There are designers who create rooms, and there are designers who create feelings. India Mahdavi belongs firmly in the latter camp. Over the past two decades, the architect and designer has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary interiors, celebrated for her fearless use of color and her ability to create spaces that feel both joyful and deeply human. Yet behind the vibrant palettes and instantly recognizable projects lies a more philosophical approach than many realize. For India, color is not decoration but emotion; design is not about style but about shaping experiences.

In this latest installment of our Layered Lives series, India reveals that perhaps this sensitivity comes from a childhood spent moving between countries, cultures, and languages, learning to read the atmosphere of a room before anything else. Or perhaps it stems from a lifelong fascination with cinema, architecture, and the stories spaces can tell. Whatever the source, India's work continues to prove that interiors have the power not only to delight us but to change how we feel.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

India Mahdavi: As far back as I can remember, I always envisioned my future as being linked to an aesthetic world. I would not call it a love of design – that came later, and somewhat by accident. What I had, very early, was an obsession with homes, with interiors as containers of another life. Films were everything to me. They brought a fantasy that felt more real than my own daily existence. I would lose myself in the sets, in the light, in the way a room could hold a mood, a secret, a whole psychology. It was less about design as a discipline and more about spaces as emotional territories. I was, I think, running away from my own everyday life and finding shelter in imagined ones.

Homes & Gardens: Was there a love of design in your family that influenced you growing up?

India Mahdavi: Design was not a subject of interest in my family – not in any explicit sense. What I had instead was movement. A nomadic childhood: eleven moves during my schooling, three languages, three countries. That kind of instability does something to you. You learn to read a room very quickly. You become attuned to atmosphere, to the feeling a place gives you, because you are always arriving somewhere new and trying to understand it.

Homes & Gardens: Were any of your relatives creative, though, and did they inspire you?

India Mahdavi: There was my grandmother – a woman who lived for taste. An art lover who dressed in haute couture, who moved through the world with a kind of intentionality that I absorbed without fully understanding. She never talked about design. She simply lived it. That was my real early education.

Homes & Gardens: Are there any spaces that showed you the possibilities of good design?

India Mahdavi: My imagination was fed by everything that caught my attention – from Tex Avery cartoons on television to the vivid, almost hallucinatory color of mid-1960s America. I was a child who lived inside images.

But if I think of one specific architectural moment, one early frisson, it was the Fondation Maeght in the south of France. Something happened to me there. It was the way art and architecture dissolved into each other, the way the building didn't simply house the work but seemed to breathe with it. It was magical in a way that had nothing to do with grandeur or spectacle – intimate and radical at the same time. That experience planted something in me without my knowing it: this idea that a space could be an emotional act.

Homes & Gardens: When did you first start to think about design as a career?

India Mahdavi: I always wanted to be a filmmaker. I studied architecture instead, precisely to follow Fritz Lang's path – he was an architect before he became a director, and I found that trajectory completely logical. Space, light, set, atmosphere: these felt like the grammar of cinema. But when I finished my studies, I was uncertain. The production timeline in architecture is so long, and the environment at the time was deeply, aggressively misogynistic. I spent a year in New York working at a smaller scale – product design, furniture design, graphic design. And something became clear. I realized that working at the scale of an object, a room, or a hotel could give me the immediacy I craved, the directness of film, without the institutional weight of traditional architecture. It felt like the right language.

Homes & Gardens: What did your own home look like at that time?

India Mahdavi: The late 1990s in design had a particular tyranny – minimalism as a moral position, restraint as virtue. I was never convinced. I wanted warmth, color, memory, the sense that someone had actually lived in a space and brought something of themselves to it. The early work was a series of experiments: not yet a language, but already a refusal.

Homes & Gardens: As your career developed, are there any projects that stand out to you as a turning point?

India Mahdavi: The Pink Room at The Gallery at Sketch in London announced something publicly that I had felt privately for some time – that color could be an architectural decision, not a decorative one, and that joy was a serious ambition.

Homes & Gardens: And did you meet anyone along the way who was particularly inspiring to you?

India Mahdavi: There was my encounter with Maja Hoffmann, a relationship and collaboration that has now lasted for more than eighteen years. Working with someone who thinks with that level of cultural rigor and personal conviction changes you. It raises the stakes in the best possible way.

More recently, POMO – the contemporary art museum in Trondheim, Norway – has been a kind of reckoning. It is my first major institutional project, and one where I had to articulate very precisely what my contribution was. What I brought was the sensibility of hospitality, applied to a museum. I focused on the in-between spaces: the corridors, the thresholds, the moments of transition between galleries. Those are the spaces that are usually forgotten. I wanted them to be experienced – to create a different quality of presence from the exhibition spaces themselves. Using color, ornament, and material in a more radical, more consequential way. That is where the work became truly mine.

Homes & Gardens: Looking at the work you create now, how has your style evolved?

India Mahdavi: My work has evolved alongside the profession, which has itself changed enormously since I founded my studio around the year 2000. Throughout that time, I have developed my own language, my own grammar. But over the years it has become more precise – and paradoxically more complex at the same time. The early work was intuitive. The current work is intuitive and considered. I know now why I make the choices I make. I can defend them, place them within a larger way of thinking. And that confidence allows me to take more risks – to use color, ornament, and material in ways that are more radical, less decorative. More consequential. What I would not do now is work from the surface inward. Form and color are consequences, not starting points.

Homes & Gardens: When starting a new project, what's the very first thing you look for or ask that helps unlock the direction of the design?

India Mahdavi: I try to define the question I want to answer – not the solution, the question. That is often the most difficult part of the entire process. If you define the question well, the design almost follows. If you rush to answers, you produce something correct but not alive. I call this Phase Zero: the moment of listening, of reading a place, a client, a brief – against its grain as much as with it. What is really being asked here? What is missing? What could this place become that it doesn't yet know it is? Only when I can formulate that question precisely do I feel ready to begin.

Homes & Gardens: You've often said that color is a language. What are you trying to communicate with it?

India Mahdavi: Color is a consequence – that is the first thing to understand. I never begin with a palette. I begin with an emotion, an intention, a question, and the color arrives as the answer. When I used pink at Sketch, I was not thinking about pink. I was thinking about a particular kind of warmth, of softness without sentimentality, of femininity without cliché. Pink imposed itself as the only honest response to that thinking. And then it took me a long time – much longer than people imagine – to find the exact pink, because I was not looking for a color. I was looking for the essence of an emotion. This is what color communicates when it is used well: not a mood in the superficial sense, but a position. A conviction about what a space is for, and what it should make you feel.

Homes & Gardens: Do you think color is becoming more important in uncertain times?

India Mahdavi: Color is very visible and very photogenic – and in a world where the image has become so dominant, that has given it an almost inflationary quality. Everyone uses color now. Not everyone uses it with meaning. What interests me more is friction. Imperfection. The idea that a color can disturb slightly before it seduces. I am not interested in color that simply pleases – I am interested in color that provokes a second look, that creates a slight dissonance before resolving into something right. In difficult times, color should not offer false comfort. It should offer the kind of aliveness that reminds you that you are here.

Homes & Gardens: How do you know when you've found the right color for a project?

India Mahdavi: It is entirely instinctive – and yet also very precise. I know, deep down, which color belongs and which does not. I often feel that colors impose themselves on me, and that I am only their medium. The work is not choosing. The work is listening closely enough to hear what the space is asking for.

Homes & Gardens: What do you think color can do to a person's emotions?

India Mahdavi: Color brings a vibration, a particular quality of light that is not physical but psychological. It can produce joy, unease, nostalgia, desire – sometimes several at once. At its most powerful, it doesn't produce a single emotion but an openness to feeling. It makes you more present in a room.

Homes & Gardens: Talking of color, the Rosary headboard you designed for Bolzan – how did you come up with that palette?

India Mahdavi: For the Rosary headboard, it was less about color choice than about meaning. I wanted to integrate something into a bedroom that could sanctify it. The bed is the center of your life in a way we rarely acknowledge: it is where you dream, where you are most vulnerable, where the most extraordinary things happen to you. It deserves reverence. The ceramic beads are there as a kind of offering – a private ritual object. And because every combination can be customized, every bed is different. Every dream is unique.

Homes & Gardens: Your work is often described as joyful. Do you consciously set out to create happiness?

India Mahdavi: I am always fighting my own melancholia. Joy is not something that comes naturally to me – it is something I pursue, something I build. This is precisely why I take it seriously as a design intention. Joy, for me, is not decoration. It is an act of resistance.

Homes & Gardens: Is joy an undervalued quality in design?

India Mahdavi: Yes, I think joy has long been undervalued in design. For too long, seriousness meant severity. Ornament was crime, color was frivolity. I never believed that. Today, when the future offers so little reassurance, joy becomes not just a value but a necessity. It is a serious matter to make someone feel – even briefly – that the world is bearable and beautiful.

Homes & Gardens: Can a space change a person's mood? What makes a room feel optimistic?

India Mahdavi: Of course, a space changes your mood – the question is whether it does so consciously or by default. Most spaces change moods accidentally, through neglect or compromise. A room feels optimistic when it has been made with intention – when the proportions are generous, when the light is considered, when there is something unexpected that delights rather than disturbs. When you feel that someone thought about you before you arrived.

Homes & Gardens: Do you think designers have a responsibility to create spaces that make people feel better?

India Mahdavi: That is what I have been trying to do for twenty-five years. When someone enters a space I have designed, I want them to become, for a moment, the actor in their own life – not a spectator. A moment of presence, of awareness, where joy is not something that happens to you but something you inhabit. Those moments nourish your memory long after you have left. That, for me, is what design is for. The responsibility is real, and I take it seriously.

Homes & Gardens: So what makes people want to stay longer in a room?

India Mahdavi: I think of comfort in three distinct ways: physical comfort, visual comfort, and emotional comfort. Physical comfort is the most obvious – scale, proportion, the quality of a seat. Visual comfort is subtler: the sense that wherever your eye lands, there is something worth resting on, without noise or aggression. And emotional comfort is the deepest – the feeling that this room knows you are there. That it was made with a human being in mind. Achieve all three simultaneously, and there is simply no reason to leave.

Homes & Gardens: Lastly, what does the word 'home' mean to you now?

India Mahdavi: Home is where my soul recognizes itself. I say this having moved eleven times as a child, having lived in several countries, having never taken rootedness for granted. My home in Arles – which is also my archive, my workspace, the place where my past and my work coexist – means something very particular to me. It is not just a dwelling. It is a kind of proof that I exist, that I have accumulated something, that I am somewhere. Home is continuity. And for someone who grew up without it, that is everything.

Listening to India Mahdavi speak, it becomes clear that her work is not really about color at all. Rather, color is simply one of the tools she uses to create something more profound: presence. Whether designing a museum, a hotel, a piece of furniture, or a private home, her ambition remains remarkably consistent – to create spaces that make people feel more alive, more connected, and more aware of themselves. In an age when so much design is consumed through a screen, that emphasis on emotion feels especially relevant. For India, beauty is never the end goal; it is the gateway to something deeper.

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Most designers arrive at their profession through years of study, carefully planned career moves, and a well-defined creative vision. But LA-based superstar Martyn Lawrence Bullard's path was far less conventional. Before becoming one of the world's most sought-after interior designers, he was a teenager selling antiques from a market stall in Greenwich, London, a drama student funding his acting ambitions through flea market finds, and a hopeful Hollywood actor who accidentally found himself decorating offices, weddings, and eventually the homes of the rich and famous.

Today, his client list reads like a who's who of celebrity culture, from Elton John to the Kardashians, while his exuberant, globally inspired interiors have made him one of design's most recognized names. Yet in this latest installment of our Layered Lives series, Martyn reveals that beneath the glamour lies the same curiosity that first sent him rummaging through junk stores as a child. Here, he reflects on the unexpected twists that shaped his career, his love of travel, and why comfort remains the greatest luxury of all.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: My parents lived in Chislehurst, Kent, in the UK, and we had a big old house. My bedroom was at the top of the roof, in what used to be the servants' bit. I was about 12 when I started to decorate it, using a lot of Laura Ashley. My older sisters were all quite a bit older than me and had already left the nest, but they'd always liked Laura Ashley, so it had influenced me. I remember there being a sale and convincing my mom to let me buy some fabric remnants, which I stapled above my bed to make it look like a canopy bed. And then I convinced my dad to rent me a stall at Greenwich Market on Saturday mornings. I would go to junk stores, buy silver spoons or cups and saucers, then go to the stall and make it all pretty and wait for unsuspecting American tourists.

Homes & Gardens: Were your parents similarly creative, or equally entrepreneurial?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: My dad had been an opera singer, so there was that energy in the house already. And my older sister was a fashion designer, so that was always in the mix. By the time I started getting into it, people were amazed by the audacity of this kid to just set up a stall. I befriended the other dealers, one of whom was Will Fisher, a kid like me at the time who went on to found the amazing antique store Jamb London. He's still a good friend today.

Homes & Gardens: Were there any places or spaces that were inspiring your interest in interiors?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Because of my dad's career, I got to travel all over Europe and the continent, and that stuff soaked in. We got to visit opera houses and stately homes, and it was my education. By the time I was 17, I wanted to go to drama school, while my dad wanted me to be more serious. So I took my ill-gotten gains – by that time I was selling antique jewelry in Covent Garden Market – and paid for myself to go to drama school. That was my big passion, but I kept on making money at the flea markets.

Homes & Gardens: At what point did you decide you should move to LA?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Someone spotted me on a beach and got me to do a little bit of modeling, a little bit of commercial work, and so by age 20 I decided I was going to move to Hollywood and become a movie star. I'd done some plays, so I got myself into the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in LA and moved here for six months. It was very difficult. I ran out of money, but still signed up for another semester so I could get another visa. I had to find a way to fund it, so I had a wooden bowl and got some little bits of jewelry and sold them at the Santa Monica flea market at age 21.

Homes & Gardens: At what point did you start moving back toward design as a career?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Well, at the same time, I got cast as Eartha Kitt's toy boy in Ed Wood's last movie, called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. I then got friendly with the producer Victor Ginsberg and told him I was renting this super funky little apartment that Judy Garland had lived in when she was super broke. He was fascinated and came over to see it and loved it.

There were things I had brought over from flea markets, and it was just stuff I'd collected, really. But he asked me to decorate his studios, which were in the 9000 Building on Hollywood Boulevard. They spent $30,000 on it, and I took the job because I thought it would get me another movie role. I used a lot of old leather club chairs, fans, and big palm trees. Then, the day it was finished, the producer Liz Heller called and asked if I would do her offices. I was like, "This is crazy!" but just say yes – I was only 22 and not one to turn down a job. She was in the Capitol Records Building, and her office had formerly been Frank Sinatra's. And I thought maybe she'd give me a record contract if it went well!

Homes & Gardens: How did you know what you were doing?!

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: I didn't! But it gets crazier. About a month into the job, she was getting married, and her wedding planner had OD'd and was in recovery, so I said I would help. I went downtown to LA and bought rose petals and rolls of tulle, went over to her house, and dressed it. It looked insane, but she loved it as I'd saved the day. Her father was Seymour Heller, and their family was Hollywood royalty. Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor were at the wedding, as was Cheryl Tiegs, who I was seated next to. She had been one of the first supermodels, and I only vaguely recognized her, but we got on, and by the end of the day she'd hired me to do her Balinese-style mansion in the hills of Beverly Hills. Neither of us had been to Bali, neither of us knew what we were doing, but it ended up on six magazine covers. Being young and crazy and full of ambition, I just went for it.

Homes & Gardens: Did you get nervous working for such big names while winging it?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Being young and crazy and full of ambition, I just went for it. I never had any training, I just fell into design. I didn't know what was going on or what was going to happen. It's been an amazing journey. I ended up in Hollywood with a desire to be an actor, but my life turned into design projects instead.

Homes & Gardens: Did you move out of Judy Garland's old place as your career took off? What did your own home look like at this time?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Actually, I just took over the bigger part of Judy's old place and stayed there until I was 30. I had gotten Edward Norton and Christina Aguilera as clients, and so then I bought a house up in the hills that had belonged to Gloria Swanson and was built by Rudolph Valentino. I decorated it theatrically, using Italian antique furniture, shopping for myself while shopping for my clients. Then I bought a midcentury house in Palm Springs that had belonged to Hugh Hefner and got to play out my '60s fantasies. And now I have another house in Hollywood, which is a Mediterranean villa, and it's a real mix. I love eclectic.

Homes & Gardens: What do you want a home to feel like?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: The very first thing I want is comfort. And to me, modern luxury is about making sure there is comfort. So for all my clients, be it Elton John or a Kardashian or Mr. Smith down the road, my approach is the same. I want to make sure a home is a sanctuary. Because I work for so many celebrities, you realize their homes have to be sanctuaries. They can't run down the street and get milk. Their only privacy is at home, which is where they need to come to recharge and to get re-inspired. The best way to do that is to focus on function. It's important that everything in the house feels easy and makes life feel easy, too.

Homes & Gardens: You've often talked about your love of Moroccan design. What lessons can designers learn from North African interiors?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: I love that Moroccan flavor. There is something very sexy about it. The decorative history of Britain is a combination of everything – we brought so much back from the countries in our empire – so in a British house you'll see a Moroccan table, and that, to me, is the essence of interesting decor. A taste of the exotic is embedded in our culture. I've done everything, from modern homes to restoring a 12th-century castle, but I do always like adding something Moroccan. It gives a twist.

Homes & Gardens: Your new project is a YouTube series called Live, Love and Decorate – what's it about?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: I love travel. It's the biggest inspiration for me. But you never know a city until you know the people who live in it. And my great passion in life is getting to know people. So in the series, we go in and talk to them about how they decorate, how their surroundings have influenced them. The series shows you how people live in the cities. It gives you a feeling of wanderlust for travel. And then I'll show some things I love to do in whichever city we're in.

It's like an Anthony Bourdain series, but about design and people and how they live. I interview interior designers, fashion designers, antique dealers, aristocrats, a cross-dressing life coach, and people from all different walks of life. It's a wonderful cross-section, and that is always inspiring. In London, I speak to the swimwear designer Melissa Odabash, and we spend most of the time in the kitchen as it's the most inspirational place. It's all filled with '60s and '70s pictures of beaches in the south of France.

Homes & Gardens: Is Live, Love and Decorate your mantra?

Martyn Lawrence Bullard: Yes, I suppose it is! I don't believe that you have to have rooms full of expensive art, just things you love. If you love something, it doesn't matter if it's $1,000 or $10, but when you put all these things that you love together, it becomes a window to your soul. And that's the number one thing to putting together a unique interior that looks and feels like you – by making it unique.

Watch Martyn's Live, Love and Decorate series on YouTube here

What becomes clear when speaking to Martyn Lawrence Bullard is that his success has been driven as much by instinct as expertise. While many designers talk about design trends or aesthetics, he returns repeatedly to people, places, and the objects that tell their stories.

Whether drawing inspiration from a Moroccan market, a Hollywood mansion, or a flea market find, his approach remains rooted in creating homes that feel deeply personal. It is perhaps why his interiors feel so alive. For Martyn, decorating has never been about perfection or status; it is about surrounding yourself with things you love and allowing your home to become a reflection of who you are.

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Author, antique dealer, and designer Nathan Turner is the kind of decorator who proves that great design isn’t always taught – it’s instinctive. Raised on a multi-generational cattle ranch in Northern California, his aesthetic was shaped as much by dusty landscapes as by the lilac chintz bedroom of his English great-grandmother, where he first absorbed the art of layering.

In this installment of our Layered Lives series, Nathan Turner explains that despite having no formal training, he was able to carve out a career defined by curiosity, personality, and an ability to translate people’s lives into spaces that feel both relaxed and deeply personal. From chance beginnings in the antiques world to building a distinctly intimate design business, his path has been anything but conventional. Along the way, mentors, friendships, and a love of storytelling through objects have helped define his approach.

Marking the publication of his latest book, I Love Decorating, he reflects on the formative interiors that shaped him, the evolution of his style, and why decorating, for him, is ultimately about creating homes that feel alive.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

Nathan Turner: I’m now having some weird early memories! If you’re a decorator, it’s just a part of you – you’re born with it. I never went to design school, but as a child, I was super-particular about my space and environment. My mother had a decorator who did our homes, and I would just interject, aged 12, and say, 'No, that’s not how it should be done,' all the time. It must have been so annoying, but you know, I was right!

Homes & Gardens: What did those early rooms look like that you had strong opinions about?

Nathan Turner: My family was an old cattle ranch family in Northern California – I’m a fifth-generation cattle rancher, and my great-grandmother (who was English) ran the show. Her bedroom at the ranch was magical to me. She had a separate bedroom from my great-grandfather, and it was all lilac-colored chintz. Looking back, I suppose it was very English, and that she wanted to do her own thing on this dusty old ranch that reminded her of where she came from. I remember that it would constantly change, that she would reupholster a chair in blush velvet, for example, and I would really take note of her masterclass in layering. But I didn’t even know it – I just loved that room; it was so pretty.

Homes & Gardens: Did her influence start to shape your own style?

Nathan Turner: Growing up around that aesthetic on a working cattle ranch is pretty much who I am, yes. I love the layered decorative approach, but I also like spaces that are incredibly laid-back. I don’t like pretentious design – you know, I barely wear shoes, and so I need a home that’s OK in. And that all goes back to the surroundings I grew up in, which were the making of me as a person.

Homes & Gardens: Were there any other design influences that inspired you as you were growing up?

Nathan Turner: My mother’s aunt was an antiques dealer and an artist, and she painted and had friends over, and I spent a huge amount of time with her. Our ranch was multi-generational, with a few houses grouped together that I would walk between all the time to see what the different ladies were doing. My mother’s aunt really nurtured that part of me, and in fact there is now a fabric in my collection called Heaton, named after her, that features wild blackberry, as there were blackberries along the route between my home and hers.

Homes & Gardens: When did you first start to think about design as a career, and how did you get into it?

Nathan Turner: I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so my family insisted I study business and economics, and it was a crashing bore. So I studied abroad, which at least sounded fun, and went to the University of Siena in Italy for eight months. I loved it, but still had no idea what I wanted to do. My mother had a friend who worked in antiques, and he said he was going to a fair in Palma and that, because I spoke a bit of Italian, I could be an assistant on this buying trip. And it was fantastic! We went to Italy, Belgium, and England, driving around, meeting amazing people, and I ended up working for him for two years. The thing is that I can’t sit still, so after that I opened my own store in LA.

Homes & Gardens: Were there any designers you were looking up to at the time who inspired the store?

Nathan Turner: I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and the designer Michael Taylor was a huge inspiration. Mario Buatta was incredibly kind to me, and when my antiques shop started to produce inquiries, I didn’t know what I was doing, and he said I could shadow him. It was so cool and fun and fantastic, and I modeled my business after him. He worked out of his townhouse on 80th in Manhattan, and he had only a few employees, something I’ve stuck to all my career. I only employ three people, and it’s much easier to keep your operation lean.

Homes & Gardens: And was the store well received when you first opened it?

Nathan Turner: I joke that I opened the store in September, and by January I had no money. I’d spent it all on inventory, so I quickly figured that out, but one of my favorite parts of the antiques business is that it’s so personal, and most dealers are really about a lifestyle. This isn’t a job people tend to do for the money, but because you get to live an interesting and great life. You meet characters in the countryside of Italy who have stories to tell and who sit you down over wine and food. And I thought that I’d like to do that in LA, so I started hosting people for dinner and lunches.

Homes & Gardens: Was there a point where the business started to take off?

Nathan Turner: Yes, so the LA Times gave me a front cover of its home section, saying that there was this kid who was cooking in his antique shop, and it snowballed. People were trying to make reservations! The whole look of the shop was that it was very curated, just like a house, and it was easy for clients to see how I’d decorate, so they started asking me to do their own homes. Of course, I had no idea how, but I just figured I’d figure it out. Martyn Lawrence Bullard gave me some contacts of contractors he used, and I was so fortunate that industry friends like him rallied around me.

Homes & Gardens: So what was your aesthetic at the time?

Nathan Turner: I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and the designer Michael Taylor was a huge inspiration. Mario Buatta was incredibly kind to me, and when my antiques shop started to produce inquiries, I didn’t know what I was doing, and he said I could shadow him. It was so cool and fun and fantastic, and I modeled my business after him. He worked out of his townhouse on 80th in Manhattan, and he had only a few employees, something I’ve stuck to all my career. I only employ three people, and it’s much easier to keep your operation lean.

Homes & Gardens: What was your own home looking like at that time?

Nathan Turner: It was cute, a 1920s Regency apartment. It got featured in Domino magazine, and that was a big boost to my career. A mutual friend had brought Deborah Needleman from the magazine in to see me at the shop, and I remember picking fig leaves to dress the table for her arrival and pouring champagne, and I became the Domino entertaining guy. It was bonkers and really fun, and those ladies taught me so much. The reason I can do books now is because I essentially went to the school of Domino, where I had to learn how to produce my own shoots and tell my own stories.

Homes & Gardens: Speaking of books, your brand-new one is called, simply, I Love Decorating. Why do you love it so much?

Nathan Turner: A lot of decorators have a look that is specific to them, but for me, every job is wildly different. I am a hyped-up person with ADD, and so I don’t get bored. I will do every type of style, from a fancy lady’s apartment in NYC to a minimalist penthouse in Japan. I just love the excitement that decorating can bring and the way it can help reflect and enhance who a person truly is. It’s kind of weird, being a decorator, as you get to know everything about the people you’re designing for, and it’s very intimate. But I love that relationship, too.

Homes & Gardens: You say in the book that you also still love buying antiques. How do you find the treasure in all the trash?

Nathan Turner: It’s my favorite part of the process! It’s always a rush going into a crap palace and finding the one good thing. I get a vibe off it. It takes a while to figure that out. I remember being an assistant and being like, 'I love that,' about a piece we’d seen but not speaking up, and getting the confidence to just like things and understand how they might look in a space comes with time and experience. I would say, be curious. No one knows more than a good antique dealer, and if you ask them why they stock a piece, they will tell you the story, which can help you judge whether it’s worth having or not. I always love a good story.

Homes & Gardens: And from those early days as an assistant, has your style evolved?

Nathan Turner: For sure – it has to. Your style can’t help but evolve if you’re a curious person, which I am. My foundation is the same – I still love comfortable English upholstered furniture, even in modern houses, and I still want the spirit of that, with a home to be all cozy – but I go through phases where I like a particular color or pattern.

Homes & Gardens: You’re friends with Sarah Jessica Parker, one of the world’s most eminent tastemakers. Has she taught you anything about style?

Nathan Turner: My husband Eric and her have been friends since they were 21, and Eric has always done her homes. Her sense of color is wild – she has such a very specific palette that she loves. To the average eye, you think it’ll be bonkers, as it’s all bold tones like peacock blue, but the way she mixes them… it has taught me to push boundaries, not to lock into safe color combinations, to be brave.

Homes & Gardens: Lastly, in the book, you say your goal is to create homes that enable people to live their best lives – how does your own home do that for you?

Nathan Turner: I love to gather and bring people together – what’s the good in having a beautiful dining room without beautiful dishes being eaten off the table?! You need to be able to fill a house with joy and laughter to make it a home, and I’m happiest when there are loads of people around. My homes in LA and Ojai do that, functioning as places our friends can gather.

What emerges is a portrait of a designer led by instinct, emotion, and experience rather than rigid rules. Nathan Turner’s story traces a path from early influences on a California ranch to a career built on antiques, entertaining, and deeply personal interiors. His approach – layered yet relaxed, considered yet unpretentious – has been shaped by mentors, travel, and meaningful relationships with clients and collaborators alike.

At its core, his work is about more than aesthetics; it’s about connection, storytelling, and creating spaces that invite people in. As his new book I Love Decorating suggests, decorating isn’t just something he does at work – it’s something he genuinely adores.

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For decades, Miles Redd has been one of the great maximalists of American decorating – a designer whose rooms pulse with glamour, wit, and an unmistakable sense of personality. Known for layering bold color, theatrical flourishes, and unexpected juxtapositions, the interiors produced by his studio, Redd Kaihoi, have long felt worlds away from the restrained minimalism that has dominated so much of contemporary design.

Yet in this new installment of our Layered Lives series, Miles Redd reveals that his tastes are shifting. These days, alongside the lacquer and sparkle, he finds himself drawn to stripped-back English country houses, scrubbed wood, and airy simplicity. Here, he reflects on the Southern upbringing that shaped his eye, his formative years working for legendary decorator Bunny Williams, and the downtown Manhattan apartment that launched his career. Along the way, he shares why decorating should never be taken too seriously – and why learning to let go of possessions may be the ultimate luxury of all.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

Miles Redd: It came from my mother, definitely – she loved beautiful houses and beautiful architecture. She was from Williamsburg, Virginia, and she grew up around 18th-century buildings, with a sense of spareness and simplicity. She had a real strictness to her aesthetic, and I always remember her saying, ‘I don’t like doodads!’ Which, of course, made me react by embracing maximalism and baroque tendencies. Though now I find myself moving toward her strictness...

Homes & Gardens: Were there any hints in your childhood that this could be the career path you'd take?

Miles Redd: I’ve always had a love of objects and furniture. I would rearrange the furniture in our home, and my mom would just move it back. But that's fair – it was her house, and she liked things a certain way, and she was entitled to it. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where the homes are amazing, designed by the greats like Philip Trammell Shutze and Neel Reid. Back then, these houses were forever being refluffed and renovated. When the construction workers were in, they would often leave the houses open, and we would just walk around and look at the floor plans. We weren't supposed to, of course, but it was one of my favorite things in the world.

Homes & Gardens: Did it start to teach you what you liked and disliked?

Miles Redd: Absolutely. My mom was a hysterical critic. She'd say things like, ‘There isn't enough closet space,’ or, ‘I don't like having a garage here on the ground floor.’ It gave me the confidence to make my own assessments. I have always liked order and beautiful interiors. You know, I’m a Taurus rising, and we like our comforts.

Homes & Gardens: What sort of aesthetics caught your eye?

Miles Redd: It was always Hollywood’s interpretation of what New York was like in the 1930s. We loved old movies and old sets, that streamlined glamour that the interiors always had. I was always in search of that feeling, and I still love it to this day, but I would say I’ve moved into an English country house phase, and now I want everything to be stripped back. It’s like they say, what’s old is new again...

Homes & Gardens: Legendary designer Bunny Williams was influential for you too, right?

Miles Redd: Oh, hugely. I worked for Bunny Williams, and her way of arranging a room, and the scale and proportion, and the mix... She’d put something Irish next to something French, next to something really decorative, and she really taught me about juxtaposition.

Homes & Gardens: How did you come to work for Bunny?

Miles Redd: I was a film major at NYU, and I’m now so glad I didn’t take that route. Film is technical, and I’m not suited to that, but people would say they just loved my sets. I worked for a producer, but it was not for me. I was just reading scripts and got bored, so I thought I’d try my hand at decorating. I got a job with John Rosselli, who is an antique dealer and Bunny’s partner. It was fun, and I was there for two years. They became like my New York parents.

Homes & Gardens: What do you think they saw in you that made them want to take you under their wings?

Miles Redd: We share a Southern sensibility, and a scrappiness. We all had a sense that if you wanted something badly enough, you’d be able to figure it out for yourself. I’d watch her making curtains by getting cotton balls from the five-and-dime store to pad the pelmets, and I was always making my own things, painting floors, and just getting stuff done. Our senses of humor and values were the same, and we all just love decorating – it’s our raison d’être. But at the same time, we all knew it was just decorating, which I appreciate. That sense of not taking it too seriously, really.

Homes & Gardens: What did your own apartment look like at the time?

Miles Redd: I lived on 14th Street here in New York, between Avenue B and Avenue C, which was not such a savory place. Or at least it certainly wasn’t in the 1990s. The bathtub was in the kitchen. It had a sort of Cecil Beaton vibe, with emerald green and white harlequin tiles on the floor. Everything else was chocolate brown. There was a loft bed, but it was my laboratory, and I furnished it from the flea market and the occasional big purchase. It launched me.

Homes & Gardens: What did your own apartment look like at the time?

Miles Redd: I lived on 14th Street here in New York, between Avenue B and Avenue C, which was not such a savory place. Or at least it certainly wasn’t in the 1990s. The bathtub was in the kitchen. It had a sort of Cecil Beaton vibe, with emerald green and white harlequin tiles on the floor. Everything else was chocolate brown. There was a loft bed, but it was my laboratory, and I furnished it from the flea market and the occasional big purchase. It launched me.

Homes & Gardens: How did it launch you?

Miles Redd: Well, actually, my career taking off was a combination of so many things. Bunny and John were so generous in introducing me to everyone – you just met people as they came into John’s shop all the time, so it felt natural and organic to make connections that way. Back then, magazines were more promotional, and I had some early success when my own apartment was featured in several major interiors magazines. At the same time, many of my friends were just starting to achieve success in their fields. They were buying bigger places and needed someone to decorate them, so the timing was right for me to step in. All these things came together at exactly the right moment.

Homes & Gardens: At what point did it feel right to leave Bunny and John and work for yourself?

Miles Redd: I worked for Bunny for five years, then took a sabbatical and went to France for six months. I had been working hard and needed a break, and taking that time out in France was where I found my center again. By that point, my sister had moved to New York, and she was the one who said, ‘Let’s try this together and set up our own design practice!’ So we did, but then she got married, and I took it over.

Homes & Gardens: And now that you're in charge, what's your approach to each new project?

Miles Redd: You have to get the walls and floors right first. You get the floor plans, and from there, you have to be practical about what will work for real life.

Homes & Gardens: Your projects are very varied; you don't seem to have one aesthetic style. Is that because your taste is always evolving?

Miles Redd: My taste definitely evolves – instead of, say, the ebony-and-silver parquet that I once loved, I'm now into natural wood tones, scrubbed pitch pine, and plaster. It's a different vibe, but a decorator sees the connection between these different looks. Perhaps it's in the way they smell or feel, or the air in the space. A decorator knows when a home is loved, cared for, and thoughtfully considered.

Homes & Gardens: What aesthetic would you say you're most drawn to at the moment?

Miles Redd: Fresh, sparkling, airy spaces. That's what I want. I used to love rich, glittering interiors, and my apartment is rich and glittering, but now I want it to feel fresh and airy.

Homes & Gardens: Does that mean a decluttering project is imminent? How do you feel about letting go of the treasures that make up your home?

Miles Redd: You have to let them go. Objects are things you can enjoy for a while, but every time I see the sale of a great collector's possessions, I think about the person those things end up with and how they were meant to go to them instead. It's very freeing not to be attached to the things in your home. I try not to be attached. You can dither about whether to get rid of something, but once it's gone, it's gone – you barely, if ever, think about it again. Your home is still there, just different. It's not the things that made the place a home in the first place; it's you, and the way you live your life.

There is something refreshing about the way Miles talks about interiors. For all the grandeur and glamour associated with his work, he approaches decorating with a looseness and emotional intelligence that feels deeply human. Tastes evolve, rooms shift, treasured objects come and go – and none of it, he suggests, should be treated too preciously.

What matters is not perfection, but atmosphere: the feeling a home creates, the memories made within it, and the sense that it has been truly lived in and loved. Even now, after decades shaping some of America’s most celebrated interiors, Miles still speaks with the enthusiasm of someone endlessly fascinated by rooms – by how they look, yes, but even more by how they make people feel.

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Effortless, inviting, slightly elevated, and always lived-in – is how Susie Watson Design’s style could be described. It’s an aesthetic that’s hard to pinpoint, and that’s the whole point. It’s layered, collected, and totally timeless.

This idea of creating pieces that are both beautiful and suited to everyday life has been at the heart of every version of Susie Watson Designs. What began as a family-run art gallery over 25 years ago quickly developed into a small pottery business, selling at fairs across the UK, and then flourished into an iconic British design brand. It moved from stalls to stores around the country and expanded far beyond pottery to include beautifully handcrafted cushions, rugs, furniture, and more – all still grounded in the same idea: that these pieces are not to be ‘saved for best’ or treated as overly precious.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is that this is still very much a family business, with Susie working closely with her daughter Anna Watson. Together, they collaborate on new ideas, travel the world for inspiration and to work with suppliers, as well as drawing constant inspiration from their own everyday lives. The family ties also extend beyond Susie and Anna – the designers, suppliers, and factories they work with are family-run too, and the brand’s whole ethos is centered on elegant design for everyday family life.

Here, in our most recent Layered Lives interview, we sit down with Susie to find out more about where the brand began, how it grew into what it is today, what inspires her now, and to gain a real insight into the dynamic of this mother-daughter duo.

Homes & Gardens: Can You Share the Story of How Susie Watson Designs Began?

Susie Watson: Susie Watson Designs really started with a simple but lovely idea: why should beauty be saved just for gallery walls? I wanted to bring art into everyday life – turning the things we use all the time, like cushions, mugs, and tablecloths, into something a bit more special. Everything is thoughtfully handcrafted, full of character, and made to be loved and used. It’s about making your home feel personal, warm, and filled with little stories in every corner.

Homes & Gardens: How Did Your Design Journey Begin Before Susie Watson Designs?

Susie Watson: I designed clothes in my twenties, which I absolutely loved. My focus gradually shifted to interiors when creating a home became more important to me. With four children, I spent a great deal of time at home, and renovating houses evolved into both a career and a lasting fascination.

Homes & Gardens: And What or Who Were Some of Your Earliest Influences?

Susie Watson: My best friend at school lived in a beautiful Suffolk farmhouse. Her incredibly artistic mother had a large, brick-floored kitchen with wonderful dressers. It made a lasting impression on me and was undoubtedly an early influence – my own kitchens still carry something of that same spirit.

Homes & Gardens: Can You Describe the First Space That Shaped Your Design?

Susie Watson: As a family, we embraced kitchen living long before it became fashionable, so the kitchen was the first room I became truly interested in designing.

Kitchen suppers always felt more fun and informal to me, and I’ve always loved cooking. A large kitchen dresser was probably our first real piece of furniture, and we still have it today. That’s the wonderful thing about investing in furniture or paintings – they become companions for life. No matter how many times you move, your home still feels like home. The kitchen table is the heart of most homes, and I still work from ours most days.

I’ve always designed my own kitchen cupboards, working with a carpenter to make them. They were never particularly high-spec, but understanding how you use a space means everything is exactly where you need it. I’ve often gone on to design kitchens for others as well.

I like to keep ceramics out where I can see them. Plate racks are by far the best way to store plates and bowls – they make it quicker and easier to empty the dishwasher, and you can immediately see when you’re running low.

Most of my kitchens have had pink walls – it makes them feel warm and inviting. The color works beautifully with the brick floors I’m especially fond of, and it provides a perfect backdrop for paintings and table lamps, both of which are essential to a lived-in kitchen.

Homes & Gardens: Can You Walk Us Through Your Typical Design Process, From Initial Inspiration to the Finished Product?

Susie Watson: Sometimes we have a clear idea of what we want to create – for example, a bedside table with more storage, or a kilim rug that complements a new wallpaper. In those cases, the design work feels more like problem-solving.

We find inspiration everywhere – antiques, paintings, nature – our ideas can come from anywhere! We work through each design together, producing drawings that we send to our brilliant makers. Samples are created and refined until we have something we’re happy with.

We take several trips each year to Sri Lanka and India and do a lot of our designing while we’re there. It helps that we’re together 24 hours a day for a week or so, but being in another country and free from the everyday running of the business also gives us time to truly be creative. Working side by side with our makers makes the whole design process so much easier. We can watch as different threads, paints, dyes, or carvings are used and shaped – and make changes on the spot – so it becomes a much more fluid process.

Sometimes, when we first arrive, it takes a while for the ideas to start flowing. But by the time we’re getting on the plane home, we’re bursting with inspiration and wishing we had a few extra days to try everything out! That’s just the nature of how our creativity works – it’s all about having the time and space to really get into an artistic headspace.

Homes & Gardens: What Are the Key Elements That Define the Susie Watson Aesthetic, and How Has That Signature Style Evolved Over Time?

Susie Watson: Designing products for the home has been a huge learning curve! We began with ceramics and tablecloths in a limited palette of pinks, blues, and greens. But alongside our makers, we’ve developed increasingly sophisticated ways of creating fabrics – learning how to stonewash and screen-print intricate designs, and embroider beautifully detailed patterns.

Over time, we began making kilim rugs and added furniture to our collection. The more we design and create, the more we discover what’s possible. Beautiful colors inspired by nature are a constant theme throughout all our interiors. We use only the very best natural materials – stonewashed linens, silk velvets, wool kilims, pure wool throws, and acacia wood.

As soon as people walk into our showrooms, they immediately feel the warmth and coziness of home. Because we are the designers, our collection feels very organic. We never design what we think someone might like – we follow our own instincts entirely. That’s why our style feels timeless and never simply 'on trend.'

Homes & Gardens: Are There Any Behind-the-Scenes Rituals, Routines, or Traditions That Shape the Way You Make Design Decisions?

Susie Watson: No – the whole design process for us is pretty chaotic! Every item we create has a completely different backstory. Some of our kilims were perfect the first time we wove them, while others went through several iterations before we were happy. Some designs get abandoned completely, even after hours and hours of work. And sometimes, a great product comes out of a mistake!

Color is always a real challenge – it’s so difficult to get just right. And occasionally, we’ll love a product when we first design it, only to decide we don’t like it at all once it’s in the stores! The key is to keep moving forward and learning from each experience.

Homes & Gardens: In the Competitive World of Interior and Textile Design, How Do You Stay Innovative While Maintaining a Consistent Brand Identity?

Susie Watson: We never set out to be a big competitor in the interior design world, and we’d never fool ourselves into thinking that should be the goal. I think if we started second-guessing what we should or shouldn’t be designing, the whole process would become inorganic.

Our brand is strong because we have a tight-knit team and we refuse to be swayed by trends. We simply focus on creating beautiful things, and our customers seem to recognize and appreciate the value in that.

Homes & Gardens: How Does Family Influence Play a Role in Your Work? Are There Lessons or Values Passed Down That You See Reflected in the Brand?

Susie Watson: Family plays a huge part in the brand. Not only do we have various members of our family working in the business, but we also see each of our stores as a family, and the people who make our products are all small family businesses. This gives a wonderful sense of continuity, stability, and longevity to the brand – something our customers really pick up on.

Everyone understands the importance of their own family, and I think people recognize that Susie Watson Designs is built on that same foundation. We are a family business, designing for families and family life.

Homes & Gardens: Are There Any Misconceptions About Running a Family-Led Design Brand That You Would Like to Clarify?

Susie Watson: I think some people get hung up on the idea of inheriting a business rather than earning it. To be honest, it’s a lot of work and quite a responsibility to take on – something many people might not actually want. The benefits for the business, however, massively outweigh any negatives.

The biggest advantage is that investment decisions are always made with the long-term growth and health of the company in mind, rather than short-term gain. I didn’t take a salary for the first 15 years! It’s incredibly hard to build a strong business in just one generation. Later generations get the opportunity to build and expand on the original concept – but it’s still hard work.

A family business also provides great security for those working within it. In a small company, the wider team becomes an integral part of the family, and that gives everyone a much greater sense of stability about their future. By contrast, a company buyout can often be traumatic for staff who’ve helped build the business – they sometimes choose to leave, saddened by how the culture they loved and felt part of has changed.

Homes & Gardens: Can You Tell Us a Little About Your Relationship as Mother and Daughter, and How It Shapes the Way You Work Together Creatively?

Susie Watson: We naturally have very similar design ideas, having spent so much time together over the years. We’re very honest with each other, which is helpful – we don’t tiptoe around our opinions when collaborating! We both understand how valuable true collaboration can be.

Of course, there are moments of frustration when something isn’t quite working, but we instinctively know when to step in and when to step back. There’s no pride or ego when it comes to design ownership – if something works, that’s great. If a product doesn’t end up working, that’s fine too. Often, the lessons we learn when things go wrong are far more valuable than when everything goes right.

Homes & Gardens: How Do You Divide Responsibilities at Susie Watson Designs, and Where Do Your Roles Overlap?

Susie Watson: I am involved in almost every aspect of the business, and I still enjoy every part of it – from initial product design to store interiors, photography, stock ordering, and even dealing directly with customers.

Anna focuses more on product design and works extensively on the bespoke side of the business, helping customers resize furniture and kilims for their homes. It’s mainly on the design side that our roles overlap, but we constantly look to each other for advice on all the day-to-day decisions involved in running the business.

Homes & Gardens: What’s a Typical Day in the Studio Like When You’re Working on a New Collection? Any Rituals, Routines, or Little Quirks That Define Your Process?

Susie Watson: It’s only really when we head to India or Sri Lanka that we have proper full days to be creative. For the rest of the time, it’s snatched hours here or there in which we think about new product design.

If we do have a spare afternoon, we’re usually in the summer house at our home with the floor covered in bits of kilim and rolls of fabric. Becca, our brilliant graphic designer who has worked with us since she graduated, works closely with us and is an integral part of our design team. She also manages all aspects of photography, which is a major part of what we do each month.

And there are usually my four badly behaved dogs sitting on everything, barking to be let in or out, and eating sandwiches from Becca’s bag! Endless cups of coffee are a staple. But usually, out of the chaos, something good will come! It’s not a recognized design process, but it’s really the only way we know how.

Homes & Gardens: How Do You Navigate Creative Disagreements? Do Those Moments Ever Lead to Some of Your Best Work?

Susie Watson: If one of us feels strongly about a new idea – against the judgment of the other – we’ll usually still go ahead and get a sample made anyway. We’ve been doing this long enough to know that until you have a sample in front of you, it’s really hard to tell whether something’s going to work or not. At that point, it quickly becomes obvious to both of us if it’s good.

Interestingly, the new designs we really love are always the ones the head office team love too – and they often go on to become bestsellers. Sometimes, the designs that look best on paper turn out to be the most disappointing once they’re made. That’s one of the joys of the process – the happy accidents. It’s certainly never predictable, and that’s what keeps it such an exciting area to work in.

Homes & Gardens: How Do You Maintain the Balance Between Running a Business and Nurturing Your Mother-Daughter Relationship?

Susie Watson: There’s an understanding between all of us that running a business is hard work – and there’s no escaping that. There isn’t really an 'off' switch, and Anna realizes more and more that this has been key to my success – she lives and breathes the business, and work naturally seeps into every part of life.

We’re happy to talk about work most of the time, but a phone conversation between us will usually cover product design, dogs, gossip, and politics – all within a few minutes! We don’t even try to keep work and home life separate; we’re lucky enough to do jobs we love, so the two blend together quite naturally.

When we’re working in Sri Lanka, we even share a hotel room and will still be discussing a new mug design while reading our novels before bed. It may not be considered the healthiest approach, but it’s the only way we know how to work!

Homes & Gardens: Are There Any Behind Closed Doors Moments – Fun, Chaotic, or Surprisingly Emotional – That Define the Life of the Brand?

Susie Watson: Everything we do is slightly chaotic – and definitely funny! We both value humor more than anything and spend a lot of time laughing at (and with) each other. Photoshoots are always a hive of activity and chaos – Anna once fell in the pool during a shoot at her house, and on one of my trips to India, my suitcase rolled across the train floor and straight out of the open train door! Luckily, a kind man on a bicycle at the next station retrieved it me.

It’s also hard to avoid emotional moments when we all work so closely together. We go through incredibly stressful times as a team, but as anyone knows, those shared challenges are often the most bonding. It’s through those hardships that we’ve built such loyalty and genuine affection for the people we work with.

None of us could do it alone – we all need each other. That can feel a little scary at times, but it’s also incredibly energizing. We’re constantly amazed by how far we’ve come, and knowing it’s all been achieved through hard work and perseverance gives us the reassurance that there’s no reason it can’t continue.

Homes & Gardens: What Inspires You Outside of Design? Travel, Art, Nature, or Heritage, and How Do You Translate That Into Your Collections?

Susie Watson: Everything around us is an inspiration – we never stop looking. Wherever we are, we subconsciously absorb why some things work and others don’t, and how certain elements complement or clash with each other. We’re constantly building ideas around shape, color, and texture, and how they all come together.

Homes & Gardens: What Advice Would You Give to Aspiring Designers About Collaboration, Creativity, and Building a Brand With Authenticity?

Susie Watson: Start small. Get your product out there in the simplest, most cost-effective way possible and see if people like it. Fairs are hard work, but they’re a great way to get your products in front of customers – and you can usually just about cover the costs through sales. You’ll get a sense right away of whether people connect with your style or not.

You need to be single-minded and not give up when a million problems come your way (and they will!). We’ve had so many ups and downs in this business, but through sheer stubbornness and hard work, we’ve forged ahead. Not many people realize how much effort goes into building a small retail business where everything is handmade. You have to be prepared to work long, hard days to get your product right.

Homes & Gardens: If You Could Describe the Heart of Susie Watson Designs in Three Words, What Would They Be and Why?

Susie Watson: Family, home, color.

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British-born interior designer Jake Arnold has become known for spaces that feel at once cinematic and deeply personal – rooms layered with texture, warmth, and a distinctly relaxed sense of luxury. Based in Los Angeles, where he has designed homes for a roster of high-profile clients, Jake's work manages to balance Californian ease with the quiet refinement of the English interiors he grew up around.

But long before celebrity projects and international acclaim, his fascination with homes began as a child endlessly rearranging furniture in the suburbs of Britain, inspired as much by episodes of Changing Rooms as by the grand historic houses of his school friends.

In the latest instalment of our Layered Lives series, Jake Arnold reflects on his winding route into design, the insecurities that delayed his pursuit of it as a career, and why creating soulful interiors is less about perfection than allowing spaces – and people – to evolve naturally over time.

Homes & Gardens: Let’s go all the way back to the beginning. Where do you think your love of design comes from?

Jake Arnold: I think I’ve always been obsessed with everything to do with houses. Even when I was a kid, I’d move my room around about five times a day. Then I’d go to friends’ houses, and I’d move their rooms around too. I went to a small school in the English suburbs from the age of 11 to 13, and a lot of the kids there lived in incredible historic homes (I was the comparatively poorer person in the school) – they’d live in original Tudor mansions or gorgeous Georgian homes, so I was always around amazing houses and just found myself drawn to them. I also loved the instant gratification of moving a space around and feeling joy when it suddenly comes together.

Homes & Gardens: Did your parents have a flair for interiors too?

Jake Arnold: My mom was an artist who used to paint murals and had her own design company for kids that would do intricate wallcoverings for their rooms. I’d go with her and pick out furniture and paint colors. I remember being about 12 and walking around with a notebook, writing notes, and giving them to my mom’s contractor about things he should be doing instead.

Homes & Gardens: He must have loved you! What did your own room look like at this time?

Jake Arnold: It was a nautical brown wood bunk bed, and there was an incredible burgundy leather inlay desk. Then there were tartan Roman blinds on the window, and my mom painted three large-scale check patterns based on the blinds on the walls in a mustard yellow. I loved it. It had a level of refinement and didn’t feel like a child’s space.

Homes & Gardens: Can you remember any early influences that inspired you and showed you what interiors could be?

Jake Arnold: In my childhood, I was never really exposed to art – that just wasn’t who my family was – so my inspiration came from TV shows. In the UK, where I grew up, we had a show called Changing Rooms, where designers would make over people’s homes on a budget and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. I was obsessed with the most ostentatious of the designers – Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and I soaked all of that creativity in. I was never exposed to high design and never thought of it as a job, so I had to be self-taught later in life.

Homes & Gardens: When did you come to realise design could be the career for you?

Jake Arnold: From an emotional standpoint, I hid my love of design for so long. I didn’t acknowledge or own that it was what I wanted to do as a career, and I would say I wanted to go into property development. I had a shame around my perceived femininity of being interested in art, and so I pushed my interests away for so long. It wasn’t until I was about 21, and after I’d studied business and economics at university, that I started to understand – and even admit – that it was what I wanted to do for my job.

Homes & Gardens: What was your first role?

Jake Arnold: After university, I had a Twitter account, and I just searched for interior designers. I came across Jaime Rummerfield, who had done John Travolta’s house – she had shared a sizzle reel that she’d made for a reality show, and I thought it looked insane and so fun. So I just emailed her from London, and incredibly, she emailed back and said that if I could get to LA for a month, I could do an internship with her. My dad was like, ‘You can’t do that,’ but I had money saved up from my bar mitzvah, and although he was like, ‘You really can’t use that for this,’ I just did – I booked a plane ticket, rented a car, found an apartment. I met Jaime and she took me under her wing – that summer was life-changing. I was initiated into a different world and exposed to so much.

Homes & Gardens: What did you learn during that time?

Jake Arnold: One of the biggest things I learned was to make peace with the process of interior design, and to let your ideas change and inspirations evolve as projects take shape. Design is so much about budgets and service, but Jaime gave me the idea that I could also find a way to accept my process and embrace the idea of layering and curation over time. That’s what brings that soul to a space. And she taught me the love of vintage. When I grew up, I didn’t appreciate the concept of pre-owned pieces, vintage and antiques. Most people in England think it’s stifling to be around old things. But when I came here, to LA, because everything is new there is a yearning and desire for more storied pieces.

Homes & Gardens: Are there any early projects that stick out to you as a turning point in your career?

Jake Arnold: Yes, there was a project I did in Switzerland where the process had been very static and linear and things were just slowly evolving over time, where I was putting into practice everything Jaime had taught me about that being OK. It was on this project I started to really get the confidence to do that, to realize that before you start work on a space you don’t generally know what the light is like at each time of day, what each room is going to need. I used to just go along with whatever was being said, but on this project I learned to put my own opinions across and allow them to shift as the project went on.

Homes & Gardens: Now that you have that confidence, when starting a new project, what’s the very first thing you look for or ask that helps unlock the direction of the design?

Jake Arnold: A mix of a lot of visuals. I like to pull a lookbook together that’s a combination of look and feel, colors, textures, lighting. I say to the client, ‘What’s your favorite hotel?’ and ‘Let me see your playlist,’ so I get a general sense of who they are and what they like. Getting to know a client is like playing Clue – you have to have a lot of questions, and it’s not always about their home décor aesthetics. I’ll look at the way they dress, for example. That to me is the funnest part of the process. And then it’s also so fun to see how people respond to different fabrics. It allows me to design freely and present fully developed spaces.

Homes & Gardens: And you’re now doing up your own home – what is that process like? What will it look like?

Jake Arnold: Yes, I’ve just come back to LA, and I am moving into my new house next week. How I’m going to approach the decor is going to be so different to my work projects. There is no timeline, it’s going to be about being creative budget-wise, so I’ll be leaning into what I like, what resonates with me, what excites me. I want there to be a playful element, for it to make me feel playful.

Homes & Gardens: What sort of decor ideas have been resonating so far?

Jake Arnold: I’m thinking that I want this to be like if Tom Ford had a house with Dries Van Noten. Very clean and contemporary. Divorce chic! You know, like you’d lived in a manor house but were now downsizing but still had all these incredible antiques and had to make them work. I’m attracted to exotic and ornate things and to bold, rich, deep colors.

Homes & Gardens: What is the style of the home you’ve bought?

Jake Arnold: I never would have thought that I’d buy a house that was this contemporary. It’s very boxy, but it has volume and ceiling height, and so the light is what is going to give it personality. It was designed in the 1940s, but I don’t want to go all mid-century with what I put in it; I want to be a bit more nuanced than that.

Homes & Gardens: So, where will the playful elements come in, do you think?

Jake Arnold: I am excited about bringing people together. That’s the difference between a party at a house and one at a restaurant – at a house you can bring people together who maybe don’t know each other and it feels a bit less forced. So through the lighting, the casualness that I’m going to instill, that’s what will make it seem playful. I’ve learned to embrace the idea that things don’t have to be perfect and that just having people over to watch a movie or cook a dinner party is refined and elevated in itself.

Today, Jake’s interiors continue to evolve in much the same way he describes his process: intuitively, emotionally, and without rigid rules. Whether designing for clients or shaping his own newly acquired home in Los Angeles, his focus remains on creating spaces that feel lived-in, layered, and capable of bringing people together. It is perhaps this balance – between polish and playfulness, refinement and ease – that has made his work resonate so widely.

Even now, after years at the forefront of the design world, Jake still speaks about interiors with the same excitement as the teenager rearranging bedrooms and scribbling notes for contractors. For him, good design is not about creating perfect rooms, but spaces with enough soul, personality, and flexibility to grow alongside the people living in them.

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Brigette Romanek’s approach to design is rooted less in formal training than in instinct, memory, and emotion. Raised by a fiercely creative mother who encouraged self-expression at every turn, she grew up in homes that were in constant flux – walls repainted overnight, murals appearing unannounced, bedrooms treated as personal worlds. That early sense of freedom continues to underpin her work today, where comfort, individuality, and a certain relaxed eclecticism take precedence over rigid rules.

Brigette Romanek came to interior design later than many of her contemporaries, almost by accident, yet her rise has been swift, propelled by a distinctive sensibility and a roster of high-profile clients. In this installment of our Layered Lives series, she reflects on the unconventional path that led her into the industry, the formative spaces that shaped her eye, and why, for her, the success of a room is measured less by how it looks than by how it makes people feel.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think your love of design comes from?

Brigette Romanek: I’ve always been moved by, inspired by, and aware of my surroundings. I’m a Cancer, so it makes sense because, you know, you live in your shell! I do love home, I just do. Home is a place to exhale and find some reprieve, and it’s also a place to express yourself – it’s your canvas. We moved around so much when I was little, and my mom was such a creative soul who understood that I needed a place to call my own. When I was five years old, we moved to LA, and she just said, ‘Whatever you want, have it!’ She knew that I should have that sense of ownership, and getting to have that place I could call my own, with my things that I cared about and that felt familiar – that was all I needed.

Homes & Gardens: And what did those early bedrooms you designed look like?

Brigette Romanek: I had yellow walls, a yellow bed... I know yellow is very in right now! I had about 72 stuffed animals all piled up on the bed – it would look like installation art to see them all stacked up. I had posters on the wall that I’d change out depending on my latest loves. My mom let me do it all. A friend of hers made her a four-poster bed that was humongous – the diameter of each of the posts was that of a small table – and she allowed me to have a canopy bed too because I loved hers so much. She was a free spirit – she still is – and so she felt that anything that had significance to me, I could have.

Homes & Gardens: Where do you think her creativity came from?

Brigette Romanek: She’s a singer – she went into music, and it wasn’t considered a popular career choice, but she wouldn’t back down. My grandfather said to her, ‘Why don’t you deliver mail?’ but she was a creative soul, and she had a different way of looking at things. I’m so grateful to her. She would always say, ‘Yes, let’s try that,’ no matter what the idea was.

Homes & Gardens: Music has been very important in your adult life too, so it’s interesting to see it shaping your formative years.

Brigette Romanek: My mom was discovered by Quincy Jones – she was the original singer in Rufus. Chaka Khan was a friend of hers and got her the audition with Quincy.

Homes & Gardens: Are there any spaces or places you remember that caught your imagination when you were young and showed you the possibilities of good design?

Brigette Romanek: Yes, a living room in our house. We got an apartment, and my mom thought it was a little boring. I kid you not, she had some very creative friends, and I would come home and there would be a mural on the wall – she would let them do whatever they wanted. It would change constantly – I would come home and the walls were purple, or I would come home and someone had painted the Chicago downtown skyline on the wall. Without realizing it, I was immersed in a creative world, and I am so grateful for that. There was no formal design training for me, it was just a love and an understanding of how things could be.

Homes & Gardens: So when did you first start to think about design as a career, and how did you get into it?

Brigette Romanek: It wasn’t that long ago. I didn’t know it was something people did in the way I understand now – it was just something that I really enjoyed. My husband and I lived in London, which was so inspiring. I loved walking around London so much because culture was everywhere, and it was fueling me, seeing things I hadn’t seen before. That, for me, was oxygen – I love to learn and grow. So then I said that if we were moving back to LA, it had to have some culture somehow.

We moved to Hancock Park, into the only house that hadn’t been taken care of, and I could see the bones of it and what it could become. Then people would come over and say, ‘Whoa, it’s amazing,’ and I just shrugged my shoulders because all I’d done was use the tricks I had learned from my mom. Then someone came in and said they weren’t connecting with the interior designer they’d hired, and perhaps I could do it. And I got the job by just shrugging my shoulders and saying, ‘OK.’

Homes & Gardens: How has your work evolved since those early projects?

Brigette Romanek: My principles stay the same – there is always eclecticism, a level of comfort, and things and pieces that mean something to the client so the space feels familiar. But as I experience the world, as I venture out and try new things, what I’m drawn to changes. I’m also always meeting new makers, seeking them out when I want something specific for a project, and that opens my eyes to new possibilities when I see what they can do.

Homes & Gardens: Are there any early projects that stand out to you as a turning point in your career?

Brigette Romanek: My first job was really important – I stepped back and said, ‘I love this, and I think I can do this,’ and it really solidified where I belonged. It was for the Patricofs, a very influential family in LA, and a lot of people saw it, so that created more work. And then Gwyneth Paltrow’s house really brought me a lot of attention. What was so amazing about that was that it happened so organically. She was like, ‘I was going to do this myself,’ but obviously she’s a little busy, and so she asked me to help, and I said sure, and it turned into an entire house. It was one of the best jobs because she is so on it, so smart, and we had a blast.

Homes & Gardens: How do you want people to feel in your spaces at the moment, and how do you create that feeling?

Brigette Romanek: You know, you can make a pretty space, but you want it to have heart and soul, and you want it to support the people who enter it. People remember how they felt in a room longer than they remember how it looked, so I want to create spaces where there is a feeling of good energy. That can come as much from the negative space as from the pieces you put in it. If there is air and space around each item, then the whole room feels more comfortable.

Homes & Gardens: In your own home, you’ve started embracing pattern. Has this changed how your house feels?

Brigette Romanek: Yes – since covering my sofa in that Liberty floral print fabric, I have continued on my journey into pattern. I love that fabric so much because it makes me feel so good. Liberty has a special place in my heart from when I lived in London, so I recently got more fabrics from Liberty and am deciding how to use them. It’s so much fun to play around with prints.

Homes & Gardens: And being in LA, outdoor space is very important to you, isn’t it?

Brigette Romanek: Absolutely, the outdoor area is just another part of the house. In my home in Laurel Canyon, I see it as a continuation of the indoors and wanted to make it as fun and relaxing to be in as my living room. That means powder-coated furniture in bright, bold colors – shades like orange that feel fresh and inviting. Because that’s what a home should always be, and that’s how I want mine to feel.

What emerges is a designer guided by intuition and a deeply held belief in the emotional power of space. Brigette Romanek’s work resists formula, instead drawing on personal history, ongoing curiosity, and close collaboration with clients to create interiors that feel both expressive and at ease.

From her early, ever-changing childhood homes to her current projects, there is a consistent thread: a commitment to creating environments with warmth, personality, and a sense of possibility. Whether through pattern, color, or carefully considered negative space, her aim remains the same – to design homes that not only look inviting, but genuinely support the lives lived within them.

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One of the most celebrated interior designers working today, Ken Fulk is known for his cinematic, story-driven approach to spaces, events, and experiences. His landmark projects include all the Carbone restaurants and Miami's Casadonna, but he also creates glamorous homes across the globe.

As part of our Layered Lives series of interviews with leading designers, Ken reflects on the formative influences that shaped his distinctive aesthetic, from a childhood spent orchestrating family rituals in rural Virginia to his unconventional path into the design world. He shares how an early instinct for detail, atmosphere, and storytelling evolved into a career built on creating immersive environments.

Along the way, he discusses the importance of lighting, flowers, and entertaining, as well as his belief in design as a tool for emotional connection. Ultimately, it's Ken's imaginative vision that continues to redefine interiors as experiences rather than just spaces, shaping how we think of design today.

Homes & Gardens: Let’s start with the early days. As a child, can you remember anything that sparked a love of interiors?

Ken Fulk: I didn't know that interior design was a craft. I grew up in a little town in Virginia – it was very bucolic. My grandparents owned a farm. To set the scene, my grandmother was one of 12 kids, and it was just expected that you were kind and warm, but you were also a bit manic running a farm. So while you were expected to keep a nice house, entertain, and take pride in it, you were just expected to know how to do it, and it wasn't anything anyone ever discussed or thought about openly. But somehow, a love of quality of life was ingrained in me – I was essentially an alien.

Homes & Gardens: In what way were you different?

Ken Fulk: Well, when I was four years old, I would just tell our dinner guests that when I grew up I was going to live in Manhattan, in a penthouse. I don't know where I got the idea, because I had never even left the county. And then by the age of six, I was the ringmaster of my family's life, and it was me who would set the table, cut the flowers, and get the china down from the cabinets, which I had previously organized. And I would pick out little buttons for my blazers – every detail was always selected by me.

Homes & Gardens: What was it about selecting details that you were drawn to?

Ken Fulk: I just knew that life would be better if we all had perfect experiences. I didn't grow up with money, and my family were simple people in a little town, but that didn't stop me from wanting to make everything perfect. So I would pick out what we were going to do for Christmas, and I would know all the right gifts for everybody, and I would calculate the optimum time to get the tree so we could enjoy it, but it would still look fresh on the big day. Orchestrating these rituals – it wasn't that I had the desire to be in charge, it was just that I had a sense that if I could set the stage, then we could all embrace the moment more easily.

Homes & Gardens: It sounds like you were born fully formed! Did it then seem like interior design was always going to be your career path?

Ken Fulk: No, I never thought of it as a career. I was deep into my 20s and had gone to college as an English and history major in Virginia, and I knew that I loved architecture and historic homes. But I moved to Boston and got a proper job (which I hated), so as a hobby I kept a beautiful apartment. Truly, I was living beyond my means, but it mattered to me that my home was chic.

Homes & Gardens: What was your first home like?

Ken Fulk: It was an apartment in a historic building that had been converted, and the part I lived in had previously been the home's parlor. It was one of the old formal rooms and, as such, had huge bay windows, high ceilings, two bedrooms, and a dining room. I was 23 years old, and I felt it was very grand. I didn't have any money, but what I did have I'd spend on the apartment, getting things like matching green and burgundy Ralph Lauren towels.

Homes & Gardens: Did your love of doing up this home help you parlay into working in interiors?

Ken Fulk: I met my husband Kurt after I'd been living in Boston for three weeks – we met in the local laundromat – and together we moved to California and started a couple of businesses that were more creative than my 'real job' in Boston. We were making shower curtains and pillows; it was all very charming stuff. Then we started making bed linen and pajamas for children, and then Discovery bought the company. So I needed a new job, and a friend said, 'Here is $15,000 – can you do up my home with it?' and I was like, 'I can do this!' I literally sanded the floors myself and did it all.

Then I got jobs in places like Martha's Vineyard and the South of France, being paid very little but becoming sort of like a concierge for people, fixing things up for them – anything from a wedding to a house. And I'd do everything, from the flowers upward. It was like being a kid back with my family again – I became the ringmaster in these people's lives, setting the stage for them, orchestrating everything.

It all grew out of me being a weird kid – my one superpower is that I can see the world through rose-colored glasses and understand what any given situation needs to make it more beautiful.

Homes & Gardens: What are your go-tos for making the world more beautiful?

Ken Fulk: I'm obsessed with good lighting – I still find it the most egregious thing when it's wrong. We do a lot of work in the South of France, and the nicest restaurants there can look like parking lots. Everyone needs a dimmer switch. I always go into places and change out the bulbs – I like amber ones that are almost brown and give everything a really warm glow. They're my secret sauce.

Homes & Gardens: Flowers are also key to your aesthetic – how and why?

Ken Fulk: I just loved flowers as a kid – I would go out and clip them from the garden. We had peonies on a hedge at the back of the yard, and I would go and clip them and set the table with them. And I still have this love of flowers – we now have a whole floral department at the studio where we do weekly arrangements for clients who want them. Fresh flowers help create a space's love language.

Homes & Gardens: Do you have any favorite flowers to decorate a home with?

Ken Fulk: Anything that smells like a California spring. So that's garden roses, wisteria, or lilac – those scents that are intoxicating but not overwhelming. The clipping and styling of flowers helps set the ritual of a space, which is partly why I also have an enduring love of taking china down from a cabinet, creating a collage of china and glass on the table, choosing music that transports you and lifts you up and makes you want to dance. All these things help you be present in the room, as you're really aware of what's around you. Talk about an imprinting method.

Homes & Gardens: What's it like to be entertained at home by you?

Ken Fulk: We don’t entertain often in our house in San Francisco. We moved here 15 years ago to a house surrounded by a garden, and it's such a sanctuary for me, Kurt, and the dogs – it's truly a retreat. Where we do entertain is in our house in Provincetown, where we're very relaxed.

I used to think that everything always had to be perfect, but I had a moment where a light went off in my mind and I realized you can't be fancy in P-town! Every house is crooked, there isn't room to be ostentatious, so it has a relaxed nature – it's very genuine – and we entertain with a great sense of ease. I have to prepare people when they come and say to them, 'Your feet may be off the bed, the shower is outside, but we'll have a good time.'

On the rare occasions I entertain in San Francisco, I set a more proper table, the flowers are more composed, and I have wine chosen and set out, and I am more orchestrated. But it doesn't need to be more than that – if you're not having a good time, then your guests aren't either, and everyone is tense. The joy is the togetherness, not the perfection.

Homes & Gardens: As you've evolved, has the way you design interiors shifted too?

Ken Fulk: Not really – we still approach every project the same way. Since I wasn’t trained and cannot even draw a circle, I still don't sketch a plan out like many designers do. But I do see spaces finished in my head – I call them movies, as they have a cinematic quality – and I know what they need to be.

So with my team, we will sit around a big table at the start of a project, and the process begins with me describing what I see in my head. I'll say things like, 'Imagine Jackie O in Gstaad in the 1970s meets a sexy cowboy in the 1950s in Montana,' and we talk about it, and it becomes words, and we write a script for our projects. There is never Pinterest – I just wave my hands around and talk and create narratives. This is the same whether it’s a house or a restaurant or a party.

Ken Fulk’s story is one of instinct, imagination, and an unwavering belief in the power of beauty to elevate everyday life. From his childhood as a self-appointed 'ringmaster' to his global design practice, his approach has remained rooted in creating meaningful, sensory-rich experiences.

Rather than following traditional rules, he relies on intuition and storytelling to shape spaces that feel alive and transportive. His reflections on entertaining, creativity, and the emotional impact of interiors reinforce a central idea: design is far from superficial. Instead, it has the ability to ground us, connect us, and offer moments of joy and escape.

Ken ultimately reminds us that thoughtfully crafted environments don’t just look beautiful – they enrich how we live, gather, and experience the world around us.

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Few designers have shaped the look and feel of contemporary interiors quite like Kelly Wearstler. Known for her bold use of texture, sculptural forms, and a confident mixing of eras, Kelly has built a career that spans private residences, iconic hotels, and product design – always with a signature sense of drama balanced by livability.

Yet behind the polish lies a deeply personal creative philosophy, rooted in early experiences of thrift store treasure hunting, instinctive styling, and a lifelong fascination with objects that carry history. In this interview, part of our Layered Lives series, she reflects on the formative spaces that defined her aesthetic, from her maximalist childhood home in South Carolina to her first major breakthrough in hospitality design.

Kelly also shares her thoughts on creating meaningful interiors today, the importance of collecting over time, and the materials, lighting, and unexpected details that continue to shape her evolving design language.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Kelly Wearstler: I grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and my mom was a design enthusiast. She was 18 when she had my sister and me, and she was still so curious about everything – she loved going to yard sales, flea markets, and thrift stores, shopping for both fashion and design. I remember so clearly going to these musty shops, feeling curious myself, and looking at all these old fashion magazines.

I can still remember the scent that came from them as I opened them. It meant I was being exposed to all these aesthetic references as early as five or six years old. Aside from being a young mom, she came from a working-class family, so she learned to be creative and make money go further by wallpapering, painting, and doing all sorts of things herself.

Homes & Gardens: What was her style like? And did any of it rub off on you?

Kelly Wearstler: Her style was very country – she collected a little bit of everything, and there was stuff everywhere. Seriously, there was nowhere to put a drink down – she was very maximalist. And it made her feel great! Thanks to her, I’m drawn to things that are unusual – a chair, a scarf, or a cool belt.

Homes & Gardens: Did you ever buy anything from these vintage shops yourself?

Kelly Wearstler: Yes, and I always really wanted to. So at 12, I got a job babysitting so I could have money to buy cool things. At 13, I started working in a beach café, and I began bringing home vintage jewelry I’d bought.

Homes & Gardens: Were you decorating your own bedroom at that age, too?

Kelly Wearstler: I remember growing up, my mom would say I could pick out the wallpaper for my bedroom, and I loved wallpaper with graphic designs. I started making very bold design decisions for wall coverings, choosing multicolored patterns that looked like knitted textures with very loose weaves. They couldn’t have been more 1980s!

Homes & Gardens: Can you see any similarities between the creative processes your mom taught you and how you work now?

Kelly Wearstler: Aesthetics were different back then, but the way I thought is still the foundation of how I work now. I love vintage and classic pieces that have a history – things that are soulful and imperfect. And I also love contemporary design – pieces that feel new and energetic. I look at projects I did 20 years ago, and it’s hard to tell when they were done, since everything draws from the past. That sense of timelessness is really interesting to me.

Homes & Gardens: And looking back over those projects, can you pinpoint one that felt like a turning point?

Kelly Wearstler: Yes – it was the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, my first hotel project, which I actually landed on a whim. I was working on a residential project, and the developers I was collaborating with said I could design a model room at the hotel – but if I wanted to do it, I had to find an architect to partner with. I really wanted the opportunity, so I found an architect, and it was a huge success that launched me into hospitality design.

Homes & Gardens: Having now worked on so many incredible hotels and private spaces, what keeps you interested in design?

Kelly Wearstler: The story of where things come from, how they’re made, and the ideas behind them. That’s why I still love digging around in thrift stores and asking lots of questions – you keep learning and continuing your education.

Sifting through what others might overlook is the fun part, digging through some dusty shop and finding something truly special. I get a high from it – from seeking out the unusual. That’s what design is: a love affair between you and an object.

Homes & Gardens: One of the things people respond so well to about your work is how… sumptuous yet relaxed it is. What do you think are the ingredients that bring this together?

Kelly Wearstler: Texture and form are everything. I love fabrics that are soft to the touch and using them on architectural, modern furniture, so the contrast comes from the contemporary shape.

Homes & Gardens: What turns you off about design?

Kelly Wearstler: I don’t like too much downlighting and only use it to highlight architecture or a special table or feature. I love lamps, sconces, and sculptural pendant lights that create shadow, because they’re what make people look good.

Homes & Gardens: What else are you loving in design right now?

Kelly Wearstler: I love the architecture of a window and not covering it up with too many treatments. I really like scrim shades that allow a lot of light to pass through, creating texture and shadow while softening the space around them.

Homes & Gardens: And outside of interiors, what fuels your creativity?

Kelly Wearstler: I recently saw couture shoes, and the creativity was unbelievable to me. I love the whole presentation – the fabrics and the way they move on the models. Equally, our homes are a way to express ourselves, just like fashion allows us to, so I like to take inspiration from the runway and apply that to decor.

Homes & Gardens: Talking of shows, you'll be presenting your new collection with H&M HOME at Milan Design Week this month. What can we expect?

Kelly Wearstler: I am so excited to be collaborating with H&M HOME. The new collection was born from the idea of daily rituals and modularity – the things we do day to day, sometimes even subconsciously, that inform our lives through design. Modularity is a key thread throughout the collection – a natural step toward democratized design that makes the range more accessible and able to respond to a broader spectrum of environments and needs.

Our collaboration marks H&M HOME’s first venture into larger furniture pieces with a designer collaborator, alongside smaller home décor items. We will be unveiling the collection at Palazzo Acerbi, a beautiful venue that has never been opened for a Milan Design Week exhibition before.

Homes & Gardens: Congratulations! And lastly, when you think of “home,” what images or feelings come to mind?

Kelly Wearstler: It’s about surrounding yourself with things that make you feel great – things you’ve collected over time. A lot of my friends want to decorate their homes all at once, and I always say, “Don’t do that! Take your time, curate, and enjoy the process.”

At its core, Kelly’s approach is less about rules and more about curiosity – an ongoing dialogue between past and present, polish and imperfection. Whether recalling the sensory memories of childhood or describing the thrill of discovering overlooked objects, her perspective reinforces the idea that great interiors are never static or instantly complete. Instead, they are layered, lived-in, and deeply personal.

From her early experiments with wallpaper to global collaborations and hotel design, the thread remains consistent: a belief in tension, texture, and storytelling. It’s this balance – between intuition and intention – that continues to make her work both distinctive and enduring.

Ariel Okin is a New York–based interior designer celebrated for homes that feel deeply personal, intelligently planned, and, above all, joyful. Known for her layered approach to traditional design, Ariel creates spaces that prioritize how people actually live – entertaining, relaxing, and raising families – rather than chasing trends.

In the latest installment of our Layered Lives series, Ariel explains how her work is shaped by an early immersion in textiles, storytelling, and spatial planning, as well as an unconventional career path that took her through journalism, politics, and education before design became her full-time calling. That varied background gives her a rare clarity about what makes a home function emotionally as well as practically.

In this interview, Ariel Okin reflects on the childhood experiences that formed her design DNA, the importance of layout and flow, and why happiness – not perfection – is the ultimate design goal. She also shares insights from her newly published book The Happy Home, offering a thoughtful manifesto for creating spaces that support real life.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Ariel Okin: My mom became an interior designer later in life, but she was the fashion director at Macy’s when I was little, so I grew up surrounded by textiles. And like a true child of the ’90s, it was a lot of chintz, a lot of Laura Ashley, and they were really formative in how I thought about design.

When I was about 10, my mom used to take me to a local bookstore and I’d sit in the arts section and pore over art and interiors books – she’d buy them for me even though they were meant for grown-ups. Then, when I was 12, my parents moved to a house that they built from the ground up, and they let me sit in on all the planning meetings, even allowing me to design my own bedroom. Which is nuts – looking back, there is no way I’d let my own kids now have that much freedom! But it gave me a big sense of agency in my own creativity. I was artsy anyway – I wasn’t into sports – and my mom and dad encouraged it. From an early age, my mom said I should do what I enjoyed and follow what I loved.

Homes & Gardens: So what did that bedroom you designed at age 12 look like?

Ariel Okin: Looking back, it’s still kind of amazing to me that I had that experience and free rein. Well, not total free rein – my mother worked with an amazing interior designer called Judy Kling, and between them they let me pick everything, but only as long as it fit into her principles. So I went for steel gray moldings, while the walls were white, and there was a scroll bed upholstered in satin that was almost like cashmere in its texture. Then the chairs were in the same color family, too. It all left such an impact on me.

Homes & Gardens: Did the process open your eyes to how enjoyable design could be?

Ariel Okin: I remember picking out the artwork – pieces that I still have in my own home – and it made me really happy. My mom collected Nantucket baskets, and I still have them all over the house. They have no monetary value, but they are full of value in other ways for me. I learned through all this how filling a space with things you love can make you really happy. My parents had these maps that they had framed, and I now have them in my own home, running up the stairs just as my parents had them. They make me smile all the time, and they were formative in shaping who I am.

Homes & Gardens: In some ways, the description of your childhood bedroom doesn’t sound too far from many of the spaces you design today. Is that fair?

Ariel Okin: Yes! Certainly, the house I grew up in left a huge mark on my personal DNA. The way the house was laid out for daily living and entertaining – because it was done so well – actually improved our quality of life.

Homes & Gardens: What does a home need to have to improve your quality of life now?

Ariel Okin: The layout needs to work for the way you want to live. If you want to do a lot of entertaining, but there is no flow from the living room to the kitchen, no places to sit before and after dinner, no proper media room, no ‘back of house,’ and all formal spaces, then it’s not going to work for your lifestyle. So we start every project with how the client wants to live – what kind of things they want to do in their home. I ask things like ‘Will the dog be allowed on the sofa?’ and ‘Are you an entertainer?’ and then work out how to make their home function specifically for them.

Homes & Gardens: So with that incredible experience at age 12, was it then a dead cert you’d become a designer?

Ariel Okin: Actually, not at all. I never went to school to be a designer. I went to undergraduate school for journalism, then worked on political campaigns, did some political consulting, and then went into education. I had no intention of becoming a designer – obviously, I loved interiors and creative things, but didn’t consider it a career. Then, when I was in New York City after grad school, my friends would come over and say, ‘I love what you’ve done with your place – can you help me?’ I was only 24, we were all moving in and out of shoeboxes constantly, and I just started helping friends for fun.

Homes & Gardens: When did you start to realize design could be a career?

Ariel Okin: Back when I was 24, I didn’t know CAD, I didn’t know anything technical, but I was just doing it – figuring it out as I went along – and soon I realized I was actually spending more time on it than on my real job. At first, I was designing for free, but then it turned into a side business, doing friends of friends for about three years while still at my day job.

I picked up a bit of journalism work, too, writing about design for a few publications, and I was really living a double life – between decor on one side and education on the other. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it, but I was young, and I had all that energy. Eventually, after three years, I had six months’ worth of design work in the pipeline, so I figured with that amount of security I could give it a go – and go back to education if it didn’t work out. That was 11 years ago, and I’m still doing it.

Homes & Gardens: Was there a project in those early days that felt like a turning point in your career?

Ariel Okin: I did a place in Tribeca that was featured in a prominent design magazine, and that changed the trajectory of my career. I started to get a lot of inquiries, and it really impacted the growth of my business. You can’t underestimate the power of getting press for a young studio.

Homes & Gardens: And how has your style evolved since those early days?

Ariel Okin: My style evolved when I had children. Now I design a lot for young families, and having kids changed the lens I use to think about floor plans, layouts, usability, and multipurpose spaces. That was a big shift in my style.

I suppose the common thread between now and how I’ve always designed is that I want my spaces to work for my clients, and I don’t believe in trends. I’m drawn to traditional but layered, homey, and cozy interiors – homes that are full of books and personal collections. Warm and not stuffy, places where you can have a glass of wine and not feel too worried about it.

Homes & Gardens: Your new coffee table book, just published, is called The Happy Home. Happiness through design is a theme that has come up a lot today, but what is currently making you happy?

Ariel Okin: For me, having those layers and that coziness is what makes me happy – a place to display those sentimental pieces I’ve collected over time. I have my grandmother’s collection of porcelain figurines, these dolls she had when I was little and that she’d tell me stories about, and they make me so happy to see them now.

Then I like things that are quirky and funny, and I feel like a house should make room for them too – like the cabinet in my living room that I got at auction. It’s painted in a faux tortoiseshell print on the outside, and then inside are painted monkeys drinking martinis and smoking cigars. It’s irreverent, but you really connect to stuff like that, and it’s those pieces that make a home happy.

Homes & Gardens: You often talk about comfort as a luxury. How do you design spaces that feel elegant but genuinely lived-in?

Ariel Okin: It comes from being unafraid to use the space, to fill it with your own collections. When a house gets installed – well, that’s just the first page of the story, and it shouldn’t stay like that. A home is always evolving, and it can feel stuffy if it’s not changing, as it’s not being used.

Homes & Gardens: Is that the message you’d like people to take from your book

Ariel Okin: I really hope that people get the overarching message, which is that the point of your home really is to add those personal layers. The joy of being in your home comes from getting in the muck of it and not being so afraid that you’re making what could be the wrong decision.

Just ask yourself, ‘Does this make us happy?’ Lean into authenticity, start to hone in on what you love and what you collect, as that’s when you feel alive and comfortable in your space. We must tap into what we actually like ourselves, not what social media says we should like – as that’s when a home feels authentic and beautiful.

Throughout this conversation, Ariel Okin returns again and again to the idea that a home should make you feel good – and that means supported, comfortable, and genuinely yourself. From sentimental collections to flexible floor plans, her approach champions warmth over rigidity and authenticity over image.

What’s most striking is her insistence that great design isn’t about getting everything ‘right’ on day one, but about allowing a home to evolve alongside the people who live in it. In a culture often dominated by polished perfection, Ariel’s message feels refreshing and reassuring: happiness comes from leaning into what you love, trusting your instincts, and letting your home tell your own story.

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Billy Cotton is a New York–based designer whose work slips (seemingly) effortlessly between interiors, furniture, and objects, always guided by an unusually human understanding of how spaces make us feel. Schooled initially as a historian before discovering design at Pratt Institute, Billy brings a deep cultural literacy to everything he does – from rooms layered with memory and warmth to rigorously pared-back, meditative spaces.

His career has taken him from early freelance projects for pop cultural heavyweights to deeply personal collaborations with artists and craftspeople, and his work resists easy categorization, moving fluently between maximalism and restraint.

In this conversation, part of our Layered Lives series, Billy traces the origins of his aesthetic back to childhood encounters with art, architecture, and collecting, reflects on the emotional responsibility of design, and explains why chairs, color, and craft remain central to his thinking. It’s a portrait of a designer driven not by style for style’s sake, but by curiosity, empathy, and a lifelong fascination with how we live.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Billy Cotton: Growing up, we lived in a really beautiful old house in Brookline, Massachusetts, that was near where the firm that designed Central Park had their offices, so there was a real heritage to it. As a child, I’d go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum often – she was an incredible patron of the arts, and she had created the facade by taking the front of a palazzo from the Grand Canal and rebuilding it. And that was my thing, I just could not go there enough. I loved the outside of the museum – there was an austerity to it, and it felt like a discovery moment for me. I loved the storytelling of it all, that she had traveled the globe and gathered all these possessions and fragments of her favorite things together in one place.

Homes & Gardens: Did it inspire you to start collecting your own things?

Billy Cotton: My first collection was salt and pepper shakers, then penguins. This was before the internet, when it was harder to find things. I also loved airline timetables – they were just so exciting! You called an airline and could just find out about all these far-off places they were going to.

Homes & Gardens: It sounds like you were really drawn to escapism!

Billy Cotton: Yes, I suppose I was!

Homes & Gardens: When you were able to start decorating your own space, what did that look like?

Billy Cotton: By the time I was in my teenage bedroom, we had moved to Vermont, and I got very into the idea of dumpster diving and going to junk stores. One of my favorite things was a long, multicolored bowling bench from a bowling alley that was being demolished, which my friends and I dragged home from a dumpster.

Homes & Gardens: And what about your first apartment? What did that look like?

Billy Cotton: My first apartment was charcoal gray, filled with a mix of things I’d dragged from Vermont country stores.

Homes & Gardens: Were there any people who were helping to shape your sense of style?

Billy Cotton: My first love was a British artist called Paul Lee, whom I met in Provincetown when I was 17. Getting to see into his world was just life-altering. I mean, sure, my mom had some chic European friends who I looked up to, but it was when I saw into this world of artists that everything began to take shape for me. Paul and I became partners, and I learned what it meant to make things. At that time, I didn’t think of myself as a creative – I went to school first for history, with no idea I would become an artist.

Homes & Gardens: How did you move away from history into the design world?

Billy Cotton: I came to realize that history wasn’t going to work for me and ended up at the Pratt Institute, which is an art school. I was going to do art history and ended up discovering design. I saw people making chairs and realized there was nothing I cared more about than chairs.

Homes & Gardens: What was it about chairs that resonated so deeply?

Billy Cotton: It’s the fact that you need them. Everyone needs them. And beyond that, it’s a little piece of sculpture. Plus, a comfortable chair brings a lot of joy.

Homes & Gardens: After college, did any of your early projects start to feel like a turning point in your career?

Billy Cotton: I had started freelancing. The moment I went into industrial design, I knew I had found my calling, but I just had to figure out how I was going to get paid. As a freelancer, my first job was for Gwen Stefani – she had a fashion brand called L.A.M.B., and I did the showroom. It felt so glamorous! I mean, I only actually met her about once, and the job itself came and went, but I knew I had the bug and that if I kept doing this, I could have the life I wanted.

Homes & Gardens: When she was running L.A.M.B., Gwen Stefani was at the epicenter of pop culture, with her Harajuku Girls and appearing on TRL all the time when that was massive. Did you feel like you were in the middle of everything?

Billy Cotton: I’ve always loved pop culture, so the dovetailing of my skills with someone else’s aesthetic – especially an aesthetic that was defining the moment – was quite special to me. Then I was basically doing odd jobs, and it kept going from there. The next big thing was when Cindy Sherman contacted me about doing her house. By that point, I had a line of plates at Neiman Marcus, Harrods, and Heal’s, and I thought I’d just be a product designer. But Cindy asked me to do her farmhouse, and I thought it was safe and a nice paycheck – and of course I loved her – and she let me run with it.

Homes & Gardens: Looking back at your early career to now, are you seeing a shift in your outlook? What is resonating with you at the moment?

Billy Cotton: My outlook has evolved in that I have more opinions, but am less judgmental about taste. I am willing to appreciate beauty in all forms of design. Everything is an idea; most things were made by a human who presumably had good intentions.

Homes & Gardens: Certainly, your work is chameleonic, sometimes patterned and sometimes minimalist – is this lack of judgment how you move effortlessly between styles?

Billy Cotton: I’m glad it looks effortless! The dream for me was to be able to inhabit my clients’ wishes. I am an omnivore of beauty and culture, and I have such deep appreciation for so many things, from the maximalist to the minimalist. How I express that vast appreciation is by trying to approach each one with the same rigor, and just hope that people connect to both my aesthetic and the ideas behind it – the respect I have for architecture, place, and function.

Homes & Gardens: You said your first apartment was charcoal gray – how are you feeling about color now?

Billy Cotton: In the right context, yes, I do think I am very interested in color and color theory, and how pattern comes together. That has become something I’m very focused on. How people are going to feel in my spaces is core – that is the thing I’m most concerned with. In my training in industrial design, that was what it was all about – the person we were designing for and their needs. Most people’s needs are emotional.

Homes & Gardens: What emotional needs is your own home designed to fulfill?

Billy Cotton: My own home is usually a canvas – a blank space for meditation – and I want the space to feel as open and free of things as possible so that I can dream. In the primary home that I live in with my partner, it’s about warmth, history, and a collection of well-loved things.

Homes & Gardens: What does ‘meditative’ actually mean to you in an interior?

Billy Cotton: I do like a relative sense of order of some kind – a cohesion, even if that means full chaos! I like complete ideas, and a space that houses only what is necessary for that person. It could be that the person needs a vast collection of Etruscan pots or something, and that’s fine. As long as everything has some level of meaning or value, and is not just there for the sake of filling space, then it can feel calm.

Homes & Gardens: Speaking of collections, how was the design process of your recent collab with the British furniture brand Soane?

Billy Cotton: Soane was a dream! I have a very deep love for London and feel close to it in my heart. My first love, Paul Lee, was British, and I’ve spent a lot of time in London. I’m there three or four times a year for extended periods and have been for the past 25 years. So to work with Lulu Lytle [Soane’s founder], who is so passionate about English craft… it was wonderful! It was an opportunity to create a dialogue with a country that has taught me so much, and to work with the highest level of craftsmanship that exists in the world. No other manufacturer is working at that level without making just limited editions, and Lulu has such an enormous amount of creativity.

Homes & Gardens: Lastly, outside of interiors, what fuels your creativity?

Billy Cotton: I would say technology – though I know that might be controversial! I feel like we’re in a version of the Industrial Revolution right now, and if we do it right, it’s going to allow creative people to make the world a more beautiful place.

What emerges most clearly from Billy Cotton’s reflections is a designer motivated less by aesthetics than by feeling – by how spaces support imagination, calm, and connection. Whether talking about scavenged furniture, sculptural chairs, or finely crafted collaborations, his outlook is rooted in respect: for history, for makers, and for the emotional lives of the people who inhabit his work.

Billy’s refusal to judge taste, and his openness to beauty in all its forms, feels particularly resonant now. In a world of fast design trends and rigid categories, his approach is a reminder that the most meaningful interiors are those shaped slowly, thoughtfully, and always with humanity at their center.

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Few designers have shaped the conversation around American interiors quite like Sheila Bridges. For more than three decades, she has forged a career defined by confidence, intellect, and an unshakable belief in the power of personal style.

From her pioneering Harlem Toile to her celebrated textiles and bestselling books, Sheila has consistently challenged the idea that good taste must be safe, neutral, or polite. Her work is layered, narrative-driven, and unapologetically expressive – proof that interiors can be both deeply individual and rigorously considered.

In this interview, part of our Layered Lives series, Sheila reflects on what it means to design fearlessly today, at a moment when homogeneity can feel easier than risk. She speaks candidly about instinct, memory, and why trusting yourself – rather than trends – leads to spaces with lasting emotional resonance. Expect practical wisdom, sharp observations, and encouragement to be braver, not just in how we decorate, but in how we live with our choices.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Sheila Bridges: I grew up in Philadelphia, in the home that my parents had for my entire life – it was in our family until I was in my 50s. And that really did shape the framework I have about design and decoration and the meaning of home. My parents had a great sense of style. Even though it was an old stone house, their design style was more modern, quite 1970s, but with an eclectic mix that included 1960s references, with midcentury modern styles mixed with antiques. For me, having grown up in the historic city of Philadelphia influenced my love of Federal and Colonial houses and classic architecture.

Homes & Gardens: In a home owned for that long, it must have been filled with sentimental pieces?

Sheila Bridges: Well, I still own a number of things from my parents' home that I've incorporated into my own homes in Manhattan and upstate New York. Things like the more midcentury-style pieces that belonged to them, a chair from my father that was in his home office, a vintage 1960s grandfather clock that was a bit modern and was in my living room my entire life. I also have a lot of their artwork – my mother was a big collector of African American art – and a few accessories of hers, too. There was also a framed drawing in my childhood bedroom that I still have now. All these things were timeless.

Homes & Gardens: Clearly your love of decor was genetic! Where do you think your parents' interest in design came from?

Sheila Bridges: My parents had a sense of pride in their home and in the idea of homeownership, and were simply interested in creating a beautiful home. Our tastes and sensibilities were very different, but I appreciate a beautiful home because they appreciated it.

Homes & Gardens: What was the first space like that you were able to decorate for yourself?

Sheila Bridges: That was when I was 18 and had left for school – it was my first opportunity to decorate my dorm room, and then later my first apartment. I started to veer into a different style from that of my parents – I didn’t have much of a budget, so there was a lot of IKEA. I convinced myself that less is more – really because I couldn’t afford more.

Homes & Gardens: As you were shaping your own style, was there any early influence that helped you work out what that was?

Sheila Bridges: I used to go to a lot of museums with my mother, and I saved money from my summer job to buy art posters from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Back then, they were expensive – there was no online shop, of course, and you had to go to the museum itself to buy these posters. I had a fascination with Wassily Kandinsky and had a Kandinsky poster on my wall, along with one of a Alexander Calder mobile. I've always been fascinated by mobiles and things hanging from the ceiling. My childhood bedroom had mobiles, and I've loved them just as much now as I did when I was a kid – although I don't have any of the original ones from my childhood bedroom anymore.

Homes & Gardens: You talk lovingly about your family home. When you think of “home,” what images or feelings come to mind?

Sheila Bridges: Conceptually, home is a place that makes you feel comfortable and comforted, that gives you a sense of belonging. I enjoy being surrounded by things that make me feel good and inspire me, and that are reflective of my life experience. I like to be able to look around and think, “Oh, I got that from a flea market in Paris, or on a trip to Sweden, or on a Saturday in New York City,” and for me that’s really what home is. Most of the clients who hire me want me to create a backdrop and to take their sense of style and try to elevate that – they often want to make sure there is room for these personal finds.

Homes & Gardens: Speaking of your clients, looking back to when you first started out, which project felt like a turning point in your career – and why?

Sheila Bridges: There was a client I worked with called Andre Harrell, a music executive who founded the label Uptown Records. I did several projects with him, and he was one of the first people who gave me the opportunity to go out on my own and not have to work for another studio. The first apartment I designed for him was enough for me to take the plunge, quit my job, and set up my own business. We did a lot together. The second project we did was in Manhattan and was on the cover of a major magazine in the 1990s, and that was a big turning point for my career – suddenly, there were a lot of eyeballs on me.

Homes & Gardens: Why do you think your creative relationship with him worked so well?

Sheila Bridges: He was accustomed to working with artists in the music world, and he treated me like an artist – something I both appreciated and needed. To have a client who was accustomed to artistic temperaments was quite something.

Homes & Gardens: And of course your artistry is evident in Harlem Toile, the print you designed that really took off. Why do you think it has resonated as much as it did?

Sheila Bridges: When I designed Harlem Toile, it was over 20 years ago. I created it simply because I was looking for toile for my own home, and I could not find one that really spoke to me. I loved French toiles, so like most designers, when you can't find something you like, you create it yourself. I was very specific about the various scenes that made up the vignettes, inspired by Philadelphia as well as Harlem, and I created both wallpaper and textile versions.

When it was being printed, the man at the print studio said he'd never seen anything like it and asked if I would consider making it available more widely. At first, I said no – it was just for me. But fast-forward 20 years, and it’s been out there in the world all this time. It resonates with a lot of Black people because we like seeing representations of ourselves in products, not just in art.

One of the big challenges I face is that not everyone can afford my design services, so how can I make good design accessible to real people? For me, the gateway was my toile.

Homes & Gardens: Looking back to those Andre Harrell projects in the ’90s, and to Harlem Toile 20 years ago, how has your style evolved in that time?

Sheila Bridges: I do think that more is more now, though, of course, it depends on the circumstances. For me, the challenge is that I'm a collector. I collect art, vintage paperweights, and my mother’s vintage Wedgwood – and now I have my own collaboration with Wedgwood. If you’re a collector, it’s hard to curate and edit, especially if you're a maximalist like me.

Over time, and with all the experience and exposure I’ve had to great design, my interests have broadened. I’ll now pull from a wide range of references when putting rooms together – everything from a Louis XVI chair to a Charles and Ray Eames table. I suppose it makes it harder for me to choose just one thing, because now I know about five more that I also like.

Homes & Gardens: It sounds like your outlook has really shifted over the years, along with your style?

Sheila Bridges: Yes, my approach to color and pattern has evolved. My own apartment’s living room is painted in Oval Room Blue by Farrow & Ball, and it has been that color for many years now, but when I first moved in, I painted it Cameo White by Benjamin Moore. Back then, I played it safe. Now I prefer more saturated color, and I want to play with pattern – mixing stripes and florals. It all adds depth and a sense of layering.

Homes & Gardens: And it has all come a long way from your original degree in sociology! Do you ever fall back on that education in human behavior to inform how you put rooms together?

Sheila Bridges: Yes, sociology is the study of social interaction and behavior, and so much of that is what we do in our homes. While it was my major in college, I didn’t think it would have much to do with my career as a designer. But it has helped me understand my clients and the way they live and interact in the spaces I design.

Homes & Gardens: You’ve spoken before about wanting people to feel something when they enter a space. What kinds of emotional responses are you most interested in creating right now?

Sheila Bridges: I try to be very thoughtful and intentional about my work. Given where the world is right now – and the U.S. in particular – I want my work and products to help bring people joy. It’s a very hard time for many people, and I do like designing things that make people think. Ultimately, it brings me a lot of pleasure to create things that bring joy into people’s lives.

What emerges most clearly from this conversation is that Sheila Bridges’ approach to design has never been about provocation for its own sake. Her fearlessness is rooted in clarity – about who she is, what she values, and how she wants spaces to feel. Whether she’s talking about color, pattern, or storytelling, her message is consistent: confidence comes from commitment.

In a design landscape increasingly shaped by algorithms and sameness, Sheila reminds us that originality is a muscle that strengthens with use. The reward, she suggests, is not just more interesting rooms, but a deeper sense of ownership over the way we inhabit our lives.

Interior designer Young Huh has built a career on interiors that feel layered, intelligent, and deeply personal – spaces that balance cultural reference, craftsmanship, and a quietly confident sense of drama. Based in New York, her work is known for its ability to move effortlessly between eras and aesthetics without ever tipping into pastiche, combining exuberant color, considered architecture, and an instinctive understanding of how people actually live.

But Young’s path to design was anything but straightforward, taking in shoebox dioramas, an unsatisfactory Barbie Dream House, and an unexpected detour into law before creativity finally won out. In this Layered Lives conversation, Young Huh reflects on the formative moments that shaped her eye, how experience has sharpened her instincts, and why emotion, storytelling, and risk now sit at the heart of her work – culminating in an exuberant new room for this year’s WOW!house.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Young Huh: When I was a little girl, my favorite thing to do was to design little dioramas in shoeboxes. They'd be little home vignettes, and then I'd make bigger ones for my dolls to live in. I remember being very disappointed by my Barbie Dream House, because it wasn't really a dream house at all! I was always trying to figure out ways I could get my doll into a house with curtains and proper bedding, and I had a lot of interest in pretty things. I was always altering their dresses and adding things like beading.

Homes & Gardens: That's so creative! To see something most kids would accept and want to improve it aesthetically.

Young Huh: I actually got into a lot of trouble for this – my grandfather once bought me a fabulous doll from Japan that was wearing an incredible kimono. And I just thought that the kimono was so tight and would look better with a low-cut neckline, so I cut a deep V in her outfit. My mom was horrified that I had ruined my doll!

Homes & Gardens: Did you decorate your room in a similar fashion?

Young Huh: No. In fact, I always say that I became a designer because my parents wouldn’t let me paint my room! They had done it in a yellow, and I just knew it was the wrong shade of yellow, yet they wouldn’t let me repaint it. I'd even ask to do the inside of my closet, and they'd say no. They were very controlling, so as soon as I got to college, I started to enjoy my own personal space.

Homes & Gardens: How did you decorate your dorm?

Young Huh: The first thing I had to have was a giant life-size poster of the band The Cure. It was so big it was almost like wallpaper – it was over-scaled, and very dramatic. Then I paired it with some Laura Ashley bedding, so you could say that I've always enjoyed the mix between modern and edgy and traditional. I felt I also needed Laura Ashley curtains and went to the store but they were expensive, so I had the idea to buy Laura Ashley sheets, remove the hem, slot in a rod... and there you go, I had curtains! I was always messing around with stuff.

Homes & Gardens: And were there any people who were helping to shape your sense of style?

Young Huh: I went to Cranbrook for middle and high school, and that opened my eyes to good design, as the whole thing had been designed by Eero Saarinen and his wife, from the building down to the curtains and dishes. I was able to see traditional and modernist ideas come together. It was like having an experience of that perfect Barbie Dream House I'd always wanted. Seeing the perfect architecture and wonderful gardens that supported it, and how everything down to the silverware matched was incredible. They stopped allowing us to use the silverware just before I started, as some very entrepreneurial students were stealing it to sell.

Homes & Gardens: Clearly, you were always creative and fascinated by design, so how did you end up studying law?

Young Huh: Law was a detour, it's true. I was an English major, a subject I'd chosen because my parents said that as an Asian-American girl, the only jobs that people would hire me for were as a doctor or a lawyer. I was bad at math, so they gave up on medicine and pushed me into law. I loved art history, but my parents said that wouldn't get me to law school, so we compromised on English. I didn't know there were other career paths I could take. My parents' view was narrow, so that was why I went to law school. But in my first week, I knew I didn’t fit in.

Homes & Gardens: How did you transition from law to design?

Young Huh: My husband told me not to let my education be a burden to me, meaning that I didn't have to follow that path just because I was on it. And you know, it's not all bad. I actually use some of that legal knowledge in my work now. Did I have to go to law school? No. But it's useful at times.

I was taking a break from work and raising children, and I thought I would be a stay-at-home mom, but I started to get depressed, and my husband said I needed to do something. He pushed me to take all these personality tests and kept telling me I should be creative. I did them all, but still couldn’t put the pieces together of what career would be a good fit. Then I met a designer at a cocktail party in 2003, and it was a lightbulb moment. I worked for him for a few years, and then in 2007, I started my own business.

Homes & Gardens: Which project felt like a turning point in your career?

Young Huh: Early on, I worked for a lot of fashion people, and then the projects would get published in magazines and not mention me. I started to think that my work must be good in order to be published, but clearly I needed nicer clients who would mention me too! So things just grew incrementally, working for people I knew, and getting calls from their friends, and then getting press for the first time, and that brought a bigger audience.

Homes & Gardens: Have you noticed your taste shift or evolve over time?

Young Huh: Taste is interesting. I have the same taste now as I've always had, and the same ability to discern and think and see things in the way they need to be seen. But I also have more knowledge and experience, which is how you get to have a good sense of scale. You know, there is always a first time you install a chair that is too big, that looked good on paper but not in person. And knowing how to avoid that comes from experience. Interior design is a trade, and you hone the trade through experience – you don't become a master of it overnight. You start to develop a sixth sense for what will work.

Homes & Gardens: Has your relationship with color, pattern or ornament changed as your sixth sense has grown?

Young Huh: It’s become more exuberant. I feel less inhibited to take design risks now.

Homes & Gardens: Looking back at your earlier projects, is there anything you notice yourself doing differently now?

Young Huh: The thing that really changed is that I understand how important interior architecture is now. I'd never really thought about that before, but it's the structure that tells the story. It's not enough to just put in curtains and furnishings and make a Barbie Dream House; you have to respond to the style, shape, and structure of the architecture.

Homes & Gardens: Your work often references different eras and cultures without ever feeling nostalgic or literal. How do you decide what to reference?

Young Huh: It’s dependent on the client and the story we’re trying to tell. We think about the client's story and how they want to feel and live, and that determines what we reference. Some people love minimalism and texture, while we have one client who wanted to showcase her Italian background by pulling in some Italian antiques. They felt familiar to her and supportive of her identity, and that's the fun of interior design, to use different types of antiques and eras and vibes. I love it, it's great to exercise different aesthetic muscles.

Homes & Gardens: Are there particular designers that you keep returning to as your work has evolved?

Young Huh: I love the work of Lorenzo Mongiardino. The amount of craftsmanship and how many artisans he employed, and how the work of those artisans was so important to his overall vision. I also love the work of Bunny Williams, who is so thoughtful about hospitality and comfort. There is a combination of beauty and practically and when you go to her house, you have an incredible sense of welcome. And also, Albert Hadley, you look at his projects now, and they could have been done today. They’re timeless.

Homes & Gardens: You're currently working on the WOW!house exhibition that will be open in the UK in June. What can you tell us about the room you're creating?

Young Huh: I'm so honored to be working with Benjamin Moore as the partner for my space. I'm actually working on a new book of my work that will be out next year, and every single project has a Benjamin Moore color in it – we're super fans of its paint! So we knew for WOW!house we had to use as many colors as possible without it being too much – I mean, it could still be too much, but it’ll be thoughtful, at least!

Color is about bringing joy and exuberance and happiness, and I was inspired by the painted panels of historic palaces and the way they were there solely to create rooms of beauty. My room is called the Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon, and Minhwa means 'Korean folk art,' so some of the panels will be papered in variations of a wallpaper I did with Fromental that was based on Korean folk art. It should all bring a lot of exuberance.

Homes & Gardens: Lastly, when you think of 'home,' what images or feelings come to mind?

Young Huh: Home should be supportive of your life. It's the place that embraces you, and is where you can be peaceful and inspired and energized. So you need different zones for those different needs. Something that is really important to me is that you can’t have everything be quiet, there should be some inspirational moment that makes you feel excited about life – something in your home that makes you think that you're ready to tackle the day and be your best creative self.

It's clear that Young didn't take a straight route into interior design, but that her passion for making spaces better than when she found them was evident as a little girl. By understanding architecture, scale, and historical references, she is able to create schemes that are as exuberant as they are polished, as smart as they are decorative.

Young Huh's Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon will form part of this year's WOW!house exhibition, where a roster of international designers create a room each and let their imaginations and creativity run wild. Running from June 2 to July 2, 2026 at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour in London.

The origin story of Nickey Kehoe always begins in Manhattan, at a dinner party. The details are fuzzy – something about a glass of creamer spilling on the table set things in motion. But Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe, strangers at the time, mostly recall giggling upon their first meeting, an instant connection that would later shape a quiet force in American design.

It’s hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy. Not only because the pair launched their interiors studio nearly two decades ago and quickly racked up a roster of high-profile clients, or because they opened a beloved Los Angeles shop–and a recent NYC outpost–widely touted as go-to destinations for home decor and vintage. More than that, there's something enviable about their foundation: a business and a brand built on friendship.

That warmth is something of a calling card. Nickey Kehoe’s world is rich with texture and pattern and patina – lived-in and unfussy palettes tinged with nostalgia and unbound by era. There may be no signature look, per se. But you can certainly feel a Nickey Kehoe interior.

And, in an era when interior studios launch furniture lines and collaborations left and right, Nickey Kehoe is something of a north star, having bridged the gap long ago between shaping environments and selling products. From furniture to wallpapers and even fragrances – and soon, new textiles – there’s plenty of material for building your own Nickey Kehoe universe.

At the center of it all is the enduring bond between Nickey and Kehoe themselves. Here, as part of our Layered Lives series, Homes & Gardens speaks with the friends and founders about how it all began, how their lives overlap, and how intuition and trust continue to guide a brand rooted in platonic love.

Homes & Gardens: What are your earliest, formative moments in design?

Todd: For me, it was an early compunction to move my room around. When I was five or six, I picked out this minty color for the walls of my room. Then two years later I was into beige stucco and orange and brown stripes. If I were staying home sick from school, there was a very strict policy that I wasn't allowed to move furniture.

Amy: How old were you when you did the wallpaper?

Todd: At sixteen, my parents went away for a week during the summer. And of course I didn't have a party: I re-wallpapered the kitchen. They were really pissed – but it looked so much better.

Amy: For a lot of creatives, you're just maybe more aware that there's atmosphere. My grandmother lived in the city, and we’d spend most Fridays and Saturdays with her. Everything was a reproduction, and her brother painted the Degas ballerinas – this wasn’t a place any of us would be like, “Let’s move in.” But it had grandeur to me. That awareness just stuck.

Homes & Gardens: What were you each exploring creatively in the period before you met?

Amy: I think chasing beauty was an unnamed path. I went to school in New Orleans at Tulane, and there were light bulbs going off around architecture and color. I was a French major and did my year abroad in Paris – that year was a lot of art history classes and studying at the Sorbonne. I didn’t know what I was going to do with any of it. Then I landed in New York and got a couple of first jobs in the industry – in those first one or two jobs, we met as friends.

Homes & Gardens: And that was early in your career – whereas Todd was a bit older and had a longer journey toward interiors?

Todd: I had a lot of jobs. When I moved to New York from DC, I worked in independent film, quickly moving into the art and costuming departments. I drifted into merchandising at Giorgio Armani, doing windows and displays, and later joined Ralph Lauren. At Ralph, it was just a very, very elaborate decorating program. Every week you're redoing six or seven windows, coming up with a theme correlated to the fashion. It was so exhilarating, and such a tuning fork for what it was that I had an ear for. And then from there, I worked my way into interior design.

Amy: You found it at last!

Todd: I found it at last – but between you, me, and the law, I never took a design class.

Homes & Gardens: And this is when Nickey met Kehoe. What are your first memories of this?

Amy: Laughter. We sat next to each other at a dinner party and giggled. When you're younger, you're out more, and you meet more people. But even then, it was sort of like, “Oh, this doesn't happen that much.”

Todd: It was so innocent, with no intention of working together someday – it was just, “God, I really like you.” We’d heard about each other through mutual friends who invited us to a dinner with someone I was dating. And he was like, “I just really feel like you’re gonna like Amy.” He and I are no longer together, but Amy and I are.

Amy: One of our first friend dates was going to the flea market in New York. It was so innocent. We were still getting to know each other, and we bought matching antique cast iron horse hooks – it was sort of like we branded each other.

Todd: A friendship bracelet of sorts.

Homes & Gardens: Did you recognize at that time that you had a shared design language?

Amy: As much as we’re drawn to similar things, we’re also drawn to different things. But when one of us points something out, it inspires the other. That’s the common thread in shopping, sourcing, and designing together.

Todd: Even when our aesthetics are different, they live well next to each other. We don’t just gravitate towards one thing. I think there's a deep respect and understanding of where the other one is coming from.

Amy: That being said, our team might be doing product development or prototyping and we're given three options – if we're in separate rooms, we'll pick the same thing. So there is a kind of a brass tax to those decision-making processes that has been a big energy mover in the business. That sort of sensibility has taken years for us to get to this point.

Todd: And we tend to dress similarly as well, showing up in the same outfit for meetings – which is never awkward.

Homes & Gardens: The chemistry was there. Did you have a vision for the big picture?

Amy: There wasn’t a business plan or a launch date. I feel for younger people starting things now. With the way the world works, and Instagram, there’s no bumbling, stumbling time – that laboratory of figuring out how it works before announcing it to the world. I’m really grateful that was our era – the ability to learn our process before it was this glossy thing.

Todd: We just slowly evolved, and it still evolves. That became the strong muscle of the business – we weren't afraid to change. And I think some of that came from an era when you didn't have to have it all defined in the first two weeks of being open.

Homes & Gardens: After Nickey Kehoe was born, you worked on some hotel projects. But then a home in Los Feliz was a turning point.

Amy: It was demanding. It was a very large, opulent house – not the kind of thing you saw in New York, ever. It pushed us. The clients had a little bit more modernity than Todd and I at that moment. I think we were more earthier at the time.

Todd: It pushed us into a much bigger world of elegance that had some room for rusticity, but a little more refined with Italian and French mid-century modern. It was just a huge – I don't want to say eye opener, because we knew of it – but we started layering that into our aesthetic.

Amy: We both had a sense that this was a big project for us – in LA, and for our tastes. It definitely helped our studio flourish from there.

Homes & Gardens: Vintage became a large part of your repertoire. Why is that?

Todd: Part of what we do, part of the lifeline – the secret sauce – is just making sure in every project, we include vintage pieces. There it is. A lot of times, it's people's heirlooms, something that somebody has in their family. Because it is really important, I think, to have pieces that people connect with. I think it creates an energy – that kind of inherent, intangible feeling of a room.

Homes & Gardens: And if you had to put your aesthetic, and that secret sauce into words?

Amy: A takeaway we're both comfortable with, no matter what, is warmth and invitation. I know it's not era-specific or genre-specific. But when we're described that way and by people in the store, or people who see our projects, that tracks. It’s a huge part of what we aim to do.

Todd: “Assembled” always comes to mind. We build projects with a lot of eras, a lot of periods. There isn't a formula for it. I mean, I think that's the formula: there really is no formula. We're very drawn to what we're drawn to, but that is such a wide range, from a '70s stainless steel console table to a Rococo mirror. The effect is the ability to weave those together without them feeling like somebody's trying to have a shtick. They become usable and friendly.

Homes & Gardens: You opened your first store in LA in 2008. What guides what you pick for the merchandise?

Amy: The shop does have to take into account an appetite for certain things, or holes in the market. When we're shopping, that comes into the decision-making. But I think it starts with passion, the hit of the heart. Like, “Oh my god, that is so beautiful, I want to find out more about it.”

Todd: We go to flea markets together around the world, and it's so exciting to push each other further. It’s that pinky swear that we have, like “This might seem insane, but what do you think about this?” It just kind of pushes that boundary further than if I'm alone or Amy's alone in the flea market – because we have a co-signer on the insanity.

Amy: It's healthy validation.

Todd: And that’s the beauty of it now. Our sales team, they're like, “If you guys like it, somebody's gonna love it.” There's a sweetness to that.

Homes & Gardens: You opened a second store in NYC in 2024. You’re a go-to source for home decor and interior inspiration. What’s next?

Todd: We're actually starting a small fabric line to upholster our furniture with – what a novel idea! We're tiptoeing into it. We're doing some fabrics that will be part of our wallpaper collection, incorporating them into fabrics. We're kicking it off with probably 10 basics that will be have a lot of integrity, a lot of color.

Amy: We make so much furniture, and we have so many people that don't work with designers, so it's been in our ear for a while. There's so much stacked in front of us at all times, but we are excited about the partner, it’s very simpatico. Once we met them, it was sort of like, “Okay, it's time.”

Todd: And they're a mill – they have their own line, but they're working with us to develop our own line. This is actually just our fabric. And, like many things that we try to do, it's based in LA. It's really exciting.

Homes & Gardens: Fabric was, after all, tied to the very naming of Nickey Kehoe.

Todd: There’s a sweet memory from soon after I moved here, when we’d decided to inch toward working together. We were in the house I’d rented, sewing drapes for Amy’s apartment on my sewing machine and talking about what we would name the company. We had all these funny ideas, everyone weighing in, and then finally thought, what about Nickey Kehoe? It very quickly became the name.

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.

Last month's Layered Lives took us inside the world of potter, sculptor, interior designer and author Jonathan Adler.

Few designers have shaped modern American style quite like Jonathan Adler. Potter, sculptor, interior designer, author, exuberant aesthete – his influence stretches far beyond the glossy surfaces of his glamorous hotels or the playful silhouettes of his iconic ceramics.

What makes Jonathan so compelling isn’t simply his signature blend of wit and chic, or the surprising combination of sharp minimalism – yes, minimalism – wrapped in joyful irreverence. It’s the depth beneath the sparkle: a lifelong devotion to craft that began, fairly literally, with a fainting spell in front of a Brancusi sculpture.

From that early moment of aesthetic overwhelm, pottery became Jonathan's true love. While other teenagers were discovering rebellious music or questionable fashion choices, he was discovering clay. His adolescence was spent not only making pots but studying them, absorbing the quiet elegance of Lucy Rie, the cross-cultural curiosity of Bernard Leach, the power of form stripped to its essence. That early apprenticeship to beauty, rigor, and connoisseurship has informed everything since, from the polished modernism of his homeware to the theatrical fantasy of projects like The Parker Palm Springs.

Today, Jonathan Adler is both design legend and cultural commentator, as quick to offer wisdom on creativity as he is to craft a gold banana sculpture. In this candid conversation as part of our Layered Lives, he traces the personal moments, missteps, and obsessions that shaped his creative life – and the sensibility that still guides him.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

Jonathan Adler: It’s been so many things! When I think back to my youth, I had two halves to my personality. Part of me was a rugged little tyke who played American football, and the other half was someone who fainted at the first sign of beauty because they were so overcome by it.

Homes & Gardens: Can you remember the first sight of beauty that had this effect on you?

Jonathan Adler: There was a brass winged sculpture at a Brancusi exhibition I went to when I was very young that made me want to faint. It also awakened my lifelong love of pottery, as I insisted on getting the book of the exhibition and then began trying pottery at summer camp. I must have been about 12.

Homes & Gardens: You're still very much a potter. Is there anything in those early works at summer camp that informed your style now?

Jonathan Adler: Not visually, but spiritually, for sure. I'm normally quite skeptical, but there was a borderline supernatural moment of awakening for me the first time I tried making a pot, such was my immediate obsession with clay. It enabled me to see the world in a different way, and from then on, I spent my entire adolescence not just making pottery but looking at pottery, studying pottery, and understanding pottery and what potters were trying to say. I was taking it all in, from how Bernard Leach was inspired by Japan to how Lucy Rie had an English sweetness. I wasn't judging or thinking of what was my favorite potter or piece, but was taking a bit from all of them. One's youth should be spent taking it all in before landing on a sensibility.

Homes & Gardens: Did you start acquiring any actual pottery?

Jonathan Adler: I bought a couple of things here and there when I could convince my parents to buy things for me. My now-husband, Simon Doonan, wrote a memoir (Beautiful People, published in 2008) where he talked about insisting his mom bought him a glass decanter when he was 11, and I feel like every gay man probably has a similar experience of a decorative objet they just had to own as a kid. I just had to have a casserole dish, which was so beautiful I could tell the potter must have had an incredible gift in order to create it. Sadly, I don't have it anymore, but I do wonder what happened to it?!

Homes & Gardens: Were there any people who inspired you from an early age?

Jonathan Adler: My dad was a lawyer and a brilliantly talented artist at the same time. He would paint and sculpt in our basement every spare second he had, and I ended up setting up a pottery studio in the corner of that basement. We'd both be making stuff every evening. He was mostly deaf, so I'd be blaring out the new wave hits – and he wouldn't be able to tell.

Homes & Gardens: What was the moment you figured you might be able to make pottery into a career?

Jonathan Adler: It never crossed my mind that I could make a living as a potter, so I tried to make it work in the real world – and failed at everything. Then, when I was 27, my grandmother cashed in some stocks and bonds and gave me $20,000, which was amazing, especially as I was unemployed, having just been fired from my most recent job. With that money, I figured that instead of trying to find a job, I would just make some pots and teach night class in exchange for free studio space. I knew someone who worked in the gift shop at the Museum of Art and Design, and they enabled me to sell some pots there. Next thing I knew, I had an order from Barney's – and, well, it was off to the races!

Homes & Gardens: And was your pottery style then similar to what you make now?

Jonathan Adler: I make a ton of different things, but I hope that everything I've ever made could be seen as minimalist. Most of the things I make are pared down in some way – in an attempt to get to the essence of what I was trying to communicate. Everything is clean and precise – somewhat graphic, elegant.

Homes & Gardens: Do you think “minimalist” is a word people associate with you?

Jonathan Adler: I mean, no. Not really. When people think of me – not that they ever should, but if they do – people think that my personality is cheeky and fun and silly. And that's actually served me really well in terms of building a business and getting people to engage with my personality – but it also does a disservice to the stuff I make, because people think I must also be a maximalist. Actually, I'm serious and a minimalist.

Homes & Gardens: Which project felt like a turning point in your career, and why?

Jonathan Adler: I still needed to make a living, and it was improbable that I'd be able to do that as a potter, so I said yes to every opportunity that came up. A friend asked me to design her house, and I said yes – and then that house was seen by the owner of The Parker hotel in Palm Springs. He called me up and asked if I'd do the interior there, too. And the thing I love about interior design versus making stuff for myself is that it's an opportunity to understand who someone else is – a break from all the introspection that comes from being a maker. I'm being asked to interpret someone's life and bring life into their space. I always say that being an interior designer is like being a slimming mirror – you're reflecting your client at their most glam. The Parker was a true fantasy project.

Homes & Gardens: It's an iconic space, not least for the big gold banana. How did that come about?

Jonathan Adler: The owner was like, "We need a public sculpture," and I was like, "Yes, sure!" In my oeuvre, I have engaged with many different themes and ideas, and one of them that crops up often is erotica – I've always found it interesting and amusing. I've made vases of women's faces and breasts, and my husband has pointed out I've never done men's bits – but it's because they're so inelegant. So that's how I started doing bananas as a cheeky nod to a phallic symbol. Then, of course, as a craftsperson I wanted this sculpture to be functional, so the three bits of peel that fold down from the fruit are seats. Though it's the only thing I've really ever properly messed up, as with that desert sun, they get far too hot in the daytime to actually sit on.

Homes & Gardens: You recently worked on the decor of the iconic Grey Gardens house – how was that experience?

Jonathan Adler: My best friend on earth brought Grey Gardens (formerly owned by the cousins of Jackie Kennedy and the subject of a much-loved documentary), and having done her home in Palm Beach, I helped with many of the public spaces to give them a bit of sizzle. It's just a really fun and iconic house which gave me so much material to play with. I sort of forgot that it was Grey Gardens, as it's incredible in its own right – the gardens are unbelievable. It's just the most gorgeous, enchanted Hamptons home.

Homes & Gardens: And having just finished decorating your own home in Palm Beach, did you notice how your style had evolved since your last personal project?

Jonathan Adler: I'm constantly re-making stuff anyway, so my style and homes have never stayed still. I like to live with my stuff and bring it into my own home. My poor husband is always tripping over unexpected bits of furniture. Now, as an older potter, I am extraordinarily lucky to have built a business that gives me a nice life – I honestly expected to be someone who sold their wares at rain-soaked craft fairs – and I have two houses in two amazing, glam locations. Shelter Island is more rustic, organic, and modern, while Palm Beach is more colorful and reflective of the Florida sunshine.

Homes & Gardens: So what does the concept of home mean to you, if it can be different in different places?

Jonathan Adler: Home is where my husband and I bicker over who made the last cup of tea and whose turn it is to make the next cup of tea – the names we call each other are unprintable! But that's just what we do – we have a laugh all day. I am lucky to have met that little creature.

Homes & Gardens: What is inspiring you outside of interiors?

Jonathan Adler: Right now, it's still mostly pottery. Ceramics are my forever love.

Homes & Gardens: And lastly, do you have any advice for new designers?

Jonathan Adler: It’s so hard – but I would say that people should really study design history and become incredibly connoisseur-like. When I was describing my engagement with ceramics as a kid, I knew every reference and understood what every potter was trying to say. Every young artist should be similarly connoisseur-like – so they can utilize that frame of knowledge.

Speaking with Jonathan Adler is a reminder that great design isn’t just about style – it’s about curiosity, humor, and a willingness to follow your obsessions wherever they lead. His journey from summer-camp pottery wheel to internationally acclaimed designer is rooted in the same passion he still feels for clay today. Whether reinventing a Palm Beach home, bringing a touch of theatrics to Grey Gardens, or shaping yet another impeccably minimal vessel, Jonathan works with a sense of joy that’s impossible to miss. His advice to young creatives – study deeply, look widely, understand the lineage of your craft – feels as timeless as his work.

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.

Few interior designers have shaped modern American style as profoundly as Victoria Hagan. For over three decades, the New York–based designer has been revered for interiors that marry sophistication with ease – elegant, beautifully balanced spaces that feel entirely personal to the people who live in them. Her instinct for scale, proportion, and purity of line has earned her a devoted global following, a shelf of design awards, and a place among the most influential names in the industry.

And she is going from strength to strength, having just completed the Armani building in New York, a haven of pale woods and sleek finishes. But Victoria's success is rooted in something far more instinctive than accolades – a lifelong, almost intuitive passion for design. From childhood memories of mentally redesigning rooms to career-defining commissions for leading collectors, she has always been driven by a deep sensitivity to how a space feels.

Here, in our monthly Layered Lives feature, she opens up about the creative instincts that guide her, the turning moments that defined her career, and the joy – and responsibility – of designing homes that truly make people feel good.

Homes & Gardens: How did you first get interested in design?

Victoria Hagan: I was born that way. From my earliest days, design has fascinated me. I have actual memories of standing in my crib and thinking about the floor finish and what I would have done – no, seriously! I remember being in my stroller and wondering why they selected certain flowers that I could see instead of other flowers that I would have chosen. I was honestly born this way – and it's a blessing and a curse. I'm very sensitive to colors and solving decor problems.

Homes & Gardens: What are the blessings of having this sort of mindset?

Victoria Hagan: That I get to help people with their homes. You get to make spaces that make people feel good, and that makes me feel good. I love the collaborative nature of the work I do. Meanwhile, the curse is that I'm passionate about it – too passionate – and I really do care about my clients and their projects. I spend my whole life thinking about them, often waking up in the night with a new way to troubleshoot something that is going wrong.

Homes & Gardens: Who or what were some of your early design influences?

Victoria Hagan: My grandmother loved to sew, and she would take us shopping for fabrics and to make us dresses. I was fascinated by the level of detail she'd drawn on to make beautiful red velvet dresses with lace collars. She used to talk to me about handmade lace, and let me select the buttons, and it was my favorite thing to do.

Homes & Gardens: Were there any places that inspired you, too?

Victoria Hagan: My mother was a fashion illustrator, and she would take us to museums in New York. We would sit in the cafeteria of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a beautiful luncheonette with a big fountain, huge white light fixtures that Dorothy Draper had designed, and the juxtaposition of the scale of these lights and the water feature was brilliant. I’ve always taken note of how a space makes you feel and what in that space it is that makes you feel that way. A lot of times, it's the unpredictable, and you have to be open to the possibilities and bring a sense of fun to everything you do.

Homes & Gardens: What sums up “home” to you?

Victoria Hagan: It's a place where I keep my favorite things. I like to collect and decorate with vintage pieces – when I was 16, I took my birthday money and bought a set of vintage broth cups. I bet there are not many 16-year-olds doing that! But I still have them and I still love them. I pulled them out to serve dessert in the other night and they made me so happy. I've been collecting my whole life – just anything I love, and I just know that I have to have it when I see it. I love to travel. My first solo trip abroad was to London when I was in design school, and we went shopping. It opened my eyes to finding pieces that are personal and have character and soul.

Homes & Gardens: Why is collecting so important to you?

Victoria Hagan: It's nice to own things that bring back memories of travel or special moments, those connections to the past. When I look at my collections, I feel comfortable. And having a home that can do that is what life should be all about.

Homes & Gardens: What other ways can you make a home feel comfortable?

Victoria Hagan: Making people feel comfortable is part of my secret sauce! Each space I design for my clients is so personal and all about collaboration with that person. I like to really go on a journey with them and figure out what it is that makes them feel good, what moment of their day, or what hobby, or what color. And then find ways to fold that into the design.

Homes & Gardens: Which project felt like a turning point in your career?

Victoria Hagan: When I look back on my career, there is one moment that stands out as just this. I was recently married, and I got a call from Ronald Perlman's office. He was a big financier, and they wanted me to work on his house in Palm Beach. The catch was that they needed it done very quickly. I was like, ‘I'm not sure you understand, it takes a while to design a house,’ and they said, ‘We do understand, but you were recommended because you can do it. And if you can't, we'll find someone who can.’ Well! I love a challenge, and so I thought I'd better just find a way to make it work.

It was so exciting because it was a historical home and he had an amazing art collection. It was the first time I could hang a huge Hockney over a couch covered in Fortuny fabric, while playing with period pieces and giving the house a great energy. You knew you were in Palm Beach and the breeze was blowing, but I introduced a notion of informality that people in the area weren't familiar with. I slipcovered his couches, which was quite revolutionary for the time! And his friends saw it, and then they called me, changing the trajectory of my career, I'm sure.

Homes & Gardens: What did you learn from that project?

Victoria Hagan: It opened up a whole world to me, showing me that I could push clients a little bit and create something special. But I always know when I'm about to push too far and it's time to pull back!

Homes & Gardens: How do you know how far you can push the design process?

Victoria Hagan: You have to be very aware, keeping your eyes open and listening to everything – not just what is said by the clients but what is not said. Trust your instincts. I know when clients are happy and comfortable, so it’s taking all these observations and making decisions along the way to keep them like that.

Homes & Gardens: Outside of interiors, what fuels your creativity?

Victoria Hagan: Art, fashion, traveling, living, just seeing new spaces – just being out in the world. When I was in design school, a professor said to me, 'Do you understand that with everything you see around you, someone made a decision about it,' and it was such an eye-opening thing to hear. Our environment has been designed by so many people – not always well, I might add! – and I respond to what people are doing and what decisions they’re making. I absolutely love to see something new on the runway; it makes you think about the possibilities. There was that recent Chanel show that had a girl with an amazing skirt, and I was so inspired. I need to do to drapery what they did to that skirt.

Homes & Gardens: What advice do you have for young designers?

Victoria Hagan: Listen to your heart and listen to yourself. Design is a profession like anything else; it's not all instinct. If you are open to learning, then you will learn every day – I always do. You might have mastered scale or color, but design is more creative than just an algorithm. You have to raise the bar and open your imagination, and never try to be the same as someone else. Just be true to yourself.

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.

You can often spot a designer’s signature style from across a room – a recurring palette, a favorite shape, a certain restraint or flourish. But with Justina Blakeney, what stands out isn’t a single look, but a feeling: one of warmth, joy, and unfiltered self-expression. Her spaces are layered with pattern and plants, saturated color and meaningful objects – each one telling a story that’s as personal as it is exuberant.

The creator of the much-loved Jungalow aesthetic, Justina has built a design language that celebrates heritage, nature, and individuality – homes that feel not just lived in, but loved in.

It’s an interior design style that feels deeply human in an era of Instagram-level perfection. ‘I put so much of myself into my work,’ Justina says. ‘My heritage, my travels, my ancestors – all of it shows up.’

In this conversation with Homes & Gardens for our series Layered Lives, she opens up about the roots of her creativity, the cultures that shape her aesthetic, how home connects to healing, and why she still believes that the boldest spaces are the ones that speak from the heart.

Homes & Gardens: Where did your journey with design begin?

‘In my early 20s, I was trying to figure out how to hustle, and I taught myself how to do lots of things. I was freelancing, styling for magazines, writing for magazines, ghostwriting for blogs, and doing anything that was paid. Through that, I got good at graphic design and made connections with writers and editors at magazines, so that when I had a cool project to share, I was able to reach out to them and have them feature my work. I wasn’t planning on any of this!’

Homes & Gardens: What is the key thing inspiring your designs right now?

‘Painting has been lighting me up. Baya is an Algerian artist from the mid-twentieth century who inspired Picasso and Matisse, yet isn't as well known herself. She was a 16-year-old orphan who was adopted by a woman in Paris, and I am mesmerized by her use of color and pattern, and form. And on a more philosophical level, I am reading a lot of Alan Watts, whose work is informing my writing, my painting, and my design work. He is giving me new ways of thinking.’

Homes & Gardens: Why do you think your design sensibility resonates so strongly with people as it does?

‘It has to do with authenticity, and because I put so much of myself into my work. It's not just my personality, but my heritage and ancestors and my travels – all these influences end up in what I create. And when you feel authenticity through someone's work, then it compels you to want to know more.’

Homes & Gardens: How does your heritage affect how you think about yourself?

‘I’m biracial in America, and because I grew up not knowing where I fit, I had to work on myself to feel like I actually did fit in. So through that process, I’ve really managed to get to know myself – who I am, what I like, and what I stand for. My heritage is Black and Jewish, and there are not so many of us in the US. It’s me, Lenny Kravitz, and Lisa Bonet – and that’s about it! Then I went on vacation to Morocco and I saw those heritages reflected me – it felt like a really wonderful mix that I could finally begin to understand.’

Homes & Gardens: So did Morocco shape your sense of design?

‘Yes. In fact, I'd say Morocco was life-changing. I went there when I was 21, and the design I encountered there spoke to me on a visceral level. It felt like I'd been there before. Previously, I didn’t know anything about Moroccan design, but being there – seeing the souks, the ceramics, the yarn – it all really spoke to my soul, in a way that American design never had. The colors were so saturated, and the indoor–outdoor way of life with the riads and their central courtyards was really inspiring.’

Homes & Gardens: You talk about having a culturally blended family – was that realization what came alive to you in Morocco?

‘For sure. Being both Black and Jewish is not an aesthetic orientation but a deeply cultural and spiritual one. Those heritages inform how I was raised – tradition is strong on both sides. By combining those two cultures, we were forced to create our own traditions, and our Thanksgiving meals were a reflection of that.'

'My mom wanted to do matzo balls and collard greens. So you could say I grew up mixing unusual things, and that was what I saw in Morocco too – bright blues with terracottas, those patterned tiles. Because of my upbringing, I was never afraid to say that one thing could go with another, and because I want my work to be a reflection of myself, they tend to have some choices in them that more traditional designers wouldn't make.’

Homes & Gardens: Being a reflection of yourself, how would you describe your style?

‘I identify as an artist, not a designer, and my work is about bringing out what’s inside me. I am modernist and I love modernism, and I love creating spaces and making them beautiful and transporting people so that they think about their surroundings in a new way.’

Homes & Gardens: How does your own home transport you? And what does “home” mean to you?

‘This year has been so crazy. I live in Altadena, and after the wildfires, I was displaced for eight months. It was a devastating situation and gave me a whole new feeling about what home means.'

'Being displaced and house-hopping and not having a place to come back home to was rough. Thankfully my house wasn't burned down, but we had to get all new furniture because of the smoke damage, and we couldn't be here while the house was repaired.'

'It made me realize that home is homeostasis, and that idea kept on coming to me. I could feel myself wanting to come home to myself – to my place of safety and connection and creativity. I was in fight or flight mode, and once I got home and felt safe, my whole nervous system was recalibrating.’

Homes & Gardens: While rebuilding your home, have you felt that the space can hold energy or memory?

‘Yes, I believe so – everything has energy. It’s the way that energies interact and bounce off each other and resonate or deflect that is so fascinating to me. My second book's subtitle was “Come home to good vibes,” and I think a lot about good vibes, and what you can do to create them.'

'It doesn't have much to do with the stuff in your home – although don’t get me wrong, the stuff is fun, the garnish – but when you come home and get the feeling of being protected and safe, when you can exhale and feel like you can be yourself, then you know you’ve got a home with good energy.’

Homes & Gardens: How has your style changed over the years?

'I've started using darker purples like mauve and eggplant, with warmer pops of crimson. And I've been leaning into greens, teals, and peaches. These tones add a sophistication I was ready for, and those darker colors – particularly the eggplant – ground the brighter shades I've always used. I've noticed that I'm craving this moodiness now.'

Homes & Gardens: And you’ve always championed maximalism and personality. Has your idea of ‘more is more’ changed as your career has grown?

‘Yes, this is part of how I am – I am attracted to homes that tell the story of how people live, and that is how I think of my own home and aesthetic. But now I'm leaning a little bit more into houseplants. It’s my age – I'm 46 – and have a bit more bandwidth now that my kid is older to actually care for them instead of just finding some cute ones for a shoot and then sadly neglecting them until they die.’

Homes & Gardens: Have houseplants become part of your daily ritual?

‘Yes, hugely. I like to spend up to an hour a day tending to my garden, making my plants thrive. It's a new experience, but there is a power and a beauty in making them live and flourish. I find it all very nourishing. I get excited about misting them and seeing new leaves, and the experience of watching them grow is similar to the way a house can become a home. Because a home is never finished – it’s always evolving and growing, just like a plant, if you treat it well.’

Homes & Gardens: What advice would you pass on to young or new designers?

'Younger designers – and in fact most people – have a tendency to get in their heads. They tend to want to plan things out perfectly before they take a dive. But in my experience – and this is the piece of advice I'd always give young designers – action is a quicker way to learn than trying to map things out.'

'If you find yourself in that mode of ruminating, of trying to cross every single "t" and dot every single "i," then just know that you’re probably going to undo that stuff you’re planning when you get round to the doing of it anyway. So, take a leap of faith, try things, and see what works for you – this has always worked better for me.'

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.

You can often pick up on a designer's signature look. Maybe it's a color scheme they stick with, a material they thread through every project, or an aesthetic that's woven into each home. But look at Marie Flanigan's portfolio, and while you'll notice each one is similarly classic and timeless, the common thing they share is not a 'look' but a feeling. All her projects reflect the people who live in them; they are layered and light and elevated, yes, but also laid back and lived in. There's a softness and approachability to her style that's very natural.

It's an interior design style we all want to achieve, but it's a tricky one to get right as it's so dependent on the balance between a space feeling curated, but still packed with personality. Marie's biggest tip? 'Design for the life you’re living, not the one you think you “should” be living. Your home should reflect your story, your rhythms, and your joys. When you start there, beauty naturally follows.'

Here, Homes & Gardens takes a step into Marie's world. In an in-depth interview, we find out more about the designer behind the beautiful rooms, gaining insight into where her love of design began, her key sources of inspiration, how she designed her own dream home, and how her daily family life works within the spaces.

Homes & Gardens: Where did your journey with interior design begin?

I’ve loved the arts for as long as I can remember, and my parents were wonderful about nurturing that creativity. They gave me the liberty to design my own room, which planted the earliest seeds of what would eventually become my career. That freedom to explore color, texture, and space was the beginning of my design story.

Homes & Gardens: Can you describe the first space that shaped your sense of design?

My childhood bedroom was the very first place where I discovered how design could transform a space. My parents let me experiment with paint colors and furniture layouts, even when that meant a bold green-and-black palette at one point. Looking back, it was such a gift to have the freedom to play, make choices, and start to see how a room could reflect personality and creativity.

Homes & Gardens: Is there a specific project you see as a turning point in your career?

One of the most meaningful turning points in my career was working with a client on their home early on, when I was just beginning as a solo designer. Years later, they invited me back to design their second home, this time with my firm behind me. It felt like such a full-circle moment – not only to see how far I had grown as a designer, but also to recognize the evolution of my business and the incredible team that now supports each project.

Homes & Gardens: And when designing your own home, how did it feel different from projects you have worked on with clients? How did you make your own home feel like 'home'?

Home is where I exhale, where lots of life happens, and where I recharge. I have three young children, so it’s really a place that feels comfortable and functional for our needs. When designing my home, I relished in creating spaces that feel warm, safe, and reflective of my family and the way we live.

Homes & Gardens: What was the key inspiration behind your home?

The inspiration came from a desire to blend timeless architecture with layers of lived-in warmth. I wanted spaces that honored craftsmanship and natural materials, but also felt approachable for our kids. My goal was to create a backdrop that would age gracefully and welcome the marks of a family of five with three young (and very active) children.

Homes & Gardens: How would you describe your style and the overall style of your home?

I would describe my style as timeless with a sense of ease. I’m drawn to classic forms, natural textures, and a palette of muted gem tones, but I love the depth that comes from layering in vintage pieces and personal collections. Over time, I’ve really embraced telling a story through design – layering pieces that hold meaning and reflect where a family is in that moment.

Homes & Gardens: Has your home changed as your family has grown and your needs have changed?

We have been in our home for about three years, so I haven’t had to change too much. When I started working on this house, I tried to be very forward-thinking in how my kids' needs would change over the coming years.

Homes & Gardens: How did designing a home with your family in mind impact the decisions you made?

Every decision was made with the idea that our home should support, not compete with, our life. That meant choosing durable finishes, creating storage solutions that kids could actually use, and leaving room for the beautiful chaos of family living. I think one way to have a home feel styled and manageable is to keep decor relatively simple. For example, a curated coffee table, only a few throw pillows on the sofa, very simple bedscape for easy bedmaking.

Homes & Gardens: Which is the space in your home that you relish the most?

Our kitchen will always be my favorite. It’s where life really happens – meals, homework, and it has the best natural light. The kitchen opens up to our living room, so we are always oscillating between those two spaces.

We love hosting, and the kitchen is always the gathering place. From there, guests spill into the dining room or out into our backyard area. I like creating flow between spaces so people can move easily and feel at home. All of these areas are connected, so it really makes casual hosting fun and engaging as everyone is in close proximity with space to move around.

Homes & Gardens: Have your favorite spaces changed over time at all, the longer you have lived in your home?

I'm still drawn to each space for different reasons, but one space that we really gravitate toward is our second-floor landing. We have a large, cozy sectional in that space, anchored by our only television, so when we head up there, it’s usually to curl up for a movie and enjoy some unhurried family time on the weekend.

Homes & Gardens: What are your favorite rituals within your home?

I’m an early bird, so I’m often up before everyone else and try to squeeze in a workout followed by a devotional. Then, I’ll look over my calendar for the day and check emails. Once the kids are up, we’re eating breakfast, getting dressed, and heading out the door. My husband and I are very protective of family dinners, so we always gather around the dinner table, and I light a few candles to make that time feel special. Then, usually after the kids go to bed, my husband and I make tea and use that time to wind down from the day.

Homes & Gardens: Do you have a favorite memory linked with your home?

I’ve really loved hosting holidays in my home. I come from a very large family and it’s been so fun to have them come spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with us. We congregate in the living room and with so many musicians in my family, including my son, someone is always strumming on a guitar. I love creating a warm and welcoming ambiance for all to enjoy. It’s the moments that we really get to slow down and enjoy that mean so much.

Homes & Gardens: What are your key tips for designing a home that feels timeless, on trend, and also personal?

I start with a foundation of classic elements – architectural details, quality materials – that will never go out of style. Then I layer in antiques, personal pieces and smaller accents. The goal is to create a space that feels like it belongs to you, not to a moment in time. For example, I personally love to collect beautiful invitations. There have been some incredible invites over the years, so I’ve had them framed and placed them around my house like art.

Homes & Gardens: Outside of interiors, what fuels your creativity?

Nature is always my greatest source of inspiration, but travel and product design also push me creatively. Whether I’m sketching new lighting pieces or exploring the textures of a rug collection, those outlets give me space to imagine and create in new ways.

Homes & Gardens: Finally, have you ever made a design mistake that taught you something essential?

Absolutely. Early in my career, I learned how critical it is to partner with the right tradespeople and artisans. Design is only as strong as the team that helps bring it to life, and developing trusting relationships with those who execute the vision and detail makes all the difference. That lesson shaped the way I approach every project today.

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.

Robert Novogratz is, at this point, an American design institution. Along with his wife Cortney, he’s been creating spaces for over 30 years, filling them with art, charm, and plenty of personality. In fact, the homes they piece together are works of art in themselves, jewel boxes of unexpected colors, beloved finds, a mix of antique heirlooms and family keepsakes, with furniture and decor sourced from brands as varied as Paul Ferrante and Pooky.

A hallmark of the Novogratz way of life is to buy a run-down home in an up-and-coming area, do it up, and flip it – the couple tends to move every two to three years. They are currently living in a loft just off Union Square, New York City, 'newly finished, which took about a year,’ Robert tells me, ‘and won’t be our forever home.’

In the first in our series Layered Lives, we sat down with Robert and got to know the designer behind the iconic spaces. We say sat down... Robert talks to Homes & Gardens on the streets of New York, rushing between meetings, having got back from France the day before and off to the UK the day after (he had a Manhattan dentist appointment he couldn’t miss). Let’s step into Robert’s world to explore his fresh take on home and interior design. It’s a world where sculptural pieces meet secondhand treasures, and the golden rule is simple: design should make you feel something, and that thing should be fun.

Homes & Gardens in conversation with designer Robert Novogratz on his philosophy of style

Homes & Gardens: You’ve had such an eclectic and inspiring career – what first drew you to the world of design?

Robert: I always had an art background, and my mom was in the antiques business. You know, she’s now 84 years old, and we were just antiquing together in France. She had a passion that has never left her. And that was instilled in me from a young age.

I was the one kid who would go to garage sales with her, and I was a collector of a lot of things: baseball cards, comic books, stamps. I guess you could say I have an addictive personality, and when I’m into something, I'm really into it. I then fell in love with art, and once I’d made a bit of money, I started collecting it.

My theory is that the more you know about something, the more you enjoy it, and so I immersed myself in the art world. People say buy what you love, but to me, it’s more than that, it’s about buying what you appreciate, what you know about.

Homes & Gardens: What sort of art are you collecting at the moment?

Robert: I love modern art. I go back and forth between photography and painting, but it’s always contemporary stuff. I used to like Damien Hirst, but my tastes have changed now. I like to support young artists and Black artists, people like Glenn Ligon and Kehinde Wiley, both of whom I bought into very early in their careers.

I'm currently obsessed with the British painter Danny Fox. He is everything I love about art, he has humor, culture, a story. I will own a Fox soon! I also really like Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who is very affordable.

Homes & Gardens: Was there a moment or project that made you realize this was what you were meant to do?

Robert: I started in finance, and I was pretty good at it, I was a good storyteller. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t love it. When I got to New York in the early '90s, there were so many interesting people doing different things that I saw there was another way to live. So I cashed my bonus check and bought a run-down townhouse in Chelsea on 19th Street. I made a lot of mistakes when doing it up, but I loved it.

Homes & Gardens: Looking back, is there anything you did in the design of that home that you still do now? Can you see the early inception of the Novogratz look in it?

Robert: That’s a great question! We had a really tight budget for that place, so every cent mattered, every decision we made had to count. But it was a classic townhouse and had great bones, and that style of building has become something we gravitate towards.

I guess our love of decorating with color was evident then, too. We took that classic brown building and painted the exterior a pale yellow, which half the neighbors loved and half of them hated. We also bought a lot of vintage tiles and door knobs, and doors for it, which is something we’ve kind of gotten away from since then, but you know I’d like to get back to it.

Our approach has been about how contemporary fittings are more calm, but those vintage things have a charm of their own.

Homes & Gardens: You’ve tackled some pretty ambitious renovations over the years – what’s been one of the most rewarding transformations you’ve worked on?

You want everything you do to be amazing, but sometimes the stars don’t align that way. It might be a budget issue, or something to do with the building itself. But with our Nolita house, every choice we made turned out to be the right choice. Its width was 25 feet which is big for that sort of townhouse, and made it easier to work with. We put a basketball court on the roof! I just loved it.

Homes & Gardens: Have you ever taken on a space that felt too far gone to save, only to fall in love with it during the process?

Robert: The last one, the Waverly Place house in New York’s West Village, was by far the most expensive, and it took the longest, about three years.

We were doing it during Covid, and there were issues with the fact that it was landmarked, plus there was a really difficult neighbor. But I loved how it turned out, and it looked so good that the people who bought it ended up taking almost all of our furniture too, which is an endorsement that we got it right.

Homes & Gardens: And why do you think that was? What makes a house right?

Robert: It’s about a vibe. An energy. A space that is so fun you don’t want to leave it, but that works if you’re with your girlfriend or your grandma, your wife, or six friends who want to party.

I reference the restaurant Balthazar a lot in my work – it has a great vibe. That buttery yellow ceiling and the pillars in the same color that support it? I love to use that color, or colors that create the same warmth and energy, whenever I can.

Homes & Gardens: You and Cortney have been called 'design disruptors'. Is that a term that resonates with you?

Robert: I never went into this world wanting to be called that, but we felt like there was always going to be someone who was smarter or better than us, so to stand out, we just had to be different. We found our own aesthetic, and people seemed to respond to it, clients seem to want it.

Homes & Gardens: How would you sum up that aesthetic?

Robert: Eclectic, with a mix of vintage and modern. Always happy, comfortable. And fun is a big word! You can walk into a lot of beautiful spaces, but they’re not fun, everything is white. That’s not the world I want to run in. Give me more fun.

Homes & Gardens: You’ve just finished your most recent home, the loft in Union Square. Are you pleased with how it came together?

Robert: We did it in about a month! We’d sold most of our good furniture with the Waverly House, and this was just a project we could tackle quickly. It’s not my dream home – the kitchen and bathrooms are a bit dated – but I’m an optimist, and I like its energy.

I’m seeing it as a vacation, to be near Gramercy, which is cool for a little bit of time. It’s next door to what was Andy Warhol’s nightclub, The Factory, so we thought we should go heavy on decorating with art, making it a cool transitional space. It’s great at night, to sit on the terrace and look at all the lights twinkling.

Homes & Gardens: Even though it’s not your dream home, are there any rituals you’ve instilled there that have helped you feel grounded?

Robert: I love vinyl, and I love jazz – I love to put on a jazz record and have a cup of coffee in the morning looking out on a view. Well, actually, at the moment I’m cutting down my coffee from three cups a day to one and a half, so with my morning jazz I’ll have a hot water and lemon. It’s really helping with my energy.

Homes & Gardens: Speaking of energy, you also found time to help your son decorate his New York apartment. What was that experience like?

Robert: I guided him a little bit – it wasn’t a full project for us. He’s a musician, not a designer himself, and New York is so expensive that he didn’t have the appetite to want to do too much. But his place had great light, and I just helped enhance that by getting him some things like some lights from Pooky – you don’t always have to spend a lot to create a fun, homely space.

Homes & Gardens: We talked earlier about your baseball card collections as a kid – what are you collecting at the moment?

Robert: We just finished our office, and did a great wall with a mix of our old clippings. I started making a huge mural out of them, which was fun. I’m addicted to eBay and 1stDibs, and I love to find vintage prints for under $500. Put them in a frame, and no one knows they’re not the real thing!

Homes & Gardens: And lastly, what’s next for you and Cortney?

We’re designing a house that’s going to be a private club but for families in Brooklyn, kind of like a Soho House vibe, but for kids, too. I’m trying to source the art for that at the moment, and was looking out for pieces in France. It just has to feel like fun, you know?

Whether he’s renovating a brownstone, curating art in a loft, or helping his son furnish a first apartment, Robert Novogratz approaches every space with the same infectious mix of optimism, creativity, and curiosity.

His is a world where homes evolve and life changes as he moves from one space to the next. With decades of experience and fresh projects always on the horizon, Robert continues to prove that great design isn’t about perfection – it’s about personality, soul, and a little bit of fun.

Our wishlist of Novogratz pieces

Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.