When Marian and Jack Riggar bought their Stonedge condominium on Lookout Mountain, they felt its layout would afford redecoration like apartments they'd seen on numerous trips to France.
Self-described Francophiles, they settled on a French urban style.
The couple bought the home in late 2009 and began to apply the style last August with white walls and moldings, dark walnut floors (replacing carpeting) and a mix of antique and modern furnishings.
"We've visited beautiful Parisian apartments built during Belle Époque [French for 'beautiful era'] in the late 1800s," said Mrs. Riggar, "and have emulated those features."
The couple said the condo's large living room and large dining room are reminiscent of French apartments, so they outfitted those spaces, as the French often do, to allow maximum room for entertaining.
Mrs. Riggar said the living room attracted her because its focal wall would allow her space for colorful framed posters she and her husband collected on trips to museums, galleries and events in France.
"A touch of irony," she said, is the collection's centerpiece, a Matisse print with French wording they found in Santa Fe, N.M.
Opposite the conversational wall of prints is a wall anchored by an 19th-century French armoire with oyster burl trim.
Seating in the room is plentiful with a comfortable couch covered in white fabric and several pairs of chairs available for conversational groupings.
They include two white caned bergere chairs, two armless French Provincial chairs Mrs. Riggar's mother purchased in 1958 (now covered in white matelassé fabric), two ottomans in a French-look botanical print fabric and two hand-carved white bergere chairs just the right size for the couple's three granddaughters.
Other features in the room include a painted blue-green antique potting table used as a bar, an adjacent metal chair reminiscent of a bird's nest and a reproduction French writing desk.
The unique bird's nest chair, said Mr. Riggar, "looks like something you'd see at a French flea market."
Off the room is a deck tucked between two eaves. Although it isn't the Juliet or faux balcony often found on French apartments, it does allow the couple to dine alfresco and view Stonedge's koi pond.
The dining room, which opens out at the top of the stairs from the first-floor entry, also combines the modern - a glass-topped table with two Lucite chairs and two Plexiglas chairs - with the Old World - a scrolled metal sideboard table.
"The French really do live in the living room and dine in the dining room," Mrs. Riggar said, "and we'll be doing that here."
French dining rooms, she said, often double as libraries, so one corner of theirs affords a comfortable reading nook with a botanical print chair, side table and colorful accent ashtray.
Off the dining room is the small galley kitchen, which the couple also renovated. Although it can be closed off with a pocket door, its white Kohler farmhouse sink, recessed lighting, dramatic stellaris granite countertops, stainless-steel Samsung appliances and lighted cabinets invite the room to be seen.
Its lighted cabinets show off the couple's Prentice Hicks glass and inherited 1930s black-stemmed Fostoria crystal.
"We wanted [the kitchen] to be attractive, not closed off," Mrs. Riggar said.
The room also affords a stacked washer and dryer hidden within the new white wooden cabinetry, pull-out drawers that allow for storage of heavy cookware, dual slide-out cabinets for trash and recyclables, and sleek, arched, metal pulls that help streamline space in the room.
In the French urban style, accessories provide splashes of color.
"We think it's quite striking with the apple green and red (oil painting) accents," Mrs. Riggar said.
While the couple added new Kohler sinks and granite countertops to the home's bathrooms, they concentrated their work on the living room, dining room and kitchen.
Built in 1975, the condo, unlike many in the Stonedge community, is not connected to one above, below or beside it. And, above its first-floor entrance and garage, it's all on a second-story level.
Mr. Riggar, whose mother's family was French, referred to the space as a pied-á-terre, which is French for foot to the ground.
Mrs. Riggar, who spent part of her college study in France, likened it to a bird's nest on a mountaintop.
"Sometimes," she said, "we call our condo, which seems like an aerie, The Perch."