Long before Jane Keltner de Valle and Giancarlo Valle met, married and founded a design practice together, each grew up in homes filled with color.

He was raised among hand-painted furniture, vibrant textiles and South American art at houses in Chicago, San Francisco, Guatemala City and Caracas, Venezuela.

She grew up on New York City's Upper East Side, in an apartment layered with Native American artwork, Southwestern rugs, leopard print and chintz. The aesthetic was the brainchild of her parents and the interior designer Keith Irvine, whose clients also included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

"At homes that are so pared back and white and clean, it's kind of hard to insert a person or a family and life into that," Keltner de Valle, 47, said.

The couple's appreciation for elevated-but-liveable spaces is the foundation for their interior design and furniture business, Studio Valle de Valle, formerly known as Studio Giancarlo Valle. A just-released book features a selection of their projects, showcasing residences awash in golden yellows, earthy reds and lush greens.

Using rich, warm colors like those is a way that the designers bring both "personality and livability" to spaces, Keltner de Valle said.

Maximum color

Sometimes that means having an entire room painted in deep blue or dusty rose, and carpeting the floor in the same hue. "If you embrace color throughout, it almost becomes a neutral," Keltner de Valle said. "It's not calling as much attention to itself."

The rich purple shade that the designers selected for the dining room of a townhouse in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood was chosen to highlight a long pale-wood table in the center of the space, Valle, 44, said. "Everything else is this dark color which at certain times of the day just recedes."

Complementing the room's walls and furniture is a purple-and-cream-tiled fireplace decorated with blue- and green-patterned plates.

Their residential clients include the Creative Artists Agency co-chairman and managing director, Bryan Lourd; the Hard Rock Cafe co-founder Peter Morton; and Kevin Wendle, the CEO of the luxury Hotel Esencia resort in Mexico. When working with Wendle on his home in Watch Hill, R.I., Valle painted its library peacock blue to complement artworks by Nathalie du Pasquier and Landon Metz that would hang in the room.

At first Wendle thought the blue might be too dramatic, but Valle convinced him otherwise. "He showed up one day and said, 'I want to paint the library this color,' " recalled Wendle, who described the finished library as "fresh and deliciously beautiful."

Wendle has since tapped the design studio to do another home for him, in Mexico. There, he was again persuaded to incorporate colors he would "normally stay away from," he said-this time greens, oranges, reds and burgundies.

Medium color

The designers' comfort with colors includes an understanding of how best to deploy them. When they bought a home in Litchfield, Conn., in August 2020, they inherited a primary bedroom with walls sponge-painted in a pale pink. They ultimately softened it even more by applying a beige Farrow & Ball paint, called Setting Plaster, to the walls.

They brought bolder hues into the muted room through textiles: a purple bedspread, along with Roman shades, a velvet headboard and a rug in tonal greens.

"We use a lot of color but we work with a very limited palette in each room," Keltner de Valle said. That approach can also be seen in the library of a home in Toronto, which has a ceiling and walls covered in warm wood that was used as inspiration for the room's overhead fiberglass light fixtures.

Valle met Keltner de Valle in 2005, at a party in Brooklyn, where the couple has another home-a loft inside a former cardboard factory. He was working at an architectural firm and she was a fashion magazine editor (who later became a design magazine editor). Early on, Keltner de Valle's friends in the fashion world would tap Valle for help with designing boutiques or sets for runway shows.

Residential projects followed, including their own homes, as did collaborations with the rug maker Nordic Knots and furniture commissions for people including Kylie Jenner, Usher and the artist Rashid Johnson. The couple also started a skincare brand for babies and children called Paloroma named after their two children, Roman and Paloma.

Minimal color

Part of the designers' process is making miniature models of the rooms they're working on, a tactic inspired by the models that Valle, who grew up playing with Legos, built in architecture school-and the dollhouses Keltner de Valle had as a child. They came from a now defunct store on Madison Avenue. "You would choose carpeting in this room, wood flooring in that room, and wallpaper and paint," she said.

For models like the one they created for a dining room in St. Barts, they make pieces with a 3-D printer and then use clay and paint to give them a handmade touch.

The St. Barts home's finished dining room has a ceiling decorated with ceramic works by the artist Yulia Iosilzon, which give it a paint-splotched-canvas effect. Hanging Iosilzon's playful ceramics is among the ways the designers like to inject pops of color into a space.

Or they utilize even subtler accents. When Keltner de Valle hired a feng shui master to evaluate the couple's homes, she said that he recommended using red in their primary bathroom for good energy. Not wanting such an intense color on the walls, they bought towels with red piping.