Every Space Should Feel Like It Belongs to You
I've spent a good portion of my life learning how to read a room. Not in the social sense, though years of performing in front of packed houses will sharpen that instinct too. I mean reading a physical space and understanding what it's asking to become. That skill started in Texas, where I worked as a real estate agent and staged homes before staging had a vocabulary attached to it. You'd walk into a house and feel either something or nothing. My job was to make sure it was always something.
The principle I've carried from that work into everything I do now is simple: the space has to feel like it belongs to the person living in it, not to the designer who touched it last. That sounds obvious. In practice, it's the hardest discipline in the room. Every designer has aesthetic preferences. I certainly do. But the moment I let my preferences outrank your life, I've failed you. The house looks good in photos and feels wrong on a Tuesday morning.
Here's where my background becomes genuinely useful rather than just an interesting footnote. When I was performing abroad, including at the Miss Universe pageant in Thailand, I watched women from dozens of countries carry their culture with them in small, specific ways. Gifts passed hand to hand. A gesture here, a fabric choice there. Those details weren't decorative. They were identity. I filed that away. It shaped how I think about the objects a client brings to a project, the heirlooms, the children's artwork, the inherited furniture that "doesn't go with anything." Those are the exact pieces that make a room irreplaceable rather than replaceable.
My son Josh's artwork hangs in spaces I've designed. Not because I'm his mother, though I am, but because the work is genuinely striking and because it tells a story only that particular family could tell. I've always believed a room should contain evidence of a life. When something on the wall could have come from a catalog or could have come from your kid's bedroom floor, you want the second one. That's the one guests remember. That's the one you stop and look at ten years later.
I learned a related lesson working with the Beverly Hills Police and Fire Department as their trainer. Those were practical environments with real constraints, not showrooms. You couldn't prioritize the look over the function. What I took from that is a habit I still apply: start with how the space will actually be used, at 6 a.m. on a weekday, not just how it will photograph on a Saturday evening. Form follows life. Style follows form. Get that sequence wrong and the result feels like theater without a cast.
The staging work in Texas taught me to see potential before it's visible. You walk into a listing that needs everything and you train your eye to strip away what's there and see what could be. That's essentially the same skill in a different context. A client comes to me with a room that isn't working and I'm looking past the existing furniture, past the paint color they've already committed to, straight to the bones of the space and what it genuinely wants to be. Then I start asking what they want to feel when they walk through the door at the end of the day. That answer is the brief. Everything else is execution.
I don't think good design announces itself. The best rooms I've ever stood in had something I can only describe as ease. Nothing was fighting for attention. Nothing felt like a statement. You just felt comfortable before you could say why. That's the goal every time. If someone walks into a space I've designed and their first thought is "what a beautiful room," that's a compliment. If their first thought is "I feel at home here," that's the one I'm after.
My work continues to grow through projects that start with that same question: who lives here, and what does their life actually look like? If you're curious about how I approach a new project from the ground up, you're welcome to get in touch or learn more about my background. The conversation about a space always starts long before a single piece of furniture moves.