A peek inside an interior designer’s home that was created with year-round comfort in mind for family and friends.
By Jean Hardiman
HQ 132 | WINTER 2026
If she wanted, Sally Weiler could throw around a lot of savvy, interior design terms when describing her own home. But she doesn’t.
“My design style is ‘comfort,’” said Weiler, owner of Sally Weiler Designs, who has spent 25 years in the interior design industry, serving clients mostly in West Virginia and Kentucky.
She’s more likely to talk about the moments shared in the space than the standout English Country theme, the various shades of white she likes to mix together and the blend of different textures and fabrics that make the space simultaneously bright, beautiful, warm and cozy.
“It’s not ultra casual, but I like to have a comfortable home where my kids are happy when they come in the door, a home where people feel comfortable coming in and sitting down in front of the fireplace and chatting for a while,” she said, motioning to the welcoming space just inside the home’s kitchen entrance, with plush chairs and throws arranged around the gas fireplace. “My husband and I sit there every morning. For 30 minutes, we drink coffee and talk to each other. That’s our morning ritual.”
She points to the far end of the white quartz kitchen bar, lined with rattan chairs adorned with small boxwood wreaths on the back.
“When my oldest daughter was in high school, she would sit right there — that was her seat,” said Weiler, a mother of four grown children (Jake, CeCe and twins Sophie and Tess), with the youngest two in college. “She did her homework there, starting in the fifth grade, all the way up. When the twins were in high school, they sat there.”
Built in 1965 by the Hanshaw family of Huntington Wholesale, the Colonial home was purchased in 2012 by Sally and her husband Jim Weiler, a Huntington realtor and developer.
“We painted it white and added on here and there,” she said. Sitting on a tree-covered hill that overlooks Huntington’s Southside, the home features several windows providing views of West Virginia’s natural beauty and wildlife.
“I like all the trees and the light,” Weiler said. “You almost feel like you’re up in the woods. You kind of are, but you’re so close to town. Most mornings when I’m here drinking my coffee, there is a family of deer out here. One gave birth to a baby right there.”
The kitchen was extended for a large farm table, where the family unites for holidays and other gatherings.
As someone who spends a lot of time working at home, Weiler said she wanted to bring comfort into her home office, another welcoming space flooded with natural light as well as stunning, glass-flower lighting by designer Regina Andrew.
“I wanted my office to feel like I was at home. I designed it so that it was cozy,” she said.
It’s a place where a lot of work gets done. When it comes to business, Weiler has entrepreneurial ventures beyond interior design. The year that her youngest daughters left for college, she founded Sally’s Sourdough Bread Co.
“I wanted to try something new that required me to learn, think and be creative. I enjoyed it,” she said.
Her latest venture combines her love of design and a relatively newfound hobby — the game of Mahjong.
The game, which originated in China but came to the United States over a century ago and has lately been gaining popularity among younger generations, is played with beautifully crafted tiles featuring artistic designs. Weiler got her first Mahjong lesson from Jean McClelland of Huntington over a year ago and fell in love with the game.
“One of the things that I absolutely love about this game is the social part of it. I have come to know so many new people just in the last year, just because of this game,” said Weiler who plays weekly with a group of friends from Redemption Church in her newly designed “Mahjong room” (a former living room — never used).
Also, she and her son have launched Merry Mahjong, a company that sells Mahjong tiles and supplies. Some that have been flying out of their Etsy store are curated, but Weiler has also drawn on her own design skills and just recently created her own tiles. Inspired by her lifelong visits to the Greenbrier in West Virginia and the Omni Homestead Resort in Virginia, the tiles celebrate the outdoor beauty of the region. The mat and the tiles feature animals, mountains, mineral springs, flowers and trees.
It’s been a long, challenging process working with manufacturers on the other side of the globe (because the game is Chinese, so are the manufacturers), and fine-tuning the pieces until they meet her standards is hard with time-zone differences, but it’s been an exciting adventure, she said. Weiler’s tiles and supplies will be sold on MerryMahjongshop, and on a new website, coming soon, which is MerryMahjong.com.
“I learned to play Mahjong, and I think because of my interior design background and my love for design, I started seeing these tile designs people were making and started researching and thinking, ‘I can do that. I’m going to give it a try,’ said Weiler. “This is my first try. I’m really proud. It has been hard.”
