Tour Kijrstjn Stahl’s Neuro-optimised Home

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Mary Cornetta

living room with neutral colors and a large mural on one wall

The interior designer used neuroaesthetics to turn her Skidaway Island home into a place to recharge.

Written by Mary Cornetta
Photography by Tobin Davies

When interior designer Kijrstjn Stahl first stepped into the home she now calls her sanctuary in 2021, she felt an immediate pull. Built in 1997 and situated on a golf course in the Deer Creek neighborhood of The Landings, it was what she’d been searching for after relocating from the West Coast. “I was looking for a peaceful and quiet place to land, and I found this house,” she says. “It was exactly what I wanted.”

There was one small problem: the entire interior was too dark. So Stahl, owner of Kijrstjn Anne Design, began redesigning, infusing every space with the calming, brain-based principles she’s built her work around. Specializing in neuroaesthetic design, she approaches her work with an understanding of how the brain responds to color, texture, and lighting. “When getting to know my clients, I learn if they have any neurodiversities, such as OCD or ADHD,” she explains. “I’ll be conscious of that when picking colors and fabrics.”

Stahl’s path to Savannah weaves through years of remodeling, personal reinvention, and the discovery of the neuroscience behind beauty. After raising her three children, she dove headfirst into her post-divorce life by gutting and renovating a Washington state home over the course of two years. “It was very therapeutic!” she exclaims. It also led her to obtain a diploma in interior design.

living room with neutral colors and a white fireplace mantel

Her introduction to neuroaesthetics came later, prompting her to earn a certification from Science in Design. “It’s based on the brain and how our built environment affects how we feel, how we think, how we interact with the world,” Stahl explains. She notes that The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine now hosts a neuroaesthetic design center, one sign of how quickly the field is growing.

After exploring the idea of staying on the West Coast and looking at homes in California and Arizona, it took only one visit to the Lowcountry to sway her. “It called to me,” says Stahl.

Her Savannah home became both a personal healing project and a showroom. “I’ll have people over for cocktail parties, and it showcases what I can do,” she says. “They’ll ask, ‘Why does this feel so calming?’ and I’ll explain that it has to do with the colors and textures.” You can feel the shift as soon as you walk through the front door. The entryway opens to a living room ahead and a dining room to the right, each wrapped in soothing colors and natural textures that flow comfortably into one another. 

Stahl’s design philosophy is simple: “Do you want to be fast-paced and creative in your office? Then we’ll design the space for that. Do you need your kitchen to be calming? Then we’ll design it for that. Your home should be where you recharge and rejuvenate and get the healing you need from the day.”

dining room with a teal ceiling, light turquoise walls and natural wood dining table and benches

For example, in her dining room, a striated Farrow & Ball wallpaper sets the palette. One of its featured paint shades, Oval Room Blue, appears again in the tray ceiling, while another, Pointing, gives the molding a warm white glow. “Off-white is more calming than stark white,” Stahl explains. An elegant wooden-bead chandelier above the dining table and airy fabrics, including linen curtains, subtly ground the space. Many of the embroidered fabrics in her home come from designers she reveres, including Weitzner and Cowtan & Trout, whose floral print appears on the window valance and accents the chair pillows.

Since biophilia — the instinctive connection between humans and nature — plays a significant role in neuroaesthetics, Stahl used it as a central theme of the living room. A hand-painted mural wallpaper depicting delicate trees washes an accent wall with pale blues, greens, and browns. The surrounding walls wear Skylight, a barely-there Farrow & Ball blue. She added a simple trellis from Home Depot inside the tray ceiling — an affordable way to add architectural texture — and lined the built-in bookshelves with grasscloth wallpaper.

While much of her furniture comes from local stores such as Clutter Furnishings & Interiors and Tapley’s Mercantile & Antiques, some she buys new and tweaks to her liking. For instance, she had the sofa swathed in washable velvet, and she tacked on custom trim and fringe that are echoed in a nearby bouclé armchair. Greenery, both real and faux, abounds throughout the room, and a painting of a white heron hangs above the fireplace mantel.

reading nook with dark leather chair, black walls, and dark bird-patterned curtains
bedroom with dark bird-patterned wallpaper and bedding
soaking tub in a bathroom with dark bird-patterned curtains

Just off the entryway, Stahl’s home office offers a different yet equally joyful color theme. Looking up, you’ll notice a shabby chic fan surrounded by a baby pink and white Farrow & Ball damask wallpaper. “I do a lot of ceilings,” she says. She considers it “the fifth wall, and I don’t like to neglect it.” The same pink was painted onto a built-in bookcase, whose custom knobs — rose quartz set in green patina petals — were custom made by Virginia-based company Modern Matter.

Since she works seven days a week, Stahl desired a primary suite that felt distinct from the main living spaces and her office. Most walls wear Sherwin-Williams’ Caviar, a striking shade of black. “This makes my brain stop thinking, and I can be quiet,” she says. The star of the room is Scalamandré’s Botany Bay, a pheasant-and-floral print that cascades across the accent wall, curtains, bedding, and pillows. In a corner near the window is her reading nook, inspired by a neuroaesthetic concept called prospect and refuge.

“If you imagine, years and years ago, people living in caves, the refuge part is about being safe in a cave. This room is my cave,” Stahl explains. “Prospect is when you would stand at the opening of the cave and you would see the land — you saw the river that was a source of water, you saw animals that you could kill and eat, you saw danger.” Her reading chair is a cozy, Eames-inspired piece that sits low to the ground and hugs the body. Artwork by Denver-based Angela Harris hangs nearby. Harris is one of Stahl’s favorite designers and the person who first introduced her to neuroaesthetics during a workshop.

a window seat in a bedroom with hunter green beadboard walls

Natural textures are found in nearly every detail, from caning in the bedframe and a nearby bench to a soft, black blanket crafted from sheep fur by California designer JG Switzer. “I love to find great designers and artists and showcase their pieces,” says Stahl.

As you head into the attached bath, she points out that she replaced all of the home’s hardware with crystal doorknobs. “Part of my stress is when things don’t match,” she says. “It drives me crazy.” The bedroom’s aesthetic flows into this space, with more Caviar paint and Botany Bay print, as seen on the curtains that flank the white freestanding tub. Inside the toilet closet, the wallpaper climbs from floor to ceiling. “You can use big print wallpaper in a small space,” says Stahl.

The powder room down the hallway is another example: a dramatic jungle-scene wallpaper print called D-Dream from the London-based brand Iksel envelops four walls from the waist up. Stahl added a chair rail with caning and painted it in Benjamin Moore’s Mink, a deep brown hue. There are three pendant lights — one made of jute directly overhead and two made of metal flanking the vanity. They’re designed to mimic palm leaves and are green with burnt brown edges. Stahl deliberately hung them at varying heights to shift the eye. “It’s meant to offset the balance and highlight different parts of the mural wallpaper,” she explains. A round mirror rimmed in wicker completes the stunning scene.

a powder room with jungle-themed wallpaper

Since Stahl has three adult children who visit her in Savannah as often as they can, she made sure each of them had a space of their own. Two guest rooms live on the first floor, one of which she’s already designed with a mix of blues and tans, giving it a breezy, coastal feel. The second is mid-transformation into an earthy oasis with linen wallpaper, a unique wool ceiling treatment, and a swing chair. “Swinging is a motion that calms our nervous system,” she says. Both have ensuite baths, and the second’s renovation will include an arched glass-enclosed shower with pebble tile meant to feel like a cave — a nod to the refuge theory.

Upstairs, a third guest suite channels lakeside comfort, a reminder to Stahl of her time vacationing in the Pacific Northwest. “I wanted this room to feel like a lodge,” she says. Beadboard wainscoting — rendered in hunter green in a specific hue that she designed and was custom mixed at Spectrum Paint — wraps the room. Above it, grasscloth wallpaper stamped with tiny green petals softens the loft-like layout. A window seat glows with natural light, overlooking palm trees and Spanish moss. The furniture is mostly a mix of antique and sentimental pieces that blend seamlessly together, and the bath continues both the vintage and nature themes with glossy, palm leaf shower tiles and an antique door from Picker Joe’s Antique Mall & Vintage Market.

a home office with light pink built-in shelves and a glass-top desk

The kitchen, updated by the previous owners in 2013, still features cherrywood cabinetry, which Stahl finds “masculine and heavy.” She has plans to renovate, but according to her, “It works great, and there’s no reason to rip it out right now.”

It opens into a cozy family room that her children adore relaxing in when they’re in town. Tall windows wrap around an L-shaped sectional sofa, and a textured jute rug lines the floor. “It’s therapeutic to me, but it stresses my daughter out to walk on bumpy surfaces,” she says. “When I design for her, it has to be smooth surfaces!”

It’s small details like this that Stahl takes into consideration for her clients. A seemingly insignificant area, like a hallway, matters just as much to her. “Every little space can be designed or decorated to calm our nervous system,” she explains. Currently, she’s choosing a piece of artwork and a chandelier to hang in the spot of the hallway that greets her as soon as she comes in from the garage. “I’ll do the same with my clients and say to them, ‘This can be a focal point, so what do you want this space to give you when you enter your home?’”

Her home is now a place she enjoys with Huck, her 2-year-old Australian Labradoodle, and her children when they visit, whether it be relaxing in the family room or drifting through the Skidaway neighborhood on beach bikes or the golf cart.

At every turn, Stahl’s home is proof that colors can comfort, textures can ground us, and the spaces we design can change how we feel inside them. 

DETAILS 

Find this feature and so much more in the January/February issue of Savannah magazine.

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Mary Cornetta

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