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Previous: Nate Ward bought the living room's spider chandelier online after seeing one like it in Europe. Red chair designed in 2009 for Moustache, Paris. The Wassily chair is reminiscent of one his grandparents had. Ward painted the artworks. 60 The designer's house favors layers over labels, mixing a Paris- apartment sensibility with vintage finds. S ome years ago, Nate Ward spotted a sinuous, noodle-like chair at the Paris flea market and mentally pinned it for the house he didn't yet have. "It was so sculptural — like a piece of art," he says. When he finally had walls of his own, he scoured the internet and found two in traffic-red. Designed in 2009 for the French company Moustache, the Bold chair is a fabric-wrapped steel loop drawn as a single line, with examples at MoMA and Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. One now punctuates the living room of his new Medical Center-area house, for a deliberate jolt of color and form that animates the space. You might describe Ward's interiors as collected rather than designed. It's a sensibility shaped in his 20s while he was traveling to Paris with a Parisian boyfriend and seeing firsthand how old architecture coexists with generations of styles. Now 37, with a decade in residential development and construction behind him and a handful of side clients, he recently launched his firm, Nate Ward Design, after earning top honors in PaperCity's Design Awards (Residential Interior Design Under 3,500 Square Feet). "Winning was unexpected but also validating," he says. "It inspired me to go full-time in interior design." The spec house, where he lives with his fiancé Danny Cohen, came with standard finishes, so Ward customized the small, open- plan shell with new lighting and a mirrored kitchen backsplash to visually double the space. Character-rich vintage finds bring patina to a handful of stylish basics. "It's a mix of things that aren't supposed to go together: my own paintings, Round Top finds, Facebook Marketplace scores, and even a couple of big-box staples," he says. "About 75 percent of the furnishings came from secondhand sources; I love the tension between sculptural and soft, refined and raw, high and low." After pouring most of their cash into the down payment, the furnishings budget was lean. "I had to be thrifty, and it forced me to be creative," Ward says. His wallet- friendly steals include an oversized modular sofa "perfect for movie nights" and plenty of '70s- and '80s-inspired chrome table lamps and sconces. Wassily chairs in the living room and primary bedroom nod to his Mississippi roots. "My grandparents had several, and I grew up seeing them, so they're special to me," he says. He scored an elegant Art Deco–inspired burlwood console at an estate sale in Memorial and raided a local hotel-liquidation warehouse for oversized canvases he reworks with putty and paint. That warehouse trove also yielded much of the furniture for three bedrooms, including a tulip table, mirror, USM Haller storage console, and a set of minimalist stainless-steel nightstands.