HOW TO MAKE AN ENTRANCE

Want a more fabulous foyer? Here's some advice from the experts.

- KATHRYN O'SHEA-EVANS CAMER

Beth Diana Smith couldn't help but speak up. The designer was hired as a remote consultant to help zhuzh a living room but spotted an eyesore in the background. It was a bad, bad foyer, complete with an exposed closet organizing system that was so unsightly it took the fun right out of function. "I said, 'I absolutely have to address this," Smith recalls. "This is the first impression. It's the first thing that people see when they walk inside your home. So it's where you want to set the tone."

Essentially, your entrance hall is like a taste test at the ice cream parlor and it can either be a spoonful of humdrum vanilla or an addictive sea salt with caramel ribbons that you can't get enough of. "I want someone to feel like, I gotta come in and see what the rest of the house looks like," says Smith, who recently installed green and white hexagonal floor tile, oversize Buddhas, and a shagreen console table in a client's Colonial Revival in New Jersey.