Residential Interiors
Rooms worthy of the hours they keep.
Maria Timmerman designs homes for the mornings, the dinners, and the long conversations. The parts of a life you cannot get back.
Begin with a conversation
Maria Timmerman designs homes for the mornings, the dinners, and the long conversations. The parts of a life you cannot get back.
Begin with a conversationThe best rooms never ask to be noticed. They ask you to stay.
Money returns; time does not. This is the arithmetic the practice rests on. Your life is made of hours, and most of them happen at home: the coffee before anyone else wakes, the dinner that runs long because no one wants to leave, the child asleep over a book. Most people furnish for the occasional guest. Maria designs for the ten thousand ordinary evenings in between.
And beauty alone is not the goal. A museum is beautiful; no one lives in one. The work is to make taste and comfort the same gesture. The gilt mirror above the sofa someone falls asleep on. The fine rug that forgives the dog. What Maria designs, in the end, is the setting for your time.
For homes that are loved but not finished. Maria sources at auction, at estate sales, and at the flea markets she can never drive past: rugs, mirrors, pictures, the one table that settles a room. Nothing bought to impress; everything bought to stay.
For the one room that never quite came together: the living room no one sits in, the bedroom that is only a place to sleep. Maria takes a single space from start to finish, so the room you use most becomes the one you would never change.
Whole homes, taken from the first walk-through to the last book on the shelf. The painters, the deliveries, and the thousand small decisions land on Maria’s desk instead of yours. Your job is to keep living your life.
“Maria never rushed us. She asked where we drink our coffee, where the grandchildren land. The home is beautiful, but mostly it is easy.”Shelly · New Orleans
“Everyone who walks in wants to stay for dinner. It’s the prettiest home I’ve ever lived in, and nobody is afraid to sit down.”Melissa · Danbury, Connecticut
“The house looks collected, not decorated. Guests assume it took three generations. It took Maria.”Camille · Garden District
Everything begins with a long visit, at your home or hers, talking about how you actually live: mornings, guests, children. Furniture comes later. Then the design takes shape around you. Some clients want a say in every fabric and sit with Maria over each decision as it comes; others want to hand over the keys and be astonished. Both get their wish.
Either way, the mess is never yours. The painters, the deliveries, and the inevitable surprises are Maria’s to absorb; you receive a weekly note rather than a weekly crisis. And on the day the doors open, the home is finished in full. Beds made, books shelved, lamps lit, the matches waiting by the fireplace.
A room by Maria looks gathered over a lifetime, arranged for the hours no one photographs: the slow morning, the book left face down, the chair everyone returns to.
Maria has been arranging rooms for as long as anyone remembers, well before it carried a name or a fee. She was born in Spain and raised on the California coast. New York came later, and she stayed on for years. Along the way she cut a country clothing line for women who ride. For a long stretch afterward she was a guest in private homes and resorts far off the map, open only to invitation, the kind of rooms where the flowers were changed before they had a chance to drop. Her eye was gathered slowly, over a life rich with places, which is what makes it hers.
New Orleans is the place that kept her. She bought a Victorian at blind auction on an oak-lined street Uptown: five thousand square feet under fifteen-foot ceilings, a dying home with good bones and little else. She brought it back one room at a time, until the street forgot the home had ever gone dark.
She reads auction catalogues the way other people read novels, and will drive three states for the right Georgian mirror. She is exacting about the things no one names: the depth of a sofa cushion, the weight of a drawer pull, the warmth of a reading lamp.
She would rather be found by introduction, one friend telling another over a long dinner. Most are in New Orleans or Houston; every so often one is a coast away. The good ones run long.
Maria takes on a small number of projects each year, which keeps the work personal and the phone calls returned.
If there is a home on your mind, one you are building, renovating, or finally finishing, write and tell her about it. She reads everything herself, and the first meeting is unhurried.
studio@mariatimmerman.com