Interior Design Is Changing. Here's What I See Coming.
I've spent years watching two very different worlds, and the longer I'm in interior design, the more I notice the same forces that reshape entertainment reshaping spaces. My path into design came through real estate in Texas, where I staged homes long before "staging" was a buzzword anyone used at open houses. Back then, the goal was simple: help a buyer feel something the moment they walked through the door. That instinct has never left me. But the way I apply it is shifting faster right now than at any other point in my career.
What I'm seeing, clearly and consistently across projects, is that clients are done chasing trends. A few years ago, someone would hand me a stack of magazine pages and say, "I want this." That doesn't happen anymore, or at least not in the same way. Now the conversation starts somewhere personal. A memory. An heirloom. A photograph their kid drew on a Tuesday afternoon. That shift is real, and it's accelerating. People want rooms that belong to them, not rooms that belong to a moment in time.
The entertaining and performing years shaped how I read a room. When I performed in NYC and LA, when I was part of Bob Hope's USO tour learning choreography in the back of a plane over the Pacific, I absorbed something about presence and atmosphere that I still carry. A stage that doesn't connect with its audience fails, no matter how polished it looks. A home is the same. The most beautiful room I've ever walked into that felt cold and disconnected was still a failure. Clients are starting to articulate this themselves, which tells me the conversation in design has caught up to what I already believed.
One concrete decision I made recently reflects this shift. I stopped leading client consultations with a portfolio walk. I used to open with images because images are fast and images build confidence. Now I open with questions. I ask what the room needs to feel like at 7 in the morning versus 10 at night. I ask whether joy in their home currently comes from quiet or from gathering. The answers change everything downstream, from materials to lighting to where I place my son Josh's art pieces, which I've used as reference points for clients on what it means to display something you genuinely love rather than something you simply bought.
There's also a generational current I can't ignore. Younger clients, people who grew up in houses staged for resale rather than for living, are actively hungry for the opposite. They want texture, history, and rooms that feel like they were built up slowly over time rather than installed all at once. As Rebecca Jane Phillips, I've written before about how my design identity was always rooted in personal expression over catalog perfection, and that instinct is now what the market is asking for broadly. That convergence is new. And it's exciting to be standing on the right side of it without having had to change my approach to get here.
Where I think this heads next is toward storytelling as a design discipline in its own right. Not mood boards. Not Pinterest saves. Actual narrative. A client's life has chapters, and a home should reflect that. When I trained with the Beverly Hills Police and Fire Department, I was the only person in the room who approached fitness through the lens of performance conditioning. That outsider angle made me more useful, not less. I think designers who bring a genuine outside frame, from real estate, from theater, from years spent watching how people inhabit public spaces, will define the next era of residential work.
If you want to understand more about the perspective I bring to each project, the about page covers the full arc of how I got here. And if any of what I've described sounds like the kind of thinking your space needs, the best first step is always a conversation, which you can start through my contact page. I'm not interested in rooms that photograph well and live poorly. The field is finally moving in the same direction, and I intend to keep pushing it there.