When visiting, I recall looking out the window of the airplane upon the approach to Chicago and feeling a magnetic connection to the city. On one trip, I even remarked to Michael, “this feels like coming home.” 

You see, the idea of “home” is very important to me. As someone who’s worked for decades in interior design and architecture, I have a particular sensitivity to all the things home can be for each of us. For me, it definitely extends beyond the four walls of my dwelling to include place. This is where Chicago comes in.

I come by this feeling honestly—I was born and raised in nearby Michigan—but I think it’s more than that. My affinity for Chicago only increased once I went to college and then entered the world of work.

While still in college, I was recruited to SmithGroup in Detroit, Michigan, where my focus was commercial interiors. I worked on the design of things like corporate offices and healthcare facilities. As a result, I would attend NeoCon, the world’s largest annual commercial design event, at Chicago’s iconic Merchandise Mart. 

At this time, the Mart was its own kind of magic. In those pre-Internet days, and before it was open to the public, it was home to exclusive materials and furniture a designer couldn’t see and smell and touch anywhere else. Even when the overwhelming wonderfulness that is NeoCon was not going on, visiting the Mart was a special event—especially if you snuck away from the commercial floors to visit the seemingly forbidden residential floors. (The design world felt more separate then, with commercial designers in one camp and residential designers in another.)

My regular NeoCon visits continued when I moved to a design firm where I first worked on residential interiors. I spent a good bit of time designing model homes, those idealized, often tricked-out versions of residences that convinced people that this dwelling could indeed be made theirs. This would prove to be a prescient career move—and it also cemented my fascination with the psychology of home, or what home really means to people.

I was then fortunate to work as an interior designer for Polo Ralph Lauren, where I learned the importance of a singular lifestyle vision for the home—and the wisdom of always investing in as much quality as you can afford. My corporate training took place at the flagship store in New York: talk about a home. It’s a shame the heiress who originally commissioned the French Renaissance Revival home, Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo, never even lived in it!

In 2006, I started my own design practice in Michigan, working directly with homeowners to reinvent their living spaces. The business thrived, and I eventually opened a second location, in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a wonderful 10 years, during which I learned a different conception of home, one that was curiously rooted in notions of Southern hospitality while embracing the rush of modernity that a rapidly growing city faces. 

During the decade, I also served as Creative Director for two different firms, where I worked with builders and architects to design homes from the ground up, from interior space allocation through exterior finish plans to interior furnishings.

Through both tenures, I gained valuable experience in meeting a family’s lifestyle priorities, starting with a blank slate to make a home from the inside out. But while I was helping everyone else love home, I found that I wished I was loving my own a little more.

Long-awaited homecoming

As much as I appreciated life in Atlanta—it’s where I met my husband and where my two nieces were born, after all—visions of a Chicago home were never far. Fortunately, in 2016, Michael was recruited by a Chicago-based tech firm, so we sold the house, packed up the car, and hit the road for our new home on New Year’s Eve. What a way to start a year!

Once here, a Chicago builder contacted me about working with them after seeing some of my past projects. At first, the job was pretty routine—making interior and exterior selections for one-off residences—but the work was well received by buyers, and I was asked to design entire homes in increasingly diverse parts of the city. From multi-unit condominium buildings in Bronzeville to single-family homes in Irving Park, I quickly learned the ins and outs of how Chicago families in different communities live and what their neighborhoods mean to them. It was a crash course, and I loved every minute of it.

This work led to where I am today, designing an entire neighborhood adjacent to the wonderfully historic Tri-Taylor community, in a development newly named by BONNER called The 12. 

Unlike the sprawling 10,000+ square-foot homes I designed in Atlanta’s suburbs, designing single-family homes in the city of Chicago, where real estate isn’t cheap and every bit of space counts, was a challenge I welcomed. I’m now working on homes closer to 3,000 square feet that “live” much larger than they appear, with efficiency and flexibility baked in from the start. 

Walking in other people’s shoes

In last month’s story, Michael talked about “first things first,” our philosophy of the essential learning we need before design can begin. Yes, we have to understand how people live and how they really use the place where they live before we can make decisions on how to allocate and furnish space. But I think there’s also the matter of relating through first-hand experience.

As great as my appreciation is for home and the city of Chicago, I couldn’t have designed an entire community of single-family homes at The 12 before I worked with a builder and architect and homeowner to design one single-family home. And then another one. And another. And one more. 

Likewise, to truly understand all the subtleties that go into successfully designing for Chicago, I had to call the city home for myself. Of course, a designer or architect doesn’t have to live in a locale to successfully design for it. But in this case, I did learn several things about Chicagoans that I feel made my work better. 

Things like an emphasis on quality over quantity (living in smaller yet efficiently proportioned spaces, in exchange for convenient access to urban amenities); sharing communal areas, particularly outdoor spaces (Chicago ranks among the top 10 U.S. cities for greatest number of public parks); and maybe most importantly, understanding the unique character of Chicago’s distinctive neighborhoods (depending on who you ask, Chicago has dozens if not more than 200 neighborhood designations). 

So maybe my corollary to “first things first” is “walk in their shoes,” something I am only too glad to do. In fact, stepping outside myself gave me a better appreciation for home and made me a better designer in the process. It’s a cliché, but Dorothy was right: there really is no place like home. Especially the one you’ve worked your whole life to live in.