Theresa Butler
Guest Curator
Photo Credit: Marc Mauldin
“Art isn’t the finishing touch. It’s often where the design begins.”
Theresa Butler is the founder of Theresa Butler Interiors, an Atlanta design firm with more than 20 years of making homes feel like the people who live in them. But before design, she spent years as a pediatric certified registered nurse anesthetist, a career that taught her to read a room fast, stay steady under pressure, and never assume two people want the same thing. That attentiveness carried straight into design.
Ask her clients what they want, and they’ll say a beautiful room. Listen the way Theresa listens, and you’ll hear the real request underneath. Places to reconnect; rooms to celebrate in; somewhere to land after a hard season. Her precision handles the practical questions, but her intuition answers what the room needs to be to feel like home. Art is where that answer lives, so she starts there and lets the design follow.
“I’m less interested in whether a piece perfectly matches the sofa and more interested in whether it still catches your eye years later, reminds you of a meaningful trip, a special season of life, or someone you love.“
Work with Theresa, and she might ask where your travels have brought you, or what song you have on repeat. What stays with you? Those answers become her palette: expressive abstraction, contemporary portraiture, organic forms, unflinching color. Art with a long fuse—a sense of place or a history behind them, the kind that makes you pause on the hundredth look and outlast trends because they speak to your experiences.
That conviction—that the art we live with should mean something—is one she’s carried home from everywhere. Wandering London, New York, and across Africa, where craftsmanship isn’t decoration but everyday life, taught her the lesson underneath all of it: the most memorable spaces are the most personal.
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So throw out matching the art to the sofa, and notice the pause instead. A potter and painter herself, Theresa will take a brushstroke you can see, a texture you can feel, or a small imperfection over flawless-and-forgettable every time. That, she says, is “evidence of the person who made it”—and in a world of mass-produced everything, it’s what makes people slow down. “Handmade pieces create connection, and I think every home deserves a little more of that.”
Take the permission Theresa is offering and run with it. Go bold with color, mix old with new, and choose art because it means something to you.
Remember, your home should tell your story. Nobody else’s.
Made for the Hundredth Look
Seamless Integration by Gulyás Edina
Broken Alder by Randall Tipton
Summer by Suren Nersisyan
She by Vanessa Valero