The thing I keep circling back to is that your space should be something you're excited to come home to after a long day, a room that does something specific for you, whether that's helping you settle into calm or lifting you back up when you're depleted, always with an added element of joy.
Joy is a non-negotiable with me.
Before this I spent ten years in the NYC culinary world, and what stayed with me was learning to compose for every sense at once, so that a plate and a table and the whole room land together instead of competing for your attention. I do the same thing now with color and light and pattern and art instead of flavor, and a lot of the work is just helping people figure out what they actually want a room to do for them before we touch a single color.
Most of what I make rests on three ideas, and none of them are mine to claim. Color psychology looks at how the colors around you move through your nervous system. Neuroarchitecture is about how your brain reads a room before you've consciously decided anything about it. Biophilic design works your connection to the natural world straight into the space itself. I'm leaning on at least one of these in everything I take on, which is a long way of saying that nothing here is decoration for its own sake, and there's a reason behind the choices, even the loud ones.
What is mine is the instinct all of that sits on top of, my pull toward neon, sparkle, bubbles, twinkly light, and whimsy that I've had for as long as I can remember. Ingrid Fettell Lee's work on the aesthetics of joy is what made that instinct make even more sense to me, because it gave me language for why the bright and playful things actually shift how a person feels in a room, instead of me just trusting that they do.
The people I work with are mostly small business owners and homeowners who want their space to actually pull its weight, whether that's a cafe owner who wants the light to feel like permission to stay a while, a salon trying to set a mood before anyone says a word, or a living room that's been half-finished for two years and still doesn't feel like the people who live in it. And sometimes the whole thing is a single pattern that turns a wall, a chair, or a piece of clothing into a small thing you're glad to notice every day.
So if you're living in a room that doesn't feel like yours yet, or you're opening something and you want it grounded in real design thinking instead of guesswork, I'd love to hear what you're working on.