Behind the elegant white facade of interior designer Kristin Ellen Hockman’s 19th-century Greek Revival home on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, lies a haven of muted sherbet hues. The colors traverse the seasons, from the “wintery warm hug” of yellow in the family room to the springtime robin’s egg blue of the dining room to the “pure summer” of the peachy formal living room. “When I think about my childhood home in Oklahoma, it was full of colors—pinks, blues, greens,” says Hockman. “I wanted to create those same cheerful memories for my own daughter by creating a colorful, comfortable home for her. I don’t want her to feel like she grew up in a beige box—I want it to exude lots of personality.”

Color has played just one of the many roles in Hockman’s tale of “breathing new life” into the five-bedroom, six-bathroom house known locally as Gippy. Hockman and her husband, Dustin, escaped to Charleston from the “everyday grind of New York” eight years ago. “We visited for the first time on vacation, and we just fell in love with it,” Hockman remembers. “It was a much slower pace. People were very friendly. There’s so much nature here. There’s architecture, there’s history.” When they visited Gippy, its gardens said to have been designed by the famous early-20th-century landscape architect Loutrel Briggs, they immediately saw the potential of its five-acre plot. “So many dreams we hadn’t really considered suddenly opened up, like having a big vegetable and flower garden, beekeeping, and allowing cats, dogs, chickens, and bunnies to roam free,” says Hockman.

Gippy’s complicated history—originally part of a plantation built by enslaved labor 172 years ago, it was purchased by a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt to use as a hunting lodge in the 1920s before becoming a second home to a local antiques dealer—guided the designer’s approach to the project: traditional but approachable, comfortable but clean-lined, forward-looking yet respectful of the past. “We wanted the architecture to be the main story, to really honor the people who built it, so a big focus of our renovation was not tearing down anything original to the home,” explains Hockman. “It was important to keep anything that was built using enslaved labor—the original moldings, the fireplaces, the floors—and to educate our guests on how this home came to be.”

However, the kitchen at the back of the house, added in the 1930s (there had been no kitchen inside the main house before that), was fair game for renewal. “We kept the original galley layout but modernized it with all new cabinetry, flooring, and appliances,” Hockman details. There was also all the “not-fun stuff,” like replacing the pipes and drainage, and, of course, lots of painting—and repainting. “I could kick myself because when we moved in, all the walls were yellow, and I was just not a fan of yellow, so we painted everything white. Now, five years later, I love yellow!” she laughs. “I’ve been on a crusade to get rid of the white walls ever since.”

Hockman scoured auctions and online resellers like eBay, Etsy, and 1stDibs for antique furnishings, from neoclassical benches and French Empire chandeliers to 19th-century marquetry commodes. “I love antiques, especially when something might have a chip missing, its paint is peeling, or maybe it’s just a little bit broken, because that’s what tells a story,” she asserts. Many of the pieces have scrolls or curves to counter the house’s “serious and symmetrical” bones, lending “some fluidity” to every space. There is a distinctly light, airy feeling to the way they are deployed. “I didn’t want our house to feel like a museum. I wanted it to feel like a home where our two-year-old, Astrid, is allowed to touch everything,” says Hockman. If an antique gets scratched or dented, or their golden retrievers Hudson and George jump on the sofas, or a friend comes over and kicks up their feet, “it’s not the end of the world, because nothing is too precious,” she enthuses.

Pared-down window treatments—white linen curtains and roman shades, simple flat-panel interior shutters—complement the designer’s peripatetic whims for constantly moving the furniture around or choosing new colors in which to swathe the walls. “If I want to paint a room again, those elements will still work,” she explains. To lend depth to each room, millwork borders have been picked out in subtly contrasting shades: creamy white teams with the dining room’s barely blue walls, pale fog outlines the panels of a muted sage door, earthy terra-cotta edges gray-green kitchen cabinets. Hits of colorful gingham—in blue for the Gustavian dining chairs’ seat covers (made by Hockman and her mom), pink on the dreamy canopy above Astrid’s bed—lends freshness to the sophisticated scheme.

Despite the generous proportions of the rooms and the grandeur of certain pieces, like the vast 18th-century tapestry hanging in the entrance hall (“it adds dimension to a space without having a piece of art, and it really sets the tone of the house”) or the 18th-century portraits of Charles de Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Saxony gracing the living room, nothing feels overly cluttered or ostentatious. These are serene, simple rooms; spaces in which to breathe, think clearly, and feel calm. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to fill up this house,” admits Hockman, “but I also don’t think that you should fill a house up immediately. It takes time.” What’s important, though, “is that it feels happy, and it feels like home.”

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 14 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!