On a single McLean street you can find a 1950s brick Cape, a 1980s colonial and a new custom house twice the size of either. Debbi Porter Interiors is an interior design studio based in Northern Virginia that works with McLean homeowners on all three. The easiest way to start is a complimentary discovery call by phone or Zoom, where you tell us about the house, the rooms and how you live in them.
New houses on older McLean lots
In Chesterbrook, Salona Village and Broyhill-Langley Estates, many of the original midcentury houses have come down and larger custom homes have gone up in their place. The new houses are lovely, and they come with a problem the old ones never had: volume. A two-story family room or a 20-foot foyer swallows furniture that looked generous in the showroom. A sofa that would anchor a room in a 1960s rambler can look like a footstool under a high ceiling.
We handle that the way Debbi once fitted a long evening gown on a petite client, with proportion. Taller headboards and case pieces, larger art, lighting hung at the right height, rugs that actually reach the furniture, and window treatments that run high enough to make the ceiling feel planned. Scale is the first thing we measure in a new McLean house, before color or fabric.
- Seating groups sized to the room, not to the catalog photo
- Chandeliers and pendants chosen for ceiling height and sightlines from the stairs
- Art large enough for a tall wall, or grouped so it reads as one piece
- Drapery mounted near the ceiling line so the windows look taller, not shorter
Brick Capes and ramblers from the 1950s
Kent Gardens and Chesterbrook still have plenty of the brick Cape Cods and ramblers built in the 1950s and 1960s. These houses have the opposite problem from the new builds. Ceilings are lower, rooms are smaller and a dining room might share a wall with the kitchen and a window with the driveway. People who stay in these houses usually love the bones, the plaster walls and the mature trees, and want the inside to catch up.
Here we lean on color and pattern to give small rooms some character instead of trying to make them look bigger than they are. A saturated paint color in a small study, a wallpaper in a powder room, a slipper chair in a print you'd never risk on a sofa. Pieces you already own usually fit these rooms better than anything new would, so we start with an inventory of what you love and build around it.
Planning a project in McLean? Start with a complimentary discovery call.
Selections while the house is still framing
If you're building on a McLean lot, the best time to bring us in is before the selection deadlines arrive from your builder. Tile, stone, plumbing fixtures, lighting locations and millwork are far easier to get right on paper than after the drywall is up. We make the selections and drawings and work alongside your builder and architect. We don't manage construction or the trades, and we find the process goes smoother when everyone knows that from the start.
You can read more about how we handle selections on a new build. The goal is a house that's furnished in the same language it was built in, so the lighting plan already knows where the sofa goes and the outlets land where the lamps will sit.
Collections that move with you
A lot of McLean homeowners have lived overseas or traveled for work, and the house fills up with what they brought back: rugs, ceramics, paintings, a grandmother's dining chairs. Our founder, Debbi Porter, came to interiors from more than 20 years as a fashion designer, living and working across Europe, Asia and North America, and we treat those pieces the way a stylist treats jewelry. They go where they'll be seen, and the room around them stays quiet enough to let them show.
That might mean display cabinetry designed for a specific collection, picture lights over a single painting, or a neutral backdrop in one room so the next room can carry the color. Many of our clients also own second and third homes, and some of the pieces we place in McLean end up in conversation with what's at the beach house or the lake.
