Traditional looking speakers

Totem's are pretty traditional looking. Cabinets are excellent, the sound great, and are pretty compact. I think the Hawks are in that range

If you are building a system, maybe start with 2 channel and work your way up. Working with 2500 I would suggest looking into NAD, Rotel, and Arcam. These are great receivers for the price and will drive almost anything. For front floor standing speakers I recommend Paradigm Monitor 11 (not 9), Reference 60 or 100 depending on budget. It takes some hunting but also look at B&W if you want nice detail (to some they are bright) Dynaudio because of their oversized voice coils (awesome for vocals, jazz, classical, acoustic) Revel F30,F32, or Vandersteen 2Ce or newer. I am sure that you can create a killer 2 channel set up with 2500 looking at those brands. Good luck and have fun!

Might want to check my vintage B&W DM6 for sale in Au'gon.

Used pair of Von Schweikert VR4Jr's.

Not bad looking. Short. Simple.

Dynamics of a moving army and plenty of elegance in the mids and highs.

Bargain at $2950 listed here on Audiogon.

This may cause some rebuttal and that's okay. I believe that speakers should be your last purchase, not your first. Buy your equipment first, get quality stuff that sounds synergistically good together, is easy to use (if that's inportant to you), has a history of reliability and has all the bells/whistles/power that you want. Spend down to your $2500 plus cables (people have different formulas for cable spending, mine is about 15% +/- of the total value of the rest of the system). I'm a firm believer that good speakers driven by average sources and amplification can only sound average at best. However, high quality components will make pretty good speakers sound their best. Speakers can only relay the signal provided to them, the better the source and signal, the better the sound. Just my opinion, it's your money. Good luck and have fun.