Michelle Woolley Sauter
Three words that describe my style:
Timeless | Balanced | Thoughtful
One Coast Design is an Award-winning interior design firm based in Summerville, SC.
Our studio offers clients one-of-a-kind interior design schemes, furnishings, accessories, antiques, lighting, fabrics, flooring selection, wall coverings, original framed art pieces and more. As an Award-winning artist, Michelle Woolley Sauter, also offers her clients customized bespoke custom framed artwork.
Meet the Designer
“As a professional interior designer and artist, I step into a client’s world to see a space – not just for its design but also its lifestyle potential. Stepping back and taking a broad view allows me to study the bones of a home and offer solutions that provide exciting options for clients.”
Michelle’s artistic heritage comes from the long lineage of artists in her family. Her father was an accomplished watercolorist, and her grandmother was a successful interior designer. Her French Great-Grandfather was also an extremely talented and successful painter.
With those influences propelling her, Michelle earned a BFA from Florida Atlantic University and honed her natural spatial and color-expertise. Creating custom large-scale commissioned artworks also became a defining passion at this time.
Her Background in the Arts
She then began working in Art Galleries from Palm Beach to Miami, where she managed and curated spectacular collections throughout South Florida, up and down the Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean. Ultimately, her gallery clients and friends recognized Michelle’s eye for interior design and her ability to marry the perfect color palette into stunning spaces filled with wonderful texture, and style, in her own renovated historic home in South Florida.
During this time, Michelle began to translate her artistry onto canvases of commissioned art for collectors while creating incredible spaces for high-end design clients around the world. She also began designing Yacht interiors, bespoke furniture pieces, and wallpaper lines and created a line of framed original artwork for Tommy Bahama International, a spectacular installation for Swarovski, and hand-painted environs for Walt Disney World International.
Though an artist at heart, interior design was always near and dear to Michelle’s passion for great design. So when she and her husband moved north to the Carolina’s, she decided to put interior design on the front burner and she has never looked back.
“I absolutely love creating environs that are as unique as my clients. We moved to Charleston and everything fell into place. We were able to secure the most wonderful historic home in Summerville, SC, and did a complete abstract on the property to find out every single family that had ever lived there. It was important to me to understand the lineage so a proper name could be bestowed upon her.”
The newly named ‘Coburn Hutchinson House’ needed a lot of work, but it was the perfect passion project to launch her design firm in metro-Charleston.
Bringing Both Worlds Together
Of all the accolades, Michelle’s greatest joy comes from working in-depth and one-on-one with her clients to create the spaces of their dreams, weaving in the cherished stories of their lives through treasured family heirlooms. Her clients come away feeling delighted, at ease, understood and experience the warmth of their personal history seamlessly integrated into fresh beginnings. Michelle firmly believes that a home should encapsulate your sanctuary and mirror the tapestry of your life, where each thread represents a memory. With a deep-seated pride, she witnesses her clients settle into THEIR perfect coastal space—a home uniquely designed to capture their essence and honor their heritage.
When she’s not passionately designing or innovating, Michelle and her Engineer husband Brian embark on escapades alongside their Mini Golden-doodle, Charleston, affectionately known as ‘Charlie’—the esteemed ‘Manager’ of One Coast Design. Renowned for their mastery in restoring historic homes, they find themselves nestled in The Coburn Hutchinson House, an exquisite, art-adorned historic dwelling in Summerville, SC. As part of the dynamic metro-Charleston locale, their residence reflects their distinctive style and stands as a testament to their commitment to preserving heritage. The name itself encapsulates the essence of their journey—where the past intertwines with the present, just like the stories woven into the very fabric of their designs.
