About Us

I’ve been a fine art lover my entire life and have studied art history, music, and many forms of mark, fabric and model making.

I have a degree in Communication and Culture, which took me to study in Latin America, and every summer I headed to Europe to fill my sketchbooks and camera with museum and architectural knowledge.

My technical skills were earned at BCIT, through a juried and rigorous 2.5 year interior design program. I learned architectural blueprints, 3-D renderings, and both millwork and industrial drawings. It was an intense study of building code, spatial engineering, and human-centred design for both commercial and residential spaces.

I’ve been taking on personal clients since 2010, which ran concurrently with my schooling, and then my employment at some of Victoria, BC's top interior design firms began in 2014.

The first half of my career was designing and project managing commercial builds, with an emphasis on hotels, restaurants, and public spaces. The latter half was spent on high end residential, or creating the look of high-end residential with bespoke flips.

The most sustainable design is through restoration and preservation.

Landfilling items every few years when you get bored of them or when they wear out is sustainable interior design’s enemy.

Humanity used to build for longevity and performance, and I’d like that to become the norm again.

In the early 90s, my Mom and I designed furniture and accessories for my childhood home, which were made by local artisans.

We had the fortune of going back there in 2022, and I’m proud to say everything is exactly where we had placed it, 30 years before.

I have many global design muses. I’m thankful for social media, where I study their current and emerging work, and for books which allow me to understand their history.

Kelly Wearstler, to me, is the interiors queen and has been my ultimate muse since design school. She reinvents and repurposes materials, and travels to find emerging artists and makers. Her work is thoughtful and cutting edge, and remains timeless due to not following trends.

William McLure is an amazing artist who was trained as an interior designer. His homes over the years are gorgeous and refined, even his smaller rental spaces when he was starting out. I love his mixture of high and low pieces and his repurposing and embellishing of pedestrian things to make them special, which shows good taste isn’t directly correlated with wealth.

I also deeply admire: Banda Properties, Watts Design House, The Fox Group, Mark D. Sikes, Hugo Toro, Jan Showers, Jeremiah Brent, Tara Shaw, and for a good tablescape, I love India Hicks.

My personal aesthetic hasn’t changed much over the years, though it has become more sophisticated.

I’d describe it as “refined maximalism”, which to me means filling spaces with beautiful materials and objects, but pairing them down so they feel deliberate, comfortable and not overcrowded.

Since I was a child, I’ve gravitated to a palette of white, cream and black with warm woods and accent metals. I am also interested in colour, and look to authorities, like Farrow and Ball, for the loveliest versions of greens, reds and blues.

I like to mix high priced items with low, antiquity with vintage and modern, organic with geometric. By taking a restrained and curated approach, harmony results between otherwise paradoxical objects, which I find to be very interesting.

Finally, I’m interested in customizing materials and using them in ways that may not typically be used. I like wood walls, wallpaper on ceilings, stone for baseboards, and enjoy finding creative and beautiful solutions to otherwise mundane pieces, like doorstops and light switches.

I am most inspired in beautiful hotels, heritage buildings, international restaurants, art galleries and in nature. Anywhere that has a creative use of materiality and form, yet remains functional and doesn’t feel too precious.

Understand the existing architecture of your home and use pieces of that era, but don’t only stick to that era.

For example, a heritage home should have antique pieces throughout, layered in with pieces from other genres to make it feel current and collected. These pieces can also be reupholstered or refinished to give them a modern glow.

And, as tempting as it may be, please do not buy everything from the same store. It is safe and quick, but doesn’t have dimension or staying power.

A home built correctly, and with quality materials, should last through the ages.

By deliberately acknowledging but not following trends, you put a unique spin on things. There’s no concern about people knowing what year your house was remodelled because it won’t be the same as anyone else’s.

This can be an investment of both time and money, but it will pay off down the road when you may be looking at recovering a chair, instead of redoing an entire room.