Photos by Jie Deng
Text by Richard L. Gaw

For those fortunate enough to be anointed with a creative spirit, the origins of those gifts are often traced back to the impressionable time of childhood - a place. For Jane Norley of Unionville, that place was Macon, Georgia, where her grandparents James Edmund Ferguson and Mary Evans – an architect and an interior designer - lived in a beautiful Southern home.

It was a sacred place to the young girl, filled with nuanced rooms of various treasures and heirlooms, a stunning outdoor garden dotted with roses and camellias and art on every wall. 

“That time of my life was magic,” Norley said of the home. “There was beautiful sunlight, gorgeous details and architecture, but most of all, it felt so warm and comfortable because my grandparents had designed and built it for themselves. It was not grand and ostentatious, but comfortable and it suited their practical nature.

“The two of them together, created this wonderful lifestyle of architecture and design. Their home permeated every cell of my being, and that is what I took with me as an adult – that life should be safe, fun and comfortable. As I got older, I thought, ‘How do I make what I learned so intuitively as a child into something I can offer others, to help them discover what they want to feel in their own homes?’”

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At the Lunar Meadows home she shares with her husband, Joe, Norley has brought the same aesthetic essence of her childhood memories to both its interior and exterior spaces. Each room serves a conversation place, filled with vintage pieces, found treasures and framed art that is illuminated by the sun during the day and softened by the moonlight at night. Outside, her gardens are a sweet embrace of florals and pastoral flow. 

These expressions are what she has brought to her long career as an interior and exterior designer.

“When I had my own design company for 25 years – which started in Los Angeles and carried through to West Chester – I would impart upon my clients that I wanted their home not to reflect my personal style, but to reflect theirs,” she said. “During our work together, I had no cookie-cutter plans for my clients to choose from. Rather, it was about digging deeper, because I wanted to know what they wanted to feel within their home.”

Throughout her long career, Norley - whose background is in architectural space planning - first trains her creative eye on how her ideas are melded within the function of a home. 

“In my career, I have worked with a lot of builders who would construct the homes, and my job has been to compliment the building process, and that always entails asking my clients, ‘How are you going to live in the house, and what is the natural flow from room to room?’” she said. “I do not come in with the idea of doing something beautiful and artsy. I have to work within the confines of what has already been constructed.”

Norley - a designing consultant with Classic Lawns and Gardens in Kennett Square – believes that the same attention to detail should transcend a home’s outdoor places, from selecting the right greenery and florals to complimenting those colors and textures with outdoor furniture.

“I look at exterior design as if I am creating rooms in the garden, so that as you enter, you arrive at a place that feels different than the place you were before,” she said. “Nature changes daily, so the exterior life you live in your outdoor spaces should accommodate for that. It should follow the spontaneous movement of nature.”

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Recently, Jane and Joe designed a daffodil garden in the middle of their lawn in the shape of a crescent moon, so that next Spring, when the garden springs into being, they will form a near perfect ‘C’ shape. They also recently planted a variety of a magnolia tree called “Moonglow,” and when the moon rises, its leaves will reflect its light and glisten beneath the nighttime sky.

Their home is called Lunar Meadows for a reason.

“The moon is always in a cycle, and we call it, “living in time outside of time,’ and to us, most of the world lives according to the sunrises and sunsets,” she said. “You go to work nine to five, you have our weekends and it’s all very regimented. We enjoy lunar time – time outside of time – because when we come home to our sanctuary, the time that we dedicate to our work stops, and we begin to live in a more spontaneous cycle.”

If the idiosyncrasies of Jane and Joe’s sense of style include the ritual of following the patterns of the sky above us, particularly at night, then the professional life that Jane leads as an interior and exterior designer is to move each client to find their own idiosyncrasies, in homes and gardens that celebrate their own sense of style.

“Style is that which we show the world, and what you feel confident in sharing,” she said. “Style changes over a period of time. When you’re thirty, you may want to show the world one thing, and when you’re sixty, it is okay to give yourself permission to show the world something else.”

You can find Jane Norley on Instagram at @designcourtesan and @lunar.meadows.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].