From the street, Hadley and Wicky Sleight's home looks like your average, traditional Kirkwood house. Upon entering, however, it becomes immediately evident this couple and their home are anything but traditional. Every inch of every room explodes with color, vibrant artwork and items of visual interest. In bright, rich hues of orange, gold, blue and green, the house is like stepping into a Picasso.

Hadley Sleight, an interior designer who focuses on color consultation and space planning, discovered his passion for color when studying design at the University of Missouri at Columbia. "I studied the Munsell Color System, which explains color in three dimensions, as well as Josef Albers' 'Interaction of Color,'" he says.

After college, the Sleights spent 17 years living in Austin, Texas, where Hadley began his extensive and impressive art collection. "Everything in Austin art-wise was very Southwestern," he explains. "You could get landscapes and cowboys, but I felt the population there was more worldly than the art that was available in local galleries." So he began bringing in fine-art prints by world-class modern artists through dealers in places like New York and Los Angeles.

"My nickname in Austin was 'Red Wall,'" Hadley says. It's easy to see why.

The entryway to the Sleights' home is painted a vibrant orange, with an intentionally imperfect pattern painted over it in rich gold using a window squeegee with small pieces cut out to create a "stripe" effect, as well as other hand-cut stencils. The bathroom at the end of the hallway is painted in the exact reverse pattern — the gold paint as the base with orange striped over.

The orange carries over into the large living room/dining room, although here it serves more as a backdrop for the Sleights' art collection, which adorns nearly every inch of available wall space, creating an incredible visual "landscape."

"When you study design, you learn all the rules," says Hadley. "Then you can break them. I think everywhere you turn should elicit some reaction."

Indeed it does. Even the hardwood floors have been painted over with a bold blue cris-cross pattern of boxes. "We originally had the lines taped solid, but I love how the positive and negative space shifts with this pattern," says Hadley.

Some might be intimidated by his style, which pairs antique character with contemporary flair (like painting a pair of traditional Chippendale ladder-back chairs chartreuse).

"Scale is the most important thing," Sleight says, "then texture and visual weight."

A china hutch in the dining room came from Kentucky by covered wagon in 1840. Antique pieces like this are offset by modern artwork. The traditional wood mantle around the fireplace is livened up with a frame of bright turquoise and a grouping of small paintings hung above it called "Theta Woman Suite" by renowned abstract expressionist painter Knox Martin.

Peeking out of the corner is a statue called "Watermelon Lady" by Austin-based artist Claudia Reese, from a series that was exhibited at the Smithsonian. Hadley also collects baskets of all sizes and types — many of which hang from the ceiling in the kitchen. "I have a weakness for ethnographic art," he says.

Every inch of the Sleights' home feels like a funky type of gallery where there's always more than meets the eye.