I always begin with the heart.

Before I ever choose a stone or a swatch or a single brass fixture, before we ever create any type of mood board, I ask you to close your eyes and tell me what you want to feel. Not what you want it to look like. What you want to feel. That is the whole beginning. Everything else, the plaster and the wood grain and the tile, is just the translation.

Experiential design, at its root, is the practice of crafting environments that engage people on a multisensory and emotional level, so that every moment inside becomes meaningful and memorable. It is not solely about how a space looks or how well it functions. It considers how you move through it, how you interact with it, how you feel inside it, whether you are the one who lives there or a guest crossing the threshold for the very first time. The goal is to build something closer to a journey than a room. A space that tells a story, that evokes emotion, that leaves you with an imprint long after you have left it. That gives you ease. That gives you comfort. Or whatever it is you actually wanted to feel when we began. And believe me, it can be as outlandish or as subtle as you want it to be. Neither one shouts louder than the other. Whisper quiet or full circus, it is all just artistic expression, and I am not here to talk you out of either. If a whisper of linen and one perfect stone is what makes your chest loosen when you walk in the door, wonderful. And if what you actually want is a carousel parked in the middle of your living room, horses and all, then let’s do it. I will help you pick the paint colors for the horses myself.

So we start by journaling without any walls. I ask you to take yourself and place yourself inside someone else’s body, someone stepping into your space for the first time, and to feel what they feel. What greets them first. What lingers. What they touch without meaning to. And once your heart has spoken, I bring in the elements, wood, fire, earth, metal, water, each one a language I will walk you through more slowly another time. For now, what matters is simply this. Every one of those elements carries a color with it, and color is never decoration. A room with no color at all still speaks, in restraint and in light. A room built on one tone speaks in depth. A room layered with many colors speaks in richness. Color sets the temperature before anyone has said a word, warms a space or cools it, and it moves through the elements the same way feeling moves through a body. Wood has its color. Fire has its color. Earth, metal, water, each one arrives already dressed in its own hue, and part of my work is choosing which one gets to speak the loudest in your space, and which ones simply hold the room steady.

Experiential design lives in the elements, but it also lives in the smallest, quietest moments. It is sitting in a chair and running your toes through a thick pile of carpet without realizing you are doing it. It is watching crystal candle holders catch the firelight and cast a soft glow across the face of the person you are talking to. It is the airflow from a fan placed just so, the way it moves across your skin and changes how you feel in a room without you ever knowing why. It is the texture of a wallpaper that someone brushes against on their way to wash their hands. Experiential design can be truly whatever you want it to be. My job is simply to interpret what is already in your heart, and that is why I ask for it first.

But more than any single element, what I am really after is you. What I am really after is helping you find what makes you feel fully alive in your own space. Fully free. Fully yourself, regardless of who else is standing in the room with you. That is the real work underneath all of it. Not the tile, not the wood grain, but the feeling of walking into your own home and finally exhaling, because for the first time the space around you matches who you actually are.

For a public space, the question shifts slightly, but the heart of it stays the same. It is no longer only about you, it is about what the founder wants every person who walks through that door to feel the moment they cross the threshold. What story are they stepping into. What version of ease or wonder or welcome are they meant to carry with them when they leave. I ask the founder the same questions I ask a homeowner. What do you want in your heart for someone to feel here. And then I build toward that feeling, knowing that once the doors open, the space no longer belongs only to us. It belongs to whoever walks through it next, and that is exactly as it should be.

Because that is the truth of it. This work always starts with you, the person who chose to have the space designed in the first place. Not the guest, not the stranger walking through a public door, you. My job is to make you feel so safe and so grounded in what we build together that you stop caring what anyone else thinks when they walk in. Not because their opinion doesn’t matter, but because by the time they arrive, you already know who you are inside those walls, and that knowing cannot be shaken by someone else’s reaction to it. Once that is true for you, the space is finished doing its most important work. Whoever comes through the door after that, a stranger discovering a room you built for the public, or someone you love walking into your most private space and seeing you in a free, open, vulnerable light you rarely show anyone else, they are welcome to feel whatever they feel. That is their interpretation to make, and it was never yours to control. Because your space should be exactly who you are.

Ever since I was a little girl, I looked at things differently. I was always curious, always intrigued, by what someone wore, by what a space looked like or felt like, by the way light moved through a window and caught an ordinary speck of dust, turning it into something magical. As I grew older I began applying that same curiosity to my own clothing. In the eighties I would pair paisley with plaid, cut my wild curly hair into something silly and profound all at once, put together things that made no sense on paper but felt exactly right on me. It took me years to understand that those were some of the freest moments of my life. Not because anyone applauded them. Because they surprised someone, and more importantly, because they surprised me. In my early twenties I learned to sew from my grandmother, and I started interpreting the fashion I loved directly onto my own body, cutting my own fabric into pants or a skirt or a top and wearing them out into the world as art. Nothing off a rack ever made me feel the way those pieces did. There was something so much more personal and intentional about wearing a thing I had made with my own hands, something that existed nowhere else, made for no one else. That is the same work I do now with experiential design.

I still do not like playing it safe. But I also love making people feel safe. That is not a contradiction, it is the whole practice. Designing with me starts at the heart of who you are in this particular season of your life, but it never asks you to stay there. A space, like a person, is allowed to grow and change and evolve naturally as you do.

Experiential design is not something I only practice within four walls. It is how I move through the world in my own body. It is the texture I choose against my skin in the morning. It is the color I reach for because it matches, or shifts, my mood. It is the structure of a garment, or the freedom of it. Some days I want the discipline of something tailored and complete. Other days I want a little cleavage showing, or the side of me the fabric does not quite cover, a short skirt, something that says I feel alive today. Other days I want to be covered from my collar to my ankle, leaving everything to the imagination. But there is always one thing. Something special, worn close to the skin, that only I know is there.

That is how I design a space for you too. There is always one thing that only you will know. A detail folded into the plaster, a color hidden where only the morning light finds it, a texture placed exactly where your hand will land. Nobody else has to know it is there. You will.

That is the beautiful secret, and the art of experiential design, through my lens, and hopefully through yours too.