A designer who has actually measured the room
Ratrell Thomas runs White & Blue Bricks out of Warner Robins, Georgia. The practice is new, deliberately plain-spoken, and built around one idea that was already sitting inside its name.
Constraints first, then the pretty part
The first conversation is about dimensions, doors, windows, light, budget and how long you are staying. Not mood boards. A room is a set of hard facts before it is anything else, and most rooms that do not work are losing to one of those facts rather than to bad taste.
So the work goes in that order. Measure it. Find what is actually wrong. Decide what moves and what cannot. Then choose the colours, the fabrics and the pieces — which is the enjoyable part, and the part that goes badly when it comes first.
You will get specifics from me rather than adjectives. The sofa is 84 inches because the wall is 11 feet and the walkway needs 36. That kind of thing.
White and Blue Bricks, explained
Two words that do all the work, and a 1704 maths paper that turns out to describe interior design better than most design books do.
The brick
A brick is the unit — the smallest repeatable piece of a built thing. Interior design is not decoration laid over a room. It is the room, built up piece by piece, in order.
The blue and white
Cobalt on white is the most travelled decorative language on earth: Persia to Jingdezhen to Delft to Lisbon, and everywhere it landed, ordinary people put it on their walls. A brick is structure. A blue-and-white brick is structure that decided to be beautiful.
The turn
In 1704 a French Dominican priest named Sébastien Truchet published a paper on combinations. He took one square tile, split it diagonally, and showed that rotating that single tile through its four positions generates an endless number of patterns.
One unit, four turns, endless rooms. The pieces are ordinary; the arrangement is not. That is the entire job, written down three hundred years early — and it is where the mark comes from. Three tiles close the ring. The fourth turns, and the line runs off somewhere new.
Left to right: the brick, then what six hundred years of people did to it.
Warner Robins, and up the road to Metro Atlanta
Home base is Warner Robins, Georgia. That covers Warner Robins, Centerville, Bonaire, Perry, Macon and the rest of Houston County — and it is close enough to Robins that the thirty-day work makes sense.
Larger whole-house projects run up into Metro Atlanta as well. If you are somewhere in between and not sure, just ask.
These are not my projects, and I am not going to pretend they are
Every photograph on this site is licensed stock. It is here to show the kind of room the work aims at, not to suggest a portfolio that does not exist yet. The people shown are stock models, not clients.
When there are real projects to show, they will replace these, and this paragraph will come down. Until then, ask and I will walk you through what I would do with your actual room.
A brick is structure. A blue-and-white brick is structure that decided to be beautiful.
Tell me about the room.
Send the dimensions, a couple of photos and what is not working. You will get a straight answer about which course fits and what it costs — not a pitch.
