Finders Keepers

It’s easy to imagine Dan Carithers as a child shouting “finders keepers!” when he discovered an especially shiny stone or some equally cool cast-off. Throughout his career, this dean of Atlanta design not only has known a good thing when he’s seen it, but he has also had the good sense to hang onto it, no matter what the prevailing design wind. “If I love it, it’s right,” he fires off in a gentrified Georgia accent playful with self-mockery. As a result, many of the furnishings he couldn’t resist when he bought his home nearly three decades ago remain as appropriate for it today as they were then.

The house itself, which he has shared the last 15 years with his wife, Nancy, won his heart at first sight. “It was like a Doris Day house,” Dan is fond of saying of the 1937 cottage in Atlanta’s Buckhead community. “You wanted to hum while you strolled past. All it needed was to be chic-ed up.”

Photography by Emily Followill
Text by Candace Ord Manroe
Produced by Eleanor Roper

Design:
Interior designer: Dan Carithers, Dan Carithers Design Consultant, 2300 Peachtree Rd., Suite C-102,  Atlanta, GA 30309; 404/355-8661.
Landscape architect: Spencer Tunnell, Tunnell & Tunnell Landscape Architecture, 1123 Zonolite Rd. N.E., Suite 1, Atlanta, GA 30306;  404/874-8430.