Becoming an Interior Designer

Kate Bolick

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982138844
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Beratung in der beruflichen Entwicklung

A revealing guide to a career as an interior designer written by New York Times bestselling author Kate Bolick and based on the real-life experiences of the cofounders of the acclaimed Brooklyn firm Jesse Parris-Lamb—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession. Becoming an Interior Designer takes you behind the scenes to find out what it's really like, and what it really takes, to become an interior designer. This artful profession combines visionary creativity and taste with architecture, engineering, and business savvy. Acclaimed Brooklyn-based studio Jesse Parris-Lamb specializes in crafting warm, textured room designs shaped by the people that inhabit them. Bestselling author Kate Bolick shadows founders Amanda Jesse and Whitney Parris-Lamb to show how this dream job becomes a reality. Visit their studio as they as they map out new projects. Watch as they inject beauty and atmosphere into open air lofts and historic brownstones. Decide on the perfect shade of blue that will complete a serene reading room. Gain professional wisdom as Bolick traces the founders' paths to prominence, from attending design school and starting a studio, to building top-tier clients and planning landmark redesigns.

1

Several moments ago, it was an otherwise ordinary Monday at the offices of Jesse Parris-Lamb, if unseasonably humid for Brooklyn in June. The founders of this residential interior design firm, Amanda Jesse and Whitney Parris-Lamb, had been crouched on the floor, poring over a series of computer printouts of images of chairs and tables, shuffling them around like playing cards, looking for the just-right combination. Every so often one of the two would leap up to pull another image from the folder on the table beside them and introduce it to the mix. They were in the early stages of designing a two-story home library in Connecticut, and the folder contained the results of months of scouting and sourcing ideas. Now it was almost game time: by the end of the following day, they needed to overnight the client a packet of images of their final selections for furnishings and lighting, as well as paint swatches and fabric samples, in preparation for their final meeting the following week.

To a layperson such as me, it was impossible to detect any rhyme or reason to the options spread out on the floor: a pair of pale-pink wingback chairs, a wooden chair with a green seat and a tall windowpane back, a pair of low-slung armchairs in beige, a klismos side chair covered in rust-colored velvet. As someone who writes often about design, I know how to describe what I’m seeing, but actually pulling together all those disparate elements to create a space that’s beautiful, comfortable, functional, and original requires abilities that are many leagues beyond me. For a few minutes I tried to imagine myself into the minds of Amanda and Whitney, to see what they were seeing, and failed. (Who wouldn’t want to live with every single one of these beautiful chairs? I’ll take them all, thank you!)

Then Whitney walked away and returned with a rug sample. The large square of tufted beige wool depicted the head of a giant black-and-brown snake, mouth open wide, seizing what looked like an orange jellyfish between its spiky jaws. Was that a green leaf also sticking out of the jellyfish? I couldn’t see what the snake had to do with anything else arrayed before us.

When I expressed my bafflement, Amanda called out to Neala Jacobs, their studio director, at her desk across the room and asked her to find the image they’d been using as inspiration. Neala has been working at Jesse Parris-Lamb (JPL, for short) for only two years, but she’s so seamlessly woven into Whitney and Amanda’s dynamic that it feels as if she’d been there since day one, five years ago. Neala found the image, printed it out, and walked over to hand it to me.

They’d originally found the image on Pinterest—a reliable source of gorgeously designed living spaces for ideas and inspiration. (“That Pinterest is the backbone of our image sourcing is the dumbest thing,” Amanda said, rolling her eyes. “I prefer when we’re paging through actual books. But Pinterest provides such an easy way to collect images and share them with the office internally.”) The image was of a dining room, not a library, with bare dark-brown wooden floorboards laid down in a chevron pattern, and a pale wooden pedestal table at center paired with midcentury-style molded-plastic hunter-green chairs. Long kelly-green drapes hung at the window, and a pitch-black ceiling light with three long, thin ectomorphic arms hung above all of it, like the most graceful of arachnids. The room was lovely, but I couldn’t see what it had to do with the images I was looking at on the floor. Reptilian refinement? Elegance with an edge?

While I was trying to puzzle through their creative process, Whitney’s smartphone buzzed, and she answered it. She walked out of the room and into the hallway they use as a concept board, then walked back out into the studio, then back into the hallway again—quickly. Back and forth. Full-on pacing. Amanda began to look concerned.

Head lowered, ear pressed to her phone, Whitney was speaking in a gracious, confident tone that completely belied her obvious anxiety. Tall and rangy, she wears her wavy brown hair in a short crop, which, as she paced, fell over her forehead, obscuring her eyes. As she paced, she looked anywhere but at Amanda—at the floor, at the ceiling. Amanda, unable to read her business partner’s expression, returned to her desk, where she sat still as a mouse, and seemed to be doing her best to absorb the contents of the call through osmosis. Across the room, Neala worked quietly at her computer, oblivious of the drama silently unfolding behind her.

Since joining forces to found their firm in 2014, when they were in their early thirties, Whitney and Amanda have amassed an impressive client list of successful executives and artists across all creative fields, from the founder of OkCupid to a famous novelist or three. Along the way, they’ve developed the communication habits of a long-married couple. They are nearly always together, and when they’re not, they are talking on the phone or texting. When they are together but for whatever reason can’t speak directly—because one of the duo is locked in a delicate telephone conversation, for instance—they rely on various nonverbal methods, whether reading each other’s body language or simply hazarding educated guesses. As I’d come to see, maintaining this constant stream of contact allows them to collaborate on every decision, which ensures they remain equal partners, always working in concert.

Their studio is in a giant redbrick building in a gritty sliver of South Brooklyn known as Gowanus. During the 1800s, this tiny neighborhood was a major hub of industry and manufacturing. So much so that the nearly two-mile-long Gowanus Canal—a narrow creek that slithers inland from New York Harbor, passes within shouting distance of their studio, and terminates just several blocks north—became so polluted with industrial runoff and sewage (and, allegedly, the corpses of Mafia victims) that in 2010 it was designated a Superfund site.

The canal’s cleanup and renewal is slow and ongoing, but the massive, long-vacant industrial buildings that line it have over time found new life as loftlike apartments and creative spaces. JPL’s building, at 543 Union Street, has the company name NATIONAL PACKING BOX FACTORY painted in massive white letters across the facade, a vestige of its former identity in the nineteenth century. Just above the final two words of the sign is JPL’s corner studio, on the third floor. The space is a serene oasis of original details and minimalist furnishings. Welcoming, orderly, understatedly chic, and completely lacking in pretension, the layout and decor beautifully embody the firm’s reputation for creating warm, textured interiors shaped by the lives that inhabit them.

The brick walls and exposed beamed ceilings are painted white (Benjamin Moore’s White Dove to be exact, JPL’s go-to white paint), and the antique pale floorboards left bare. The furniture is simple and streamlined. Set against the walls, each of the four desks—natural-wood tops on simple white metal frames—is paired with a utilitarian white rolling chair. Extending from the far wall into the center of the room is a white Parsons table set with four wicker-and-bentwood chairs. A sleek chrome-and-pony side chair, and another in chrome and black leather, are pushed against opposing walls, waiting to be called into service. A tall white-oak bookcase holds all manner of design books, both new and historical, neat stacks of Architectural Digest and Elle Decor, an orderly array of tile samples, and just a few choice accessories—a pair of intriguing silver candleholders, an unusual glass paperweight, a mystifying metal object that could just as easily be a modernist sculpture or a piece of curtain hardware. On the floor, two big woven baskets brim with fabric swatches in every color. Six tall windows with plain white shades look out onto the street below, where horns honk and sirens scream, as if protesting the heat wave as well as the traffic. A lone globe-shaped glass terrarium is suspended from the ceiling with a length of rope.

The duo’s individual wardrobes seem of a piece with their environment, striking that difficult balance between comfortable and professional—clothes that allow for whatever the day may hold, whether hoisting an armchair up a flight of stairs, or sitting down at a business meeting. Today Whitney is wearing fashionable high-waisted, wide-legged jeans, a beige T-shirt, flat brown leather open-toe sandals with gold-buckled straps across the top, and a simple gold cuff bracelet. Her round, brown-framed glasses accentuate her intellectual aspect. Amanda is in a cut-off denim miniskirt (most likely from Madewell, where her husband works as a designer), a white cotton blouse with puffed sleeves, and red patent-leather Rapetto ballet flats with low heels and small bows at the toes. Her clear-framed glasses are a pleasing contrast to her black hair, which she keeps in an immaculate straight bob that just grazes her shoulders.

Finally, Whitney’s mystery conversation comes to a close. She sets down her phone.

“I had no choice,” Whitney says gravely. She grew up in North Carolina and has just the slightest, most barely discernible twinge of a Southern accent, which gives this pronouncement an extra dimension of sobriety.

Amanda shakes her head in disbelief and silently tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her pale oval face is inscrutable. Somehow she seems to know exactly what just happened.

“No choice about what?” Neala calls out from across the room.

Whitney seems not to hear her. “How could I possibly say no?” she says to Amanda.

Amanda raises her eyebrows. “Are you kidding me?” she says, voice flat. She’s from Michigan and doesn’t seem to have any accent at all, but given that she’s usually animated and upbeat, it’s disarming to hear her speak with such calculated solemnity.

“Kidding you?” Whitney growls.

Amanda can’t hold it in any longer—she breaks into a grin. “Of course you had no choice!” she cries out, laughing. “Of course!”

For a split second Whitney squints at Amanda, to make sure she’s being sincere, before relief washes over her face. Then both of them are laughing. Then they are howling with laughter.

Along with being in the early stages of a decorating plan for this client’s home library, they’re also just finishing this same client’s entertainment room, a big, airy space with a lot of windows. Early on in its design, when JPL suggested various draperies and shades, the client wanted to keep the windows bare. But the client has had a change of mind—hence the phone call. Now the client does want window treatments and wants to see fabric options before the meeting next week. So JPL has to generate a whole new batch of options to include in the package it’s sending out at the end of tomorrow.

“We have to mail them fabric options by tomorrow!” Whitney spits out, doubling over with laughter.

“Fabric options!” Amanda howls.

Their laughter is saying many things at once: There is no way we will have fabric options by tomorrow; if we don’t have fabric options by tomorrow, we will lose this job; I can’t believe our livelihood hinges on the fate of something as inconsequential as fabric options; really, is there anything more satisfying than thinking about fabric options?? It says something about how they feel about the job—and each other.

Then, fun over, they get down to work.

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VIEWED FROM THE OUTSIDE, residential interior design can appear to be a glamorous profession, if not downright fantastical. What could be easier than sitting around thinking about paint colors and fabric patterns? In what universe could that possibly be considered a job? Moreover, only the wealthy can afford to hire other people to make over their homes; for those designers lucky enough to land the commissions, traipsing through mansions and country estates is just another day at work.

Meanwhile, an entire industry of glossy design magazines and home-makeover TV programs, not to mention perfectly curated Instagram and Pinterest accounts, is devoted to reproducing the results of this so-called labor, and turning practitioners of the trade into minor celebrities. Those of us who care about how our spaces look but can’t afford an interior designer (me) press our noses against the windows to this parallel universe, hoping to steal an idea or two, or even to just escape, if only momentarily, the gross imperfections of our humdrum homes and their many compromises: the DIY kitchen-cabinet project we can never get around to finishing, the chic woven baskets bought to corral clutter that are now so jammed with junk they’ve become eyesores in their own right, even the IKEA sofa we’re sitting on, which came upholstered in a shade of plum that seemed inspired at the time but now calls to mind rotting fruit. What is it like to live in a home without flaws, among original Eames chairs, hand-embroidered tapestries, custom-built kitchen banquettes, gold-leaf wallpapers, on and on? People actually get paid to make that all happen?

They do! But it hasn’t always been this way. For centuries, interior design wasn’t even a profession. For most of human civilization, well-appointed homes were the exclusive province of the very rich, who arranged their castles and estates according to whatever principles they’d inherited from their parents and ancestors. For the rest of us, living spaces were mostly functional, places to cook and sleep and come in from the cold. This focus on utility extended to furnishings, too: If you needed a new chair, you hired a carpenter, built one yourself, or just made do with whatever wooden crate was closest at hand. Certainly some people have always cared about how their homes looked and felt, but among the nonrich their avenues for expressing this interest were mostly limited to sweeping, scrubbing, sewing, embroidering, and making quilts. Likewise, since time immemorial every culture has venerated some objects over others and trafficked in sentimental touches, though these were by and large personal matters. Unlike the village square, the home was a private sphere.

Then came the early 1800s, and the industrial revolution, which birthed so many of the forces that shape our contemporary life, among them social mobility and a status anxiety that hadn’t previously existed among ordinary people. Now that mass production and increased educational opportunities were creating ever more jobs, and factories were churning out ever more objects to buy, home decoration became a way for everyone—not only the very rich—to display their newly acquired wealth. But this was easier said than done. The rising middle and upper-middle classes, unwilling or unable to trust their own instincts, wanted—needed!—guidance.

So, toward the end of the 1800s, two brand-new, interrelated phenomena emerged, essentially in tandem: interior designers—that is, people who told others what to buy, and where to put it, who were hired by the rich; and home magazines (now known as shelter magazines), which disseminated tips and advice to those who couldn’t afford to hire professionals.

Back then, at the beginning, the role of interior designer—or lady decorator, as it was known—was exclusively filled by wealthy society women who’d grown up among fine things and therefore knew how to tell others what to do with them. A century later, it’s often assumed that this is still the case—that only people who were born into generational wealth, or those who married into money and therefore have ready access to rich clients, can work as interior designers. But that is no longer the case. Today, interior design is a thriving profession that’s available to anyone who wants to pursue it. Some people enroll in college or graduate programs to learn the trade; others simply set out a shingle and make it up as they go along.

Jesse Parris-Lamb epitomizes this contemporary model of interior design professionals. Each partner was born into a working-class family far from the coasts, in what New Yorkers consider to be flyover country. Yet, each was blessed with that most elusive of qualities: having an eye. After a few false starts, each took advantage of the many educational opportunities to learn interior design. Now past the beginning stages of their careers, they are enjoying a measure of success and acclaim that promises more good things to come.

That is, if they can only solve this window-treatment conundrum.

2

Jesse Parris-Lamb is always juggling several different projects. When I first meet with Amanda and Whitney, in June 2019, they are in the midst of a more than yearlong residential commission in Greenwich, Connecticut, with plans to complete a major element of the project by the end of July. They are also about to embark on their first-ever show house, the Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse, which will open to the public in late September. (A show house is similar to but different from a standard residential commission, which I’ll explain in detail further on.) Meanwhile, they are in the early stages of gut-renovating a two-bedroom, three-thousand-square-foot penthouse apartment in a historic cast-iron building in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, to be finished in February.

Interior design is a highly tactile, visual profession that involves a great deal of creativity. But it also requires a commensurate amount of organizational skill, social intellige...