Q&A with Shay
Shay sits down for a Q&A in anticipation of launching her new website as the year turns
Let's dive right in, shall we? Shay — When did you first realize you were into interior design?
…Forever? There were many early signs that becoming an interior designer was in my future! I think it all started with an early obsession with rearranging my own bedroom furniture. I'm talking elementary school age kiddo, sitting on the floor, pressing my back against the wall and nudging bigger furnishings around with my feet… Then by the age of 11, I fell in love with sketching out house plans, like a little architect, and as soon as I had a home computer, I had an architecture program to go with it. I'd also spend years geeking out over the TLC show Trading Spaces – probably my first exposure to interior design as a potential career path. I was lucky to have friends and adults in my life who entrusted me with opportunities to design their spaces as a teenager!
Was interior design your first and only career path?
It was not – in fact, for as long as I can remember, I had been torn between becoming a teacher or an interior designer. And ohhh the pressure I felt as a high school senior! The (not-so-true, but perhaps a little more relevant in 2006) advice I took at the time: “Teachers are needed everywhere. Interior designers can only work in big cities with wealthy people.” Well, that settled it in my young Enneagram 2 mind — teacher it was! I earned a secondary education teaching degree with an English major and psychology minor. (Hands down my favorite college course? The psychology of language & design. Go figure!) After college I started my own business privately teaching and tutoring students in various settings, and eventually I'd pursue starting my own interior design business, too! (Somewhere along the way I figured out that the advice I took in high school was outdated, and that, in fact, I could pursue more than one vocation I loved.)
How did that unfold? Starting your own interior design business?
My interest in interior design never waivered, and in my early twenties, a real estate company caught on and asked me to join forces. I had the opportunity to fulfill design projects for home renovations – flips and rentals at first. It was almost as if the business happened to me, it evolved so naturally. A few years later I was offered a contractor position with Wayfair as an interior designer, and I worked with nearly one hundred e-design clients in the brief two-year existence of the design department. The department shut down in early 2020, just as I was going into labor with my firstborn (and just a few weeks before the pandemic shutdown!). Suddenly I had an early labor project: revamping my website in effort to focus on building my own e-design clientele.
Nearly 100 clients, wow! Did they carry over into your own business clientele?
Oof, this is still a sore spot – all of my reviews, client correspondence, everything existed within the Wayfair design platform. We were sent a bunch of folders, like a giant “peace out” portfolio, and that was that. That's my biggest regret about working with Wayfair as a contractor…I was so loyal to their policy not to promote outside services that I never even directly linked to my website nor an outside platform for reviews (now I use Google). In the end, it cost me access to so many clients, and so many published reviews. But I was thrilled to discover that my own side projects would snowball into a growing client base.
Speaking of side gigs – what happened to teaching/tutoring?
Ah, yeah – teaching was still my main gig in those early design years. By 2020, I was only tutoring (rather than also teaching homeschool). I had several long-time students approaching high school graduation, so I set a goal to phase out after-school tutoring and grow my interior design business as my students graduated. This 2023-2024 school year was my first without any students – in 17 years! Bittersweet!
You mentioned becoming a parent – how has that impacted your own home’s interior?
Well, I'm back to shuffling furniture around a lot more often, much like I did as a young child! We live in an 1890s fixer upper, and it's a multifamily home; tenants live in one unit, and we live pretty close-quartered in the other. To suit our family's fast-evolving needs, we occasionally switch up how some spaces function. Safe zone for baby there, toddler free-reign here…different rooms have served different functional purposes since parenthood! Function is so important to me at this stage, so there's a balance to strike between functional needs and aesthetics. For example, my living room is a mostly wide open play space – but even if it might feel like it's missing some furniture (because it is lol), I'm still intentional about a cohesive vision and how the space looks and feels.
Has this phase of “functionality first” in your own home shifted the way you perceive your clients’ spaces?
Yes, in that I can more easily embrace a design that might look like it's, and I quote, “missing some furniture” haha. I'm also well-versed in child-proofing now, which isn't a bad skill to carry in my toolkit! But I've always really cared about function, so it's always been important to me to understand how my client actually uses or intends to use a space. It's foundational to my entire design process. I understand that spaces evolve, not just in the way they look, but also in the way they function. To me, interior design is about how a space makes you feel – and that feeling hinges on how a space functions and how it looks.
Can you give us an example of balancing function with the look of a space?
Oh sure – okay, back to my living room. My living room has a cohesive design down to the details. However, if my baby were constantly banging into a sharp-edged coffee table (and this has happened, because we occasionally bring one back into the living room while hosting), I'd be more prone to feeling anxious in the living room, she'd be more prone to feeling pain – it doesn't matter how beautiful the space is, anxiety and pain win in that scenario. So, if it matters to me that I feel calm in my living room and my baby feels comfortable to more freely be a baby, sharp-edged coffee table’s gotta go, despite making the design feel less “complete.” Just for now, anyway. I'm holding out for a round table once we don't need as much play space there anymore.
So a round coffee table is in your future… Speaking of the future, could you name a couple design trends on the horizon?
I'm really loving the pendulum swing back to elegant, ornate details – like, say, an antique brass switch plate with beautiful engraving vs a plain old white plate. Fluted glass rather than clean curves. Crown moulding, frame moulding, baseboards with colonial or Victorian profiles…I really appreciate fine details like you’d expect to see in a heritage home. I think we'll see a resurgence of these elements as maximalism is having a new moment. Maybe I’ll have to blog about this…
Well that's a nice segue – can't wait to see what's next for your design business and your blog!
Thank you! I'm excited for the in-progress design projects bridging me into the new year, and for all the projects still ahead!
