You should try and make the most of what you have through creative thinking.

Do you collect anything?
Taylor- There are home things that I find myself always drawn to picking up, and lately, it's been candle holders. I've picked up quite a few of those, and I think that goes back to the hosting aspect of it all. I love candles when you're hosting, like tall tapered candles just throughout the home, probably because I don't like artificial lighting but rather natural lighting. There was a period, too, where it was flower vases, and I had to stop for a second because I didn't want to look cluttered, and we only had so much storage. Then I had to keep up with buying a lot of flowers too.

Jack- I have a really hard time throwing away books. I'll take that one. If I need to get rid of any to free up space, I love giving away books to people. We collect records, but I think we're pretty selective with records. I collect good magazines and good print. Like Holiday, Letiquette, Monocle, and Surface.

Taylor- I have a hard time throwing away any Vogue magazine because I can always go back and reference it. I still love getting magazines; a new favorite is YOLO magazine, and I'd love to get more Cabana magazines, too.

Jack- There’s a lot of really good independent print right now. We hold on to those like they're coffee table books.

You can follow Taylor over on her Substack: Nice Outfit!