Ndesign: Stephanie Sabbe, Sabbe Interior Design and Heirloom Artifacts | Homes + Interiors

Somewhere among the full-color and richly designed pages of Interiors of a Storyteller (released March 2025), you might forget you’re reading about houses and feel more like you’re reading the diary of an emotionally open and quite hilarious friend — who just happens to have gorgeous taste. Because author Stephanie Sabbe’s stories, from her precocious childhood to her thriving design business, are as seamlessly layered as a well-proportioned room inviting you to step inside and enjoy the textured warmth of family and friends.

“The goal of our work is to imply it has evolved over time,” writes Stephanie, whose own design aesthetic has matured from her childhood summers in West Virginia — where she first contemplated the freedoms of designing a treehouse —  to her time back in Nashville, where she lives with her husband Bryan and four children.

Along the way, she graduated from the University of Tennessee’s interior design program, worked in Memphis designing large hotels and restaurants, and taught design in Boston, where she launched Sabbe Interior Design in 2009 before returning to Tennessee in 2015.

While Interiors of a Storyteller can stand up to the glossy coffee-table books you flip through for the photos, don’t be surprised to find yourself poring over Stephanie’s words, which range from boldly confessional to riotously funny. Chapters alternate between tender personal memoir and architecture-design review, featuring nine drool-worthy projects that paint a coherent picture of Stephanie’s creative aesthetic. 

Projects include residences in rural Leiper’s Fork and Nashville’s urban Richland-West End neighborhood, while structures range from large rambling houses to elegantly concise outbuildings. 

There is no shortage of aspirational design moments in the photographs of whimsical lighting, breakfast banquettes and lofty ceilings with rustic beams — not to mention the enviable array of wallpapers throughout the gracious rooms. But perhaps the real signature of Stephanie’s “more-is-more” creativity is her willingness to offer no-nonsense advice and observations, such as the following guidelines and good ideas:

• “Create visual symmetry while avoiding contrived matchy-ness.” (Page 126)

• “I want to be buried in a casket with horizontally lined fabric.” (Page 134)

• “Three shams and a bolster: That is our absolute max when it comes to decorative pillows on a bed.” (Page 143)  

• “We, as a design firm, are in a pencil-post-bed era and we’re not ashamed to use one in every single project.” (Page 166)

• “Two teens of different genders share this little bath. May God bless them and keep them, may his face shine upon them and give them peace. Amen.” (Page 168) 

Such helpful humor regularly pops up on Instagram at @sabbeinteriordesign, where Stephanie shares glimpses of design projects and family life. Meanwhile, you can explore her designs in her studio at 5133 Harding Pike, where her Heirloom Artifacts home-goods boutique stocks furniture, art, lighting, linens, rugs and books — including her own lovely page-turner.