OUR DESIGN ASSESSMENT: This vignette—part of a larger study in a contemporary Houston home—is all about deadpan juxtapositions. Starkness collides with splendor, masculinity with femininity, 90-degree angles with coy curves. Houston designer Richard Holley made such unexpected choices: The looming, brooding 2005 canvas (by painter Nancy Nye ) should be bullying the slight, impish Regency settee, but the two bring out the best in each other. In case you don’t get the joke, the concrete floor, as blank and brusque as the painting, also highlights the cheeky ornateness of the settee, ottoman and pillow. (Plopping the furniture on an equally florid rug would be far less modern.) Our favorite bit of visual wit: How the splaying lines of the camera’s tripod echo the pillow’s sunburst pattern. Only criticism? The seating looks rather uncomfortable.  THE DESIGNER’S RESPONSE: “This is a disorienting conversation to have,” said Mr. Holley. “You’ve put in words things I just did intuitively.” A blockier sofa might have matched the décor’s squared-off elements, he said on reflection, but “this project was all about a client who is eccentric and unpredictable. She’s an artist and a beekeeper and a Buddhist. I wanted to amuse her eye.” He deliberately skipped a rug—“it would have confused the simplicity”—but didn’t consciously orchestrate the tripod-sunburst echoes. As for the comfort factor, “The room also contains an overscale chaise and an overstuffed chair,” he said in his defense. This arrangement, designed to lure the eye down a hallway and into the room, “is more decorative than functional.”
A Masterclass in Unpredictable DécorWe pit our aesthetic assessment of a study in a Houston home—full of opposites that attract—against the intent of the designer, Richard Holley