There’s a moment in a well-designed space when you exhale.
Sometimes it’s the light. The proportion. The texture of an old material against something new. Sometimes it’s simply the absence of something that never needed to be there.
I’ve become increasingly interested in that feeling—not only in the spaces I design, but in the way we inhabit our lives.
Over the past few years, mine began to feel strangely out of balance.
Nothing was obviously wrong. The foundation was good. I had built a life around people and things I deeply valued. And yet, somewhere along the way, I realized I had become very good at making room for everyone else while taking up remarkably little space myself.
My instinct at first was to think something had gone terribly wrong.
What I eventually discovered was much more interesting:
The foundation didn’t need replacing. The composition needed reconsidering.
That realization has changed the way I think about design.
Keep the history. Move the walls.
When approaching an existing interior, good design doesn’t automatically erase what came before. History gives a space character. Patina tells us something has been lived with. Materials acquire depth with time.
The question is what still belongs.
Sometimes a wall that once made sense interrupts the way a family lives today. Removing it doesn’t diminish the architecture. It can allow light to travel farther, improve connection, and give the existing space an entirely different rhythm.
And sometimes, after treating a wall as immovable for years, you discover something rather liberating:
It wasn’t load-bearing after all.
I’ve had a few of those walls in my own life.
Old expectations. Ideas about who I needed to be. The tendency to manage outcomes rather than allowing other people their own experiences. Even assumptions I’d made about myself.
Some were worth preserving.
Others weren’t structural at all.
Learning to distinguish between the two has been its own kind of design process.
Designing from the inside out
Interior design entered my life at exactly the right time.
I expected to learn about color, materials, history, space, and composition. I didn’t expect design to give me a language for understanding myself.
But as I learned to trust my instincts creatively, something else began to happen.
I became more willing to have an opinion.
More comfortable being seen.
More curious.
More open to inspiration.
And perhaps most importantly, I stopped believing that making space for myself somehow took space away from someone else.
The opposite happened.
As I became more fulfilled, the people around me seemed to have more room to breathe too.
There was space for every story.
Including mine.
Finding my voice
That idea eventually found its way somewhere unexpected: into a song.
I’ve been taking voice lessons, partly because I wanted to improve my singing, but the experience has become another exercise in allowing myself to be heard.
While writing a song called By Design, I kept returning to the language I use when thinking about interiors: light, composition, materials, history, breathing room.
And then a few lines emerged that seemed to say far more than I had intended:
The walls weren’t load-bearing after all.
There’s room for me here.
What’s left is by design.
Suddenly I wasn’t writing about a house.
Or perhaps I was.
There’s room for me here.
Recently I’ve found myself stepping into opportunities I wouldn’t have imagined a few years ago—building my design practice, placing in a design competition!, sharing my work publicly, writing, meeting people in the design community, and sitting down for an interview with Influential Women.
That last one still makes me smile.
Not because I suddenly think of myself as an “influential woman,” but because I’m learning not to decide ahead of time how others will see me, or how much space I’m allowed to occupy.
Whether the title fits is someone else’s decision.
Mine is simply to show up.
And maybe that’s what I want the spaces I design to offer other people too.
Not perfection.
Not a prescribed version of how a beautiful life should look.
A place where history is honored, individuality is visible, light can get in, and the people who live there recognize something of themselves.
A place that quietly says:
There’s room for me here.
That may be the most important thing I’ve learned about design.
And about myself.
Some things are worth preserving.
Some walls can move.
And what remains?
By design.
Leave a Reply