My Favorite Part of the Design Process
When you love what you do, and in my instance, it's interior design, there are two paths you tend to take:
You drill down and obsess (or specialize) in a specific aspect of it or
You explore and study and pick up knowledge and skills in every area of it that you can
I chose the latter. We'll...actually, the latter chose me.
My career has gone from commercial healthcare design to project management to retail sales to visual merchandising to buying to production styling to residential design to boutique commercial design to content creation and more! Every change came with a new thing to study and a new set of skills as the result.
Styling is my favorite.
It's only a fraction of the design process and only a fraction what l'm capable of…but it's a skill that sets me apart...almost as much as the million dollar smile.
I'd always loved it, but I studied and perfected it during my 5 years of visual merchandising and retail/environmental design. Styling for furniture retail merchandising is an art in storytelling. You have to tell a story so visually compelling that multiple strangers, whom you've never met, of varying styles, backgrounds, taste levels and budgets, will all pull out their wallets to buy the story you told to take it home and incorporate it into theirs. It's designing for no one and everyone at the same time, simultaneously aiming for mass appeal and intimate personalization.
Combining design principles (balance, scale, symmetry, contrast, etc.) with the analytics of merchandising (dollars per square foot) and psychology of sales (who, what, when, where, how and why of the buy) is truly an art, and one that I love so much.
Here’s an example of a space I designed:
In 2019, I styled this office for the Vesta Home Show Show House. I designed it to feel like you stepped into someone's intimate creative space when you walked in. Every piece was borrowed from a retail store, but visitors loved creating the story of the imaginary person the space belonged to (you can see the full room here).
She ain't just a pretty smile you may have seen on TV. She's an artist... and she's serious about her shit.
There’s so much that goes into the styling process, but don’t worry: if you want to learn more about styling and design so that you can refresh your own home, be sure to check out my Design 101 and Saturday Styling Series to help you get started. I’ve written tons of blog posts over the years to help you with styling everything from your coffee table to a bookshelf with ease!