Where Peace Anchors

Becoming an interior designer “wasn’t on my bingo card,” Alphonso Buie says — and yet here he is in his 40s, in Atlanta, running Place of Peace and loving it. He got the name from his grandmother, who always told him a home should be a place of peace, “and if it’s not, you need to figure it out.” It took him years, and a home of his own that finally felt calm, to understand what she meant. Now he builds that feeling for other people.

The conversation with Jeanne wanders the way the best ones do — why your bedroom (not your office) should be your sanctuary, how a client let go of 27-year-old child-support papers and started to heal, mixing metals and colors because “anything matches if you design it right,” peppercorn accent walls, grass-cloth wallpaper, and the fabric and furniture pilgrimages to Gayle K and High Point. Underneath the design talk is a bigger theme: reinvention, letting go, and making room for other people to succeed — “there’s more than enough for us to eat.”

It gets candid, too. Alphonso opens up about the panic attacks and FMLA leave behind a workplace rumor that spun into an “investigation” over — of all things — a Beyoncé concert. Then comes Two Truths & A Lie: Beijing, the Beyoncé firing, and a million-dollar penny-slots jackpot. One of them isn’t true. You’ll have to listen to the end to find out which.