Letter From The Editor
I grew up surrounded by the smell of wood shavings and the sound of my father’s hands working. Not metaphorically. Literally. My parents built apartment complexes and houses. My father and brothers arrived in New York and began with restoration work — which, if you want to understand how the world’s finest furniture is actually constructed, is the most rigorous education that exists. You cannot restore a piece built at the highest level of craft without first understanding exactly why it was built the way it was. Every joint. Every finish. Every decision made by the person who made it.
My father eventually moved from restoration into commission work — custom consoles, dining tables, carved pieces requiring a level of mastery that almost no one in this country practices anymore. His work has been handled by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. You will not find his name in a design magazine. He does not speak much English and has never tried to market himself. He simply makes things, at the highest possible level, and the people who understand what they are looking at find their way to him. That is the tradition I come from. That is the standard I hold myself to.
Becoming an interior designer was never a decision I made. It was simply what I was always going to do. I never wanted to do anything else. I had spent my entire life inside the world of renovation, construction, material, and craft — watching my father understand a piece of furniture the way a doctor understands a body, watching my family transform spaces from the ground up. Interior design was the natural language of everything I already knew.
I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in this process who is structurally on your side.
That is not a marketing claim. It is a description of how the economics actually work. Your broker earns a commission when you buy. The stager earns a monthly fee when you rent furniture you would never choose and cannot verify the provenance of. The building manager recommends contractors from a network of personal relationships with no quality accountability. The big-box showroom earns margin on volume. Every party in a residential transaction in New York City is incentivized by something other than your outcome.
I am not. My work is complete when your home is right. When it reflects who you actually are, when it is built from things that were made with intention, when it will outlast the next renovation cycle and the one after that. That alignment — between my success and your genuine satisfaction — is rare in this industry. I want you to know it exists.
On What Things Are Actually Worth
A few years ago I was working with a client on a penthouse project — a significant renovation, the kind where every decision has consequence. We had commissioned a custom silk rug from Nepal. Hand-knotted. Designed specifically for the room. Made by artisans in a workshop that had been operating for generations.
The rug was taking time. Custom work at that level always does. And it was expensive. My client was frustrated — understandably. He pushed back. He wanted to know why he couldn’t just buy something comparable from a showroom and have it in two weeks.
I explained what the rug actually was. That it had been in production for six months. That the workshop making it employed an entire community of skilled artisans whose livelihoods depended on commissions like his. That the silk had been sourced from a specific region for specific qualities. That when it was complete, it would be the only one in existence — made for his room, for his light, for the proportions of that specific space. That in twenty years it would still be there, still beautiful, and that no one else in the world would have it.
Something shifted. He went quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I didn’t think about it that way. I thought I was buying a rug. I didn’t realize I was participating in something.”
That is the moment I understood my mission clearly. Not to sell design. To make the connection between a person and the thing that was made for them — and to make that connection as direct as possible, with as few extractive layers between the maker and the person who will live with what they made.
He loved that rug. He still has it. It will outlast every piece of furniture that any stager has ever placed in any apartment in this city. And the community of artisans in Nepal who made it were supported for six months by a single commission from a single New York homeowner who finally understood what he was buying.
That is what conscious design actually means. Not the Instagram version. Not the styled photograph with the affiliate link. The real version — where a decision made in a penthouse in Manhattan has a direct, traceable, human impact on the hands that made the thing you are going to live with.
On New York City
I love this city in the way that only long-term residents understand — not as a backdrop for ambition or a credential to collect, but as the specific, unglamorous, irreplaceable place where I have lived my actual life. The buildings I know by their bones. The neighborhoods I watched change. The workshops in Brooklyn where things are still made by hand. The buildings on the Upper East Side where I have watched stagers remove Wayfair labels in the lobbies of $20 million townhouses before a showing, so that no one asks where the furniture came from.
That last image stays with me. A $20 million property. Foreign investors parking capital. Furniture that will be returned to a warehouse when the property sells, having added nothing to the life of the city, nothing to the culture of the building, nothing to anyone’s actual experience of living. The apartment is not a home. It is a financial instrument dressed up to look like one.
I am not interested in that version of New York City. I am interested in the people who chose to be here, who intend to stay, who want their homes to be genuinely theirs — not staged, not generic, not indistinguishable from the hotel lobby aesthetic that has colonized luxury residential design in this city for the last two decades.
The home is the one place in New York where you are entirely sovereign. Where the noise of the city stops. Where the decisions you make about what surrounds you — what materials, what light, what objects made by which hands — are entirely your own. I take that seriously. I think you should too.
On This Site
nycinteriordesign.com is becoming something more than a portfolio. It is a knowledge resource — a city guide to the design and craft ecosystem of New York, built from the same fifteen years of active relationships that inform everything I do. The makers I know. The studios I trust. The showrooms that carry things worth specifying. The buildings with stories worth knowing. The news of a city that is still, beneath everything, one of the great centers of human creativity and craft.
It is for architects and designers who want a curated resource rather than a search engine. It is for homeowners who are about to make significant decisions and want to understand what their options actually are. It is for anyone who believes that where you live should reflect how you actually live — and that the things in your home should have been made by someone who was paid fairly, by hands that knew what they were doing, for a purpose that outlasts the trend cycle.
I do not certify contractors. I do not offer referral networks. I do not take commissions from vendors for recommendations. What I offer is knowledge, honesty, and the particular perspective of someone who has been inside this world her entire life — who knows what good looks like, who knows what it costs, and who will tell you the truth about both.
Buy less. Buy better. Know where it came from. Live with it forever. That is the whole philosophy. Everything else is detail.
If that resonates with you, you are in the right place.