ABOUT

We are NOT a typical e-design done-for-you service that creates your design, then sends you a list to go shopping & tells you where to put everything.  

THE DECORATING COACH is a completely different service:  Our purpose is to guide YOU to be the star designer & get the satisfaction of designing a home you love!  We teach you professional decorating strategies and provide a convenient, easy-to-follow path to designing your own home, at your own pace. Then we offer additional online advice & support if you need it.   

Combining our experience in both decorating and photography, we are able to teach design in a very visual way with plenty of examples. (This last year alone we have taken almost 10k photos of model homes for inspiration and illustrative teaching purposes!) 

Finally, we explain decorating in a clear, straightforward way without all of the unnecessary pretentious designer-speak & theory.  You don’t want to go to interior design school!  We teach what you need to know and skip the overwhelm.  Nothing to feel intimidated by or that overcomplicates the process.  

*Note: in case it's unclear, we are NOT a full-service interior design company. We do not offer project management services, CAD drawings or construction advice.

Decorating is making your home best suited for your design style & personalizing it to function with your everyday life.

Staging is styling your home when you are about to put it on the market to sell.  You want to appeal to the most buyers, so many of the personal touches and style specific choices you made to fit your needs will need to be changed to give buyers a clean slate to envision how the home could work best for them & their furnishings.  By de-personalizing your home, buyers don't have to mentally work as hard to see themselves living there.  They shouldn't feel like a guest visiting your home.   

For further info, read the full blog post on this topic here.

Do you love the styling & special touches found in model-homes? We do!  Model homes avoid a plain-cookie cutter look by including unexpected details, but have a design that flows cohesively from room to room.  A true blend of sophisticated style & casual comfort. All they lack is some genuine personality - and we can easily add that!

We help clients with a variety of styles that fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.  You may think of words like transitional, industrial, contemporary, vintage-modern, urban, rustic-glam, new French country, boho, farmhouse, traveler, electic, or somewhere in between.  Design strategies are universal no matter how your style evolves over time. 

*We do NOT specialize in the traditional aesthetic.  So if ornate, glossy woods, layered floral drapery & accessories covering every surface are your thing, we are NOT a good fit.

With a background in both photography and interior decorating, we believe in having a variety of photo examples for visual learning.

Our teaching style is clear and straight-forward, without all of the unnecessary fancy-designer jargon.  Nothing to feel intimidated by or that overcomplicates the process.  

You want to learn about decorating, but don't want to go to design school & learn about design history or building codes.  We are here to just teach what you need to know to get style you love & a home that works with your life.

Decorating is a creative skill that can be learned, and once the underlying concepts & strategies are understood, the skill will continue to be helpful throughout your life as you move homes and as your tastes and needs change with new life-stages.  You know yourself the best, and if you have the desire to decorate your home, you are the one best suited for it!

You will probably buy & sell multiple homes in your lifetime.  Every home sale you will want to stage it to earn fast & high offers, and every new home you move into will have a new floorplan and decorating strategy to fit & enhance the space (even if you keep the same furniture).

I won’t try to sugarcoat it, decorating a home is an intensive investment of money, energy & time.  But in the long run, you will have a home that feels like you, that functions with your life, and that you can be proud of knowing most of what you selected are pieces that will be a part of your life for years to come.  So, if you are up for the challenge, it can be quite rewarding.

The true value of a professional home designer is in the strategy, planning & project management they provide.  The actual design direction, inspiration and true vision will be created from what they are able to pull from YOU.

Kinda like a good therapist, they need to ask all of the right questions to help draw out from you the best design solution for your home.  In fact, you give the same project to 2 different designers, with the same basic design parameters (style, colors, likes/dislikes) you will get 2 completely DIFFERENT designs.

If you are going to hire a professional designer because you have a remodel, or if you are too busy to manage the project yourself, learning the fundamentals of design will help you to communicate with your designer more fully.  

When you know what you like, why you like it, and how you need your home to function everyday, you are going to give better direction, and know how to communicate what you do/don’t like so that designer can give you a much better design than they ever could have before. Without paying for unnecessary design-change fees and the resulting time delays.

Still unsure?  For the full article on this topic, click here.

You are the only person who can answer this question.  We will give you the tools to help you create a spending plan & show you how far your investment can go when purchasing furniture & decor.  That is the beauty of designing your own home - when you go at your own pace, you can create a budget that works for you.  

While we share some DIY tips and don’t feel that great design has to have a high price tag, we DO believe in quality & that you get what you pay for.  Invest in key quality pieces & learn where to incorporate DIY or custom work to add value and interest to your design instead of cheapening it.

We are based near Dallas, Texas, but travel to cooler weather and mountains every chance we get!  So please start the conversation by dropping us a note though our Contact page (linked here) and we will get back with you asap :)