Interior Designer Charles
Faudree: French Flair

Photographs by Jenifer Jordan
Produced by Julianne Hilmes and Rebecca Christian

Interior designer Charles Faudree, long a favorite of Traditional Home readers, is known for his fondness for all things French. He is based in Tulsa, where he has an interior design studio and shop. The multitasking and highly versatile designer—who has an international following—writes popular books on design, leads design tours of his beloved French countryside, and designs wallpaper and fabric. He designs both quaint cottages and lavish formal homes. These days he’s at work on fabric and trims for Vervain and wallpaper for Stroheim. “I’m a big believer in the mix,” he says. “A single object on a tabletop or a single work of art on the wall can be nice, but for me, mixing collections provides the most excitement.”

Faudree's work first appeared in our magazine in its second year of existence (February 1990), when we featured a Tulsa home he designed. Even then, he wielded a highly decorative style lush with objects and patterns for an "elegantly eclectic environment that is at once French and English, formal and casual, feminine and masculine." Over the next two decades, we featured 10 more houses he had designed, seven of them being his own homes. (The antique saltbox was short-lived for Faudree, a rolling stone who declares, “I feel about my houses the same way Elizabeth Taylor felt about her husbands. Each one is my best and my last!") Although he swore the home he is in the process of moving out of was his FRP (Final Resting Place), he has fallen in love again with a small and charming cottage.

Three times his own homes made our covers: in April 1991, and on our 2000 and 2002 holiday issues. We’ve watched as his enthusiasm for English florals waned and his French style bloomed in full. In May 1995, he was a Traditional Home Design Award winner. Like the magazine he grew up with, this traditionalist is still evolving.

Here Faudree is shown with his beloved Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.