Businesswoman gives homes fresh, new look

By JAN HOGAN

VIEW STAFF WRITER

Giving a home a new look can be costly.

A sofa here, an end table there, a piece of artwork on the wall -- it's enough drive a homeowner to debt.

That's where Ruthanne Hatfield comes in. In fact, she comes right into your home and provides the fresh look without purchasing so much as a knickknack.

Using only the room's existing furniture, Hatfield will rearrange everything so it has a professionally pulled-together look.

She's not so much an interior designer as she is an interior re-designer. In fact, her company is called The Art of Interior Placement.

"Each room has a focal point," she said. "Whether it's a window or a fireplace or whatever, but once I identify what it is, I can build around it."

To re-do a room means removing the knickknacks, the wall hangings and all the furniture and starting with a barren room. She then assesses what the room needs and works her magic.

Hatfield estimates she's done about 300 rooms in the past four years, with much of the business coming from other businesses.

For individuals, her first visit is an hour-long consultation, which costs $50. From there she can determine if the job will take half a day or a full day and set her schedule, and price, accordingly.

For those who want to move the furniture themselves, she'll advise them on proper placement for $100.

Hatfield displayed her room design talent as a youngster, beginning with her family's house.

"My parents were never sure what the house would look like when they came home," she said with a laugh.

She earned her degree in Interior Designing and Space Planning at Endicott College in Massachusetts, but her particular talent for discovering was realized by taking an intensive week-long course. The result is Hatfield can create a room where people naturally feel comfortable.

One of the mistakes people make when they decorate a house is to have two large pieces of furniture facing each other. It gives people nowhere to stare but at each other, she said. Another mistake is to back a couch up to the longest wall and center a picture above it. Too rigid, Hatfield noted.

She likes to pull furniture away from the walls and create cozy conversation areas, set off with the correct lighting and maybe an area rug.

She said her most challenging project was making over a huge room which had completely straight lines. Undeterred, she followed her basic rules for incorporating the space, using multiple levels of height to draw the eye and making the largest upholstered piece anchor the space, and her instincts just took over from there.

"You know the job is done right if you have winding traffic patterns," she said. "You need peaks and valleys. People like to discover little treasures as they go along."

One-quarter of Hatfield's business is staging a house for re-sale. Another 23 percent involves new-home move-ins or setting up the furniture as soon as the movers truck it in. She likes those projects as it gives her a clean slate with which to work. That and she doesn't have to move the furniture twice -- a big plus.

While mixing the tastes of young newlyweds is challenging, not trampling on the "But I've had this for years" mentality of second marriages is harder. Hatfield has had to mix leather with chintz, paisley with animal prints -- but she does it.

"Sometimes I put a throw on the leathers," Hatfield admits. "But I've found that having a third person there to arrange everything usually stops the fighting."

Hatfield can be reached at 617-1230.