An interior designer's 1927 Old Metairie home is a nature study, inside and out

"It was a lovely vision they had, planting trees everywhere. It was like being in the country," Hammett said.

Carey Hammett loves to bring the outdoors in. Nature scenes and floral themes abound in her 1927 Old Metairie home, from the topiary designs on the pantry wallpaper to a Schumacher rainforest wallpaper in the spa dressing room.

"I hate boring walls," admits Hammett, a leader in the effort to preserve the live oaks that are a signature element of her neighborhood, Metairie Club Gardens, and a board member of The Friends of Jefferson the Beautiful.

Keith Marshall

Contributing writer

Hammett's house sits on an expansive, oak-shaded lot that also accommodates a formal garden, a Lilliputian greenhouse, a pool and a spa pavilion.

The spa pavilion, overlooking a broad swath of rear lawn, is the interior designer's private retreat. (Jogging, she maintains, will ruin both your complexion and your knees.)

Hammett's love of pattern is evident from the moment you step into the home's entrance hall. Wallpapered in a lively profusion of pink and crimson roses, urns and baskets, set against a stark white background, the semicircular hall, with its impressive winding staircase, feels like a garden gazebo.

Sitting behind the demure, carefully organized desk in her home office, Hammett also points out the Scalamandre "Venetian Carnival" wallpaper with its garlands.

Picking out wallpaper was one of Hammett's first post-Katrina design decisions. After the Mediterranean-style home took on more than five feet of floodwater in the storm's aftermath, she decided wallpaper would add life to walls discolored and damaged by flooding.

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An interior designer's 1927 Old Metairie home is a nature study, inside and out