With Beth Webb’s Tranquil Interiors, Home Becomes a Sanctuary

March 23, 2025“I want a home to be well-designed, I want it to be beautiful, but more than anything I want it to provide peace,” Atlanta-based designer Beth Webb writes in the introduction to her latest book, Embracing Beauty: Serene Spaces for Living, which Rizzoli recently published.

And indeed, Webb, who founded her design studio more than two decades ago, has built a sterling reputation for creating soothing interiors that calm nerves frayed by the often frenetic contemporary world.

In this book — her second, following 2017’s An Eye For Beauty — Webb takes readers on a tour across the country, showcasing 12 recent projects, from an Arts and Crafts–inspired residence on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island to a rustic yet refined mountain home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Embracing Beauty invites readers to trace a through line in her work, as Webb imbues all her designs with references to the homes’ history and surrounding landscape, as well as with the personalities of her clients, many of whom have turned to her over the years for help with multiple residences.

The book is also an inspiring story of aesthetic collaboration, the houses in it featuring masterful commissions by some of the most sought-after contemporary architects working in the South today, Atlanta’s D. Stanley Dixon and T.S. Adams and Birmingham’s Jeffrey Dungan among them. 

Sanctuaries Designed by Beth Webb Throughout the South

For the dining room of her own home, on South Carolina’s Brays Island, Webb commissioned artworks from American landscape artist Michael Dines and surrounded a simple table with Christian Liaigre director’s chairs.

The library of Webb’s home was originally conceived as her husband’s study, and he commissioned the desk. But the interior designer ultimately kept the room for herself. The work over the fireplace is by Kate Hunt.

Webb dressed the primary bedroom of another Buckhead home in diaphanous cream-and-white embroidered textiles. She describes the space in the new book as “a dream.”

Although husband and wife each have their own bathroom in the primary suite of the Seaside, Florida, home, Webb designed the windowed all-white area in their bedroom as a shared space. The chairs and ottoman are from Formations, covered in fabric from La Maison Pierre Frey.

Webb used a barrel-back Formations wing chair at either end of the table in the Seaside home’s dining area. The artwork in the niche is by Heather Lancaster, acquired through Spalding Nix Fine Art.

Offering spectacular floor-to-ceiling views of the Gulf of Mexico, the Seaside great room contains swivel chairs by Formations and a custom rug by Stark.

In the kitchen of another home on Brays Island, which Webb designed for clients, she used the wood grain of the rift-cut white oak cabinets to emphasize the space’s verticality. Photo by Emily Followill

Webb wove together layers of natural materials, including wood, wicker and jute, throughout the Sea Island, Georgia, house. Over the living room fireplace, she hung a painting of a local egret by Kate Griswold. Photo by Emily Followill

Perhaps the most compelling project in Embracing Beauty is Webb’s own home, on Brays Island, in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The modernist-inspired house — by James Choate, also of Atlanta — sits beneath a canopy of old oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Inside Webb has deployed a palette of organic materials, such as wenge, cedar and white-oak woods, and decorated the soaring spaces with numerous artworks. (The designer was an art dealer in a previous life.)

There’s also a rich array of objects and antiques found on her travels around the world, including Japanese ceramics and ikebana baskets and vintage pieces discovered at Les Puces in Paris.

With its high glass walls framing the verdant wilderness outside, the house provides a fitting backdrop for a designer who knows how to layer color, texture, nature and beautiful finds to create homes that are true sanctuaries.