Despite the early hour and wet September morning, it’s standing room only at Creative Mornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series for local creatives. Shawn Chopra, the creative director and owner of coffee and home goods store Good Neighbor, is the featured speaker and even thought he looks like the coolest person at the party, he seems nervous.

But once Chopra starts talking about “shedding a lifetime of going through the motions,” his voice gets steadier and easily fills the room at Sandtown Furniture in Pigtown. Chopra ends the talk by handing out pieces of papyrus, a thick paper that was used in ancient times. For Chopra, papyrus has come to represent the connection between roots and growth.

Chopra’s parents grew up in Chandigarh, India, the dream city of India’s first prime minister, Sh. Jawaharlal Nehru, and planned by the famous French architect Le Corbusier. It’s known as one of the best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the 20th century. But Chopra himself was born in Winnipeg—“the cold middle part of Canada,” he sighs—after his parents immigrated there in 1985.

The family then moved to Vancouver, where Chopra spent his childhood in a city called Richmond. Due to an influx of Indian and Chinese immigrants and a shortage of housing, Chopra’s father, who worked as an engineer and provided the sole income for the family, saw an opportunity to renovate and flip their small childhood home.

Every few years when the market was right, they would rinse and repeat. “I think my dad enjoyed it,” says Chopra. “And I think we as a family enjoyed the renovation process.” Chopra’s parents were also homebodies and much preferred hosting friends at their house to going out. That meant Chopra spent a lot of time in his room, which he filled with sports team pennants his father would pick up on his business trips to the United States.

“I would also constantly rearrange the furniture in my room,” remembers Chopra. “We used to go thrifting—a lot of my clothes were thrifted and also my furniture, like side tables and lamps.”

The cornerstones of his childhood—hospitality, innovation, renovation—ended up being the building blocks that ultimately led to opening Good Neighbor.

By the time his senior year of high school rolled around, Chopra had his eyes set on New York, so he did the most sensible thing he could think of and headed to the “East Coast of Canada”—Ottawa. His parents had hinted he had three career options in their eyes—health care, lawyer, or accountant—so he found himself studying physical therapy at the University of Ottawa.

It was on his first day of college that he met Anne Morgan, herself the child of Egyptian immigrants. They started dating in 2007. Morgan immediately recognized that he was a creative spirit.

“She was able to uncover a lot of these things in my past,” says Chopra, and she would press him: “What are you doing studying medicine?” But at the same time, she understood the immigrant mentality of being expected to do something great. “Meeting Anne was one of the best things that happened to me, because she saw me,” says Chopra.

The two graduated in 2009 and two years later they moved to Baltimore, where Morgan was enrolled in dental school at the University of Maryland.

“We’ll live in Baltimore for four years,” Chopra remembers thinking as they purchased an apartment in Locust Point. (Living in Baltimore also meant he was now only a train ride away from New York City.) Chopra transferred his physical therapy license, but wanted to make a bigger impact in the field, so he began working in public health and visiting seniors around the city who were in recovery from strokes and other ailments.

“I loved it,” says Chopra. “I got to go to every part of Baltimore.” And suddenly a Canadian was visiting neighborhoods that even some homegrowns had never been to—talking to residents and their children, who would occasionally stop by and share stories.

“That’s where I started to fall in love with the city,” says Chopra. “It just needs more people to stay and do something and be a part of it.”

Baltimore is addicting because it’s the kind of place where people believe in your dream, he says. “I think Charm City is the right word for it because it is very charming, and I think people see the potential in it,” he says. “It’s authentic.”

Chopra had also gotten to know a lot of the artists and makers and became immersed in how they created the fabric of the city—but at that point simply as a supportive bystander. Then one day it hit him.

“I was tired of consuming other people’s work,” he says. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate their art; it’s just that he wanted to create, too. He was finally owning up to what Morgan had been telling him all along—there was a piece of him missing and he realized he would actually be honoring his parents by becoming the best version of himself.

So, he decided it was time for a leap of faith. But he still didn’t know exactly what that meant. Should he go back to school? How could he be more involved in the community?

“And then I just came up with the idea of Good Neighbor,” he says. “A place that I thought Baltimore needed, a place that I needed.”

Chopra made a list of all the things that he and Morgan enjoyed—coffee, community, togetherness, sharing meals, beautiful dishware, plants. He decided he would make it a one-stop cool coffee shop where lingering is encouraged.

“You know, you go to these other cities and it’s like, ‘Why can’t Baltimore have this?’” he says. Yeah, it would be that.

He rented the space in 2019. It had been sitting empty for a few years and needed a complete rehaul. Chopra had never worked as a contractor but had helped his father on all those home renovations, so he was able to self-manage the build-out.

“It was the only way we could afford this,” says Chopra. But in the end, it was also “the only way I wanted to do it. This was going be my education this was my grad school,” he says. “That’s actually how my parents framed it.”

Chopra and his builders got to work, with an initial opening date of March 2020. Obviously, the pandemic had other plans and they spent the extra two months adjusting—building an outdoor deck and changing business procedures.

In May of 2020, still in the throes of COVID and with Morgan nine months pregnant, Good Neighbor opened on Falls Road between Hampden and Hoes Heights. It’s a rare space, with a main building, a big outdoor area, and a garage that was turned into a picture-perfect greenhouse and has probably starred in hundreds of Instagram stories.

Even with all that, Chopra wasn’t sure if it would work. Having customers wear masks and socially distance to keep the employees safe made no sense when the whole purpose of Good Neighbor was stranger interaction and closeness. But people came. They utilized the tiered outdoor garden and still felt like they were hanging out with other friends even if they couldn’t sit together.

“It was a dizzying couple of years,” says Chopra. And when customers finally could come inside, they found a light-filled space stocked with Chopra’s curated finds, from furniture to housewares, bottles of wine, magazines, and candles.

In 2023, Chopra launched Guesthouse by Good Neighbor, a seven-room boutique hotel on the two floors above the coffee and retail space, which had previously been used as storage. Meant to recreate the feeling of staying at a friend’s house versus a stuffy hotel, it doubles, like the shop, as an opportunity to showcase the work of Baltimore makers and artists as well as Chopra’s and Morgan’s roots.

In November of 2022, Chopra, Morgan, and their toddler son, Avi, visited Aswan, Egypt, with Chopra’s “baba” (Egyptian for father-in-law), who helped them source more than 2,000 pieces of papyrus that have since been integrated into every room at the hotel. Often, the light hits and dances off the ancient paper as it takes on new life within the most modern spaces.

And while Charm City now gets to claim Chopra as its own, he has also been noticed by the bigger design community, from furniture brands that had never had accounts in Baltimore before to national design magazines. “Baltimore’s Tight-Knit Design Scene Is Thriving,” announces a new piece in Dwell magazine, with an illustration of Chopra and a story proclaiming him as “the city’s beloved design retail resource.”

Locally, the design community has taken note as well. “Shawn has done such a brilliant job of bringing incredible design and a high-end aesthetic to Baltimore in a way that is approachable and for the people,” says Robin Heller, lead designer and founder of Surrounded By Color. “He’s so open to ideas and input from designers and brands and friends and patrons. It’s refreshing.”

Part of Chopra’s genius is also the relationship between his businesses. The success and aesthetic of Good Neighbor led to Guesthouse, which in turn has led to Design Garage, a space for designers, architects, builders, and decorators to work together and innovate, and even a weeklong Good Neighbor Design Camp.

Chopra’s parents still live in Vancouver but come down several times a year—mostly to see their grandson Avi—and “they do love the shop and seeing me in my element and using my talents,” says Chopra. He knows they worried, as parents do, when he took that huge gamble on his future.

“But, as I always tell them, the immigrant sacrifice they made was so that their kids could dream completely free and without constraints, something they could not afford to do.”

That there is now tangible evidence of his success feels good.

“Shawn and his team have imagined Baltimore in a super aesthetically pleasing way,” says Surrounded By Color’s Heller. “It’s so lovely as a designer, and a Baltimorean, to be able to bask in the light of it all and watch everyone else shine in it too.”

It may come as a surprise that interior designer Patrick Sutton’s office is a bit generic.

“It’s basic,” he admits from behind his simple wooden desk that’s stuffed inside the Federal Hill rowhouse his company has been occupying since September 2001. “We definitely didn’t try to design a showcase—it’s basically a vessel to create design.”

And create design Sutton has—after 30 years in business, his portfolio is as thick as it is impressive.

It turns out Patrick Sutton is both a “normal guy” who likes football and baseball games, hanging with his kids, vacationing with his wife, and calling his 13-year-old dog, Stella, the “center of my world”—and a world-class designer with movie-star hair, a résumé full of industry awards and accolades, and a roster of clients that could best be described as fancy.

“I’m going to tell you this—you’re going to laugh at me,” says Sutton. “I’m 61 years old but I still think of myself as 25 trying to make it.”

He says this as his staff—17 workers “shoehorned like Keebler elves” into the building, he jokes—work on some 40 projects, including six currently for the Baltimore-based Atlas Restaurant Group.

While Sutton reflects on three decades in the business, he looks around the room. Yes, the space is surprisingly no-frills, but not without its personal touches. He gestures to a photograph by contemporary Dutch visual artist Hendrik Kerstens depicting a stoic-looking woman in a red turban, a playful nod to the works of the Dutch Old Masters. “It’s art I can afford,” he jokes. “It’s in the tens of thousands, not hundreds.”

On a side table between two bookcases, sits Footloose in France, the first book written by his father, Horace Sutton—a travel writer and a huge influence on Sutton’s life. “When I went on my book signing across the United States, I carried this to honor his memory, which I thought was kind of cool.”

Next to the book is a candy corn lamp he bought at auction. Yes, the entire base is the shellacked Halloween treat and the shade a fuzzy yellow and pink. “My favorite is when the air conditioning turns on—those feathers dance a little bit.” It’s garish and a bit of surprising décor until Sutton adds, “I put that there so that when people come in here, they know I don’t take myself too seriously.”

From afar, Sutton’s childhood seemed glamorous. His father was a pioneer in transatlantic travel journalism, so young Patrick grew up tagging along on his overseas trips to the most beautiful places in the world—“hotels, restaurants, palaces, things like that,” he recalls. He remembers as a little boy just soaking in all the sounds, sights, and smells.

“You’re wandering down beautiful hallways or strolling through gardens, and you just get a sense of the design and the romance and the lifestyle.”

But the other part of Sutton’s upbringing was his mother’s ongoing struggle with mental illness. He didn’t know any other life, but suspected something was different at his home. “It made me an avid listener and observer,” says Sutton, qualities that serve him well in his work.

And there was something else he came to realize after years of therapy. “I could never heal her, so I’ve been trying to heal everybody else through design,” he says.

His first foray into design came in high school when a teacher recognized a natural talent in his architectural drafting class. After a summer program at Harvard called Career Discovery, Sutton headed to Carnegie Mellon University to study architecture.

“I did really, really well there,” says Sutton. He was so immersed in his studies he would keep a sleeping bag under his drafting table so he didn’t need to waste any time walking back to his dorm to sleep. “I just wanted to get all this design out. Like, if you talk to any artists, they’ll tell you that they have this overwhelming need to get it out. And I had that.”

After graduation the job offers rolled in. Sutton didn’t want to go back home to New York, so he figured Washington, D.C., was the next best option—close enough to visit his family but “far enough away that I can make my own path.”

But he didn’t feel a connection to the city when he visited. One of the firms pitching Sutton mentioned their headquarters were in Baltimore—“just an hour up the road,” they told him. Sutton went to take a look.

“I had just spent four years of my life in Pittsburgh, which is just like Baltimore. It’s a working-class city of neighborhoods. And so, I saw something very familiar, and I thought it was charming. And I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a year.’ That was 1985.”

He lasted at the firm for nine months, but hated how corporate it felt, so he switched to a smaller agency, Robert Kaplan & Associates. Within three years, he was a partner.

“I was gung-ho about it, but I started getting a little disillusioned on the architecture piece, because I would design these houses, and then they would hand it off to some interior designer whose vision was completely left field of what I thought the project wanted to be,” says Sutton.

And so, he began adding interiors to his architectural projects. “That was the first time that I started to realize that there’s a whole story here about the people that are living in these houses that need to be crafted and curated as a whole,” he says. He found that he was drawn to the more human aspect of interior design.

“I think that this is going to be an unpopular thing to say, but I think it’s true that most architects have to disassociate a little bit from the owner and think a little bit more abstractly than someone in the interior design business,” he says. “We really focus on lifestyle, and how are people going to live in these spaces and have meals and entertain and raise their children.”

For Sutton, architecture was about order and structure, but design was about living and connection—and he craved the latter. So, he officially switched from architecture to interior design.

“I approach each project like a story that’s waiting to be told,” says Sutton, who has truly leaned into the idea of storytelling through design. (His second book is due out next year.) With every client he asks about their “hopes, dreams, and aspirations” and couples that with the house’s energy—“that genius loci,” he says referring to the protective spirit of a place. It sounds a little woo-woo until you see the unbelievable spaces he’s created that are luxurious yet comfortable.

“It’s not surprising that my childhood was in palaces, restaurants, and hotels, and the three things that I do are luxury residences, restaurants, and hotels,” he says.

He attributes a lot of that success to staying firmly planted in Baltimore. “If I had gone to New York, my career probably would have started faster, but look at all the opportunities [Baltimore] gave me,” he says, mentioning Pazo, his first restaurant design collaboration with Foreman Wolf. That place had a festive decadence, a far cry from other bars and restaurants in the city, says Sutton.

When he first started, he had to “smuggle design in the projects” because Baltimore was so conservative. He designed the entire Pendry Hotel for Kevin Plank and penned the vision statement for Port Covington, one of the city’s newest developments. He has now designed countless restaurants with Atlas Restaurant Group, too.

“What sets Patrick apart is how well-traveled he is,” says Alex Smith, Atlas’ president and CEO. “He’s seen so many different concepts through his travels around the world, and he brings that global perspective into his work. He’s not just focused on one aspect, like fabric or décor—he thinks about the entire experience. From lighting to candles to artwork, he creates an immersive environment that feels cohesive and thoughtful.”

Clients also hire him because he gets what restaurants and hotels have to do—it’s about the immediate wow. “You’re designing for a shorter period of time,” says Sutton. “So, it’s kind of like, if you’re a guy, and you walk into a bar and it’s dimly lit, you see this hot, beautiful woman at the bar, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’d love to spend a night with that person,’ but you don’t necessarily want to marry them.”

There’s a different design aesthetic when you are capturing someone’s attention for a few hours or days verses day in and day out. “So, in a restaurant or hotel, there’s more eyeliner, you’re really pumping up the volume…in a residence, you’re creating a background for life.”

He smiles. He loves good metaphor almost as much as he hates the word legacy, a word often used to describe his body of work.

“It sounds a little haughty to me. I don’t even know what that means.” But he understands how lucky he is to still be busy, relevant, and even revered 30 years into a career—and as much as he loves the big, glitzy projects, he’ll never stop designing people’s homes.

“You know I’m going from Pazo to the Pendry to writing this vision brief for an entire community, but meanwhile, like my day-to-day, I’m picking out the trim that goes on the edge of a drapery.”

Two ends of the spectrum, but all important. Thirty years of hard work and therapy have gotten him to a great place.

“I became a happier person. I calmed down. I had nothing left to prove,” says Sutton.

He also finds joy in mentoring the next generation of designers. “I can move from being quarterback to coach, and I think that’s fulfilling.”

You can spot a project by Surrounded By Color, an interior and color creative studio, from a mile away.

The rooms are rich, layered, bright, fun, happy, sophisticated, and tasteful—unlikely contrasts that often work together in surprising ways. Robin Edlow Heller and Jen Levy, the duo behind Surrounded By Color, are the living, breathing version of that contrast.

“That’s why Robin and I are a good partnership—because I love neutrals, and I love simplicity and restraint,” says Levy. “Robin is more of a maximalist in that sense.”

Heller, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the great room of her dazzling midcentury-modern rancher, laughs. “I’m like, you want one side table—what about four?”

The company name doesn’t mean they only come in and overly saturate the house in color (though they certainly wouldn’t be opposed to that)—“but I really think that it comes back to the definition of what our brand is,” says Heller. “It doesn’t just mean hues on the wall. It’s really about surrounding yourself with things…”

She trails off and Levy jumps in: “A level of joy.”

That’s how the two are—finishing each other’s sentences and respecting what each brings to the team. There’s a magnetism between them. They grew up nearby each other, but Heller, 41, and Levy, 35, didn’t meet until last spring, when Heller politely stalked and wooed Levy into joining her fledging business.

It’s hard to say no to Heller, who oozes charisma and vivacity, a combination that’s always served her well. After graduating from McDonogh, she headed to New York University to study poetry. (“I don’t know what my parents were thinking,” she deadpans.) Her plan was always to return to Maryland, but she “got sucked into New York.”

After graduation in 2000, she was doing public relations for Rolling Stone and then Lucky magazine before pivoting to J.Crew and helping with their launch of Madewell. Then, needing a change, she moved to Los Angeles “for a few years” but ended up meeting her husband, Noni, through a bunch of mutual friends. They bought a fixer-upper home in Los Angeles and then grew out of it. (They now have three boys.) And then they bought another one—which also needed major renovations.

And Heller loved it. “I was doing all the design stuff,” she says. She made mood boards and picked out the tile materials and found the painters. And she sort of found herself in the process. “A lot of moms can relate to this, but I just was like, ‘Who am I?’ I was such a career woman. And then I was just, like, a mom. It felt really weird for many years. I had no creative outlet and I’m super creative. I’ve always done artistic things and I just felt really dulled.”

The renovation brought her endless joy. She got her shine back.

“It was just so incredibly rejuvenating and life-affirming. And I loved it to the point where I thought this could be my job,” she says.

In 2020, when they decided they wanted to be closer to Heller’s extended family, they moved back to Baltimore. They bought their house on 2.6 acres near Lake Roland—after only a virtual visit. And yes, it gave Heller a chance to rev up again with a new project.

“It didn’t need very much, but it really wasn’t entirely our aesthetic,” she says. And then her sister “hired her” to design a new bathroom, and then her friend needed a whole house renovation, and word continued to spread. “Very quickly, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I have a business.’ So, I opened an LLC and a bank account, and I was just kind of running around. But having truly the greatest time and learning along the way,” Heller says. “There’s a lot of things I knew I didn’t know—but why I think it felt so right in Baltimore is because it’s a really comfortable space.”

Baltimore, both Heller and Levy say, creates room for all its makers, builders, and designers. Levy, a little more buttoned-up but whip smart, studied art, sculpture, and art history at University of Colorado Boulder, and ended up back in Baltimore after a long career in New York. Her first Manhattan job was at Bloomingdale’s on the sales floor selling denim, but it’s where she learned about visual merchandising. (Though technically her first official design project was her bat mitzvah.)

She interned for the visual merchandising director at Stella McCartney and then got her first big break, at minimalist clothing brand Vince during its heyday. That led to a big job at SMCP, a French holding company specializing in ready-to-wear luxury, and then eventually Levy opened her own firm.

In 2019 she was hired by Pop Up Grocer, a hip, traveling pop-up grocery store that showcases innovative brands in the natural food and beverage sector. She worked as lead designer and project manager for the brand’s first six pop-ups in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Brooklyn, and Chicago, and designed the permanent flagship location in New York.

But it was during COVID, trapped in her Brooklyn apartment, that Levy felt the pull back to her hometown of Baltimore. In the summer of 2020, she headed home for what she thought might be a temporary stay. “I very quickly realized that I was here to stay and loved everything that Baltimore had to offer me,” she says.

Four months later, she bought a house in Hampden, painted the outside pink, and Domino magazine ran a feature on it. It was her signature style—white floors, pops of color, chic but lived in. (Levy and her husband, Jack Rutka, are now renovating a home in Stevenson.)

“This is kind of important to the story,” says Levy. “Like I’m famous for my all-white spaces. I painted my floors white in my Brooklyn apartment. I painted floors white at the Pop Up Grocer—it was all over the Internet. And then I found my house that I bought in Baltimore, the floors were already white, so it became a part of my identity. But my houses were still really colorful.”

That was what attracted the two designers to each other: the place where their Venn diagram overlaps—but also where it doesn’t.

“We push each other out of our comfort zones,” Levy says. “Also, we can always cater to what the client really wants or needs. Because maybe I understand it better than Robin or vice versa. And we’re able to sort of like pivot in that way which I think is really lucky that we have that partnership.”

Levy is always with her laptop, organized and ready to work anywhere—a car, a plane, a coffee shop. Heller likes to be seated at her desk to answer emails. She loves sketching ideas and shocking their contractors with the boldness of their ideas. Before Levy, she kept track of expenses with the Notes app on her phone. Now there are spreadsheets.

“I think when we met, Surrounded By Color really became Surrounded By Color,” says Heller. “Jen just added an element of organization and operation and go-getter-ness that I feel like I didn’t have. Maybe in a silo of one person working in a business it’s hard to have that. She brought a real nice level of intensity that helped us really grow and be way less overwhelmed.”

The past year has brought some dream projects locally but also in Atlanta, Athens, Los Angeles, and New York. The two were named Rising Stars by Baltimore magazine’s Home & Design Awards and Domino magazine just featured an incredible project they headed up in Mt. Washington along with Ziger|Snead Architects and Greenleaf Construction.

Heller approaches each job like a birthday kid in front of a pile of wrapped gifts. Eager, excited, and ready to get to work. “It has to be fun or don’t do it,” she tells their clients. “It’s financially a burden and I don’t want to take that away from anyone because spending money is hard and stressful, but this process should be fun, because you’re creating things that you want to bring you joy.”

They also find that many people think interior designers are “not approachable, or it’s scary or intimidating,” says Heller. “I mean I’m sure it can be, but our experience is not that.”

She flashes a big smile, her eyes shining behind her clear frames. “We just want to collaborate and make people’s homes happy.”

Baby, it’s (getting) cold outside. But if you look around your home and find that the inside is less than delightful, might we suggest using the winter months to tackle a few home projects that will refresh your space and transform it into a hygge haven?

Whether you restore an old piece of furniture or play with removable stick-on wallpaper (yes, that’s a thing), there are many low stress updates you can make during these drab winter months that you’ll enjoy all year long.

√ ORGANIZATION IS KEY

Once your creative juices are flowing, you’ll want to start your projects right away. But experts say that’s putting the cart before the horse.

“People tend to jump right into redecorating because it’s fun, but organizing needs to happen first,” advises Cindy Bernstein, who runs the Pikesville-based organizing business Aim 4 Order. “Clutter creates feelings of stress and being overwhelmed, while organization leads to a sense that you’re on top of things in your life,” she shares. The anxiety comes in part from the cognitive dissonance many of us experience when we know we need to get organized but put off doing it. “It’s a nagging stressor, making us feel guilty for not doing something we know we need to do,” she says.

Tempting as it may be, Bernstein tells her clients not to start an organizing project by simply running out and buying bins from Target. Containers have a place, but the initial step needs to involve sorting—putting similar items together, then storing or getting rid of what you no longer need. People often realize that they have an abundance of mugs crammed in a kitchen or unworn jewelry muddling the top of a bedroom dresser.

To determine what to remove, ask yourself: Do I use it? Would I buy this again? If you feel remorse at getting rid of something, store it, but don’t keep it in storage forever.

“Think of your basement or storage area as a ‘marinade box’ or a place to stow your stuff while you decide whether to keep it,” Bernstein says. “In a year, if you haven’t touched the items, and they hold no sentimental value, purge them.”

√ REDUCE, REUSE, REPURPOSE 

Also think outside of the box with organizational systems. You can purchase and install a readymade system for your closet or entryway, but you can also repurpose objects found at home or bought second-hand.

Mark Foster, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Second Chance, an architectural salvage warehouse in South Baltimore, says he’s continually astounded by the creativity of people repurposing salvaged materials for practical and decorative purposes.  “Social media is ripe with ideas for repurposing, and people are doing all kinds of interesting things that ultimately add character to their homes,” Foster says. “Because of the patina of age, these items can’t be replicated and are made with a bygone craftsmanship that buyers struggle to find these days.”

Bob Baxter, who owns Clifton Upholstery and Design in Lauraville, attests to seeing renewed interest in repurposing older furniture, too.

“People are starting to realize that older furniture lasts longer and is crafted with higher-quality materials, like hardwood, instead of a composite, and springs, instead of foam rubber,” Baxter says. “They’re buying furniture secondhand or inheriting it from family, and they’re bringing it in to get reupholstered in a fresh, modern look.”

Like organizing, reupholstering a chair or sofa is a great project to take on this winter—and can add vitality to an older piece or even an entire room. When you take in a piece for reupholstering, you’ll need to select a fabric. Options abound but thinking about your needs can help you narrow the selection. For instance, if you have pets or kids, consider a durable fabric with a higher thread count.

“Furniture fashion has a lifespan of about five years that is basically dictated by color,” says Baxter, whose family has run the upholstery business since 1915. “Some fabrics, like velvet and chenille, were in style 100 years ago and will be in style 100 years from now,” says Baxter, who admits to encouraging his clients to choose timeless over fashionable. But he carries the full spectrum of options, from textured linens to printed geometric patterns, and acknowledges the fun of using fabric to express personal style.

√ BRING ON THE WALLPAPER

While reupholstering can add flair to your wintertime abode, it’s not the only way to achieve fashion and hygge, the Scandinavian word for comfort and coziness.

“Wallpaper has made a major comeback and can transform a space,” says Erin Friedel, who owns and operates Friedel Design, an interior design business in Baltimore. From metallic patterns that reflect light to grass cloths that add texture, wallpaper selections are endless and, if you go with a peel and stick, easy to apply. “If you’re not ready to wallpaper a larger room, start with a powder room or accent wall, like the space behind the headboard in your bedroom or a wall in your entryway,” Friedel advises. An added bonus for a playroom or music room, wallpaper made of natural fibers like grass cloth and seagrass also absorb sound.

Right now, patterns and a style known as maximalism are in vogue, Friedel shares. There was a time when the only way you could flaunt your “good taste” was through extreme minimalism. But thankfully, those days are over. “Maximalist interiors involve decorating to the max and an eclectic layering of textures, colors, patterns, and, mostly, personality,” Friedel says.

Patterned wallpapers with, say, exploding paisleys or florals can contribute to a maximalist décor, while solid-color wallpapers like a black grass cloth can create a sleek, modern look. And if you’re not into wallpaper, you can transform your space with paint.

“Trending paint colors are warmer earth tones, often with sophisticated undertones of gray or green,” Friedel shares. If your room doesn’t get much light, the biggest mistake you can make is to paint it in a light color, thinking it will look lighter. Instead, “paint it in a rich color like terracotta, deep blue, dark brown, or a deep, sage green to give your space more atmosphere,” Friedel says.

√ LAYER THE LIGHTING 

Friedel views atmosphere as key to a cozy, inviting interior and considers lighting the most critical component. Many people overlook lighting, and “if it’s not done well, you can be sitting in someone’s living room and feel like you’re in an operating room,” she says.

When helping clients, Friedel pays attention to three layers of lighting. “Ambient lighting is the general light illuminating your entire space, while task lighting provides direct light for tasks like reading and sewing, and accent lighting highlights things like art and plants,” Friedel explains. In a living room, for example, you might have ambient overhead or recessed lighting and lamps, along with a task light for reading and an accent light on a bookcase or vase.

Lighting over a table can really set the mood, Friedel adds. To make your space feel more formal, opt for a light fixture with crystals or something metallic, and to make it more casual, consider bare bulbs or round globes.

“Brushed brass and matte black are big now in light fixtures and come in all kinds of configurations, as are single, straight bars of LED lights,” Friedel says. “It’s a question of your personal style and whether you want a statement piece or something more subdued.”

√ GREENLIGHT THE GREENERY

As you freshen up your home for the chilly months ahead, don’t forget indoor plants. They’re one of the least expensive ways to add warmth. “Research shows that plants can calm us, lower our stress, and even boost our focus and productivity,” says Lisa Heckman, who owns Plantacea in Federal Hill. She attributes these positive effects to biofilia, or our human drive to connect with nature. Especially in winter, when we hunker down indoors and spend less time outside, plants can satisfy our innate need to be close to nature. They also give us something to care for and nurture, which Heckman says many of her customers came to realize and need during the COVID-19 quarantine.

While plants can intimidate many, Heckman carries plenty that require little maintenance. Zamioculcas zamiifolia, known as the “ZZ plant,” and sansieviera, known as the “snake plant” can both survive in little light and only need watering once a month. Other hardy plants that tolerate low or indirect light, yet require weekly watering, are pothos plants and philodendrons. For spaces with direct sun, try hoyas, succulents, and cacti.

“Regardless of the plant you choose, watering guidelines depend on your home’s humidity,” Heckman says. To determine the moisture level of a plant, “insert your finger or even a chopstick to the bottom and read it like a thermometer,” she says.

Plants, of course, can do more than add an aura of calm to your home—they can also add style. Plantacea carries stark white and black ceramic pots, along with those featuring geometric designs, for a thoroughly modern look. Or you can get playful with the shop’s hanging baskets woven with natural fibers or wall-mounted pieces made from barnwood.

You can also let nature do its thing: climb. At Heckman’s house in the lush Greenspring Valley, she sat a pot of Rhaphidophora tetrasperma—known as the mini monstera—at the base of her stairs and watched in awe as the plant’s green vines wound their way in and out of her cable railing staircase all the way to the second floor.

“There really is no more beautiful art form or home décor than nature,” she says, “and nothing that can add more warmth to a home.”

And in the cold winter months, what more can we ask for?

When Brittany and Joseph Wight first saw Whitehall Mill near the Jones Falls in Hampden a few years ago, the sister-and-brother team were thrilled about locating their business, Wight Tea Co., in the planned food hall. “We knew we wanted to be there,” Brittany says. “We could see the outcome, but we weren’t good at putting it together.”

But they knew just the person who could help them navigate the design and construction in the unfinished warehouse: interior architect Tiffanni Reidy. They had met Reidy, a tea lover, when they were promoting their custom-blended teas at local pop-ups. “She helped us to create a modern space that was trendy and fit the aesthetic of our demographics,” Brittany says.

There were some hiccups along the way when the Wights weren’t able to secure a loan in time for their shop. “We didn’t have a lot of collateral at the time,” Brittany admits. But Reidy was able to design the 300-square-foot space to accommodate the siblings’ expenses. “I always have to think, ‘How can I maximize the potential of the space and stay within my clients’ budget?’” Reidy says. “We worked together in figuring out how to get it done.”

The Wights had to ditch plans for a tasting bar and a mural, but today, the tea stall is an oasis of calm, with a wood-slat front counter, deep-blue accent wall, and strategically placed green plants that complement the array of specialty teas. “It is exciting and beautiful,” Brittany says. “Tiffanni was a wonderful guide.”

Reidy, 39, who opened her business Reidy Creative in 2018, has carved out a niche for her design work. As an interior architect, she works as a conduit between her clients and architects, contractors, and tradespeople. “It’s hard to explain what I do,” she admits. “So much media show design as decorative. What I do is architecture.”

She guides customers through a maze of decisions that can include where walls and built-in furniture should go and what paints, tiles, and flooring should be used. “Anything where you would need a contractor,” she says.

Originally, Reidy was on a different career path. She majored in computer graphics and photography at Syracuse University in New York. “I wanted to go to work for Pixar,” she says, spurred by her fascination with the computer-animated movie Toy Story. But while Reidy was in college, she realized she had another driving interest. “Any time I was going through emotional turmoil, I would move my furniture around,” she says, which led to her constantly redecorating her dorm room. “By junior year, someone said, ‘Why don’t you do interiors? Your room is really decorated.’”

Not wanting to switch majors so late in her studies, she hoped she could translate her graphics training into interior design. When she was unable to find a job, she moved to Florida, where her parents were living.

Reidy, who now lives in the Hamilton-Lauraville area with her husband, Mike, and 5-year-old daughter, Autumn, grew up in Harford County and went to Roland Park Country School in north Baltimore. She quickly found out that “Florida was not for me,” she says, though she stayed long enough to meet her husband and work at a furniture store, where she arranged furnishings into showroom vignettes.

Inspired to follow her design dreams, she moved to Silver Spring to attend grad school at George Washington University in D.C., earning a master’s degree in interior design in 2010. While in school, she worked on an independent project that involved turning a building in a food desert into a neighborhood hub with a marketplace offering fresh produce, a community garden, and artist galleries. “It really gave me a passion for community and thinking maybe residential design wasn’t all I wanted to do,” she says.

But that doesn’t mean she has entirely stopped doing home design. Reidy is still very much involved in helping homeowners make the most of their spaces. Lynne Plauson, who runs Arthaus Baker, a home-based, gluten-free bakery, sought out Reidy when she was renovating her 1000-plus-square-foot row home in Hampden. “It was clear from Tiffanni’s Instagram account and website that our aesthetics meshed,” Plauson says. “She was more than a partner and a guide. I think of her as a design mentor.”

Reidy describes her aesthetic as “colorful, modern, and vintage.” “It’s really about my appreciation for clean lines. There’s not a lot of embellishment or fluff,” she says. “I definitely gravitate closer to mid century [design] and Art Nouveau. It pushes me in the direction of wanting things to be classic, as opposed to something that is more trendy.”

Reidy was able to work with Plauson’s builder on design challenges, such as where the kitchen sink should be placed, moving the master bedroom door, and how to set up the bathroom in the diminutive home, which was completely gutted.

“She navigates difficult times with a lovely, calm focus and gracious presence,” Plauson says. “What I appreciate about her is that she is always the most creative person in the room but also the most focused…and is the first to solve seemingly intractable problems.”

When Reidy works with clients, she meets with them to find out their ideas and intentions and then comes up with conceptual boards and 3D models to guide the project. “A lot of my job is education,” she says. “There should be reasons we’re making design decisions, not just that it looks pretty. It should have meaning behind it.”

Her background in computer graphics and photography often comes into play in her work. She encourages her commercial clients to determine what their branding is, so they can decide on what kind of design they want.

“The more they know about branding the more I can bring that to life in their space,” says Reidy, who has experience with logo and website design. She credits photography with giving her insight into the composition of a space. “You want to capture it from many angles, especially when you’re in a restaurant space. You don’t want people to think it looked great when they walked in, but once they sat down, it’s [just] okay.”

Reidy is currently working with Chelsea Gregoire, the managing partner at the yet-to-open Church bar in Old Goucher. Reidy describes the multi-room space as a “long, older home with front patios, decks, a vestibule, bar, kitchen, and a main area” with each sector having its own feeling and mood. “Chelsea is my ideal client,” Reidy says. “Chelsea knows what their business is and what the brand is.”

Gregoire didn’t want to discuss specific details about the layout and decor, but says that Reidy is helping with finishes, furniture, and designing a space that “fits our concept and the spirit we want to create for the community,” a place where people will gather and feel welcome and comfortable.

“I’m really thrilled about Tiffanni being part of Church,” Gregoire says. “At the end of the day, there’s no one more talented for this project. She goes above and beyond what is expected.”

Reidy knew from the time she was a child that she was interested in art. “That was the thing that really made me happy: drawing and painting,” she says. While she says her two younger sisters are also artistic—one is a musician; the other dabbled in visual arts—she notes there is no one in her family who was an artist role model.

“I think it’s more an influence of being given the space to create versus saying, ‘I want to draw like this person or paint like this person’ as a child,” she says.

Reidy is an avid farmers market-goer, supporting the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly, the Baltimore Farmers Market & Bazaar, and the Hamilton Farmers Market near her home. “My neighborhood is like a mini-Baltimore,” she says, referring to the many restaurants and businesses located in Lauraville-Hamilton.

Favorite spots include Red Canoe Cafe and Silver Queen Cafe for dining out, Walther Gardens for plants and crafty things, and Cloudy Donut Co. for vegan pastries.

When she’s not working, she maintains a large organic garden, where she grows eggplants, peppers, squash, cucumbers, beans, blueberries, and flowers. “We eat a lot of what we grow and give away produce,” she says. “I live in my garden all year.” This summer, she made a “tremendous amount of pickles,” she says.

Reidy follows her own design mantra at her 1920s home, keeping the public spaces minimal, though she admits her office is cluttered with work-related and other paraphernalia, from boxes of tile samples and paintswatch books to gardening seeds and props like glassware and gold flatware. “There is always chaos in the room,” she admits.

She prefers “simple colors” such as green, gray, black, blue, and purple for her house. “Paint is easy to change,” she says. She doesn’t use a lot of patterns except for accents like wallpapering and tiles and is a big fan of African mudcloth with its intricate designs.

“IT’S REALLY ABOUT MY APPRECIATION FOR CLEAN LINES. THERE’S NOT A LOT OF FLUFF OR EMBELLISHMENT,” SAYS REIDY.

A recent design project was particularly near and dear to her heart. Reidy designed a playroom for her daughter when she was 3, detailing the project in her blog, “The Tea,” on her website. “She can go in there and make a mess,” Reidy says. “If we need to have company over, we can shut the door.”

The room’s walls are painted a periwinkle with ample space for hanging Autumn’s artwork, while a colorful rug in periwinkle, orange, and blue makes the space pop. There’s a kid’s kitchen set, art tables, and a pillow-filled seating area.

“We tried to upcycle things and not spend too much when we thought she really wasn’t going to keep it for a long time,” Reidy says. To fashion the creative play zone, Reidy shopped at Target, Ikea, HomeGoods, and Burlington. “It screams kid space but remains modern, and, thankfully, not full of primary colors,” she says.

This is another one of Reidy’s talents. The inveterate bargain-shopper and collector actually likes to find ways to save money. “I love thrifting,” she says. And not just for her own clients. So far, her own keepsakes include about 25 teapots and several matching cups; more than 100 Pez dispensers, which she stores in a box; a growing batch of enamel pins; and all manner of tin cans with food-related themes. She’s also known for her exuberant earrings.

“It’s great,” she says. “But sometimes it’s a problem where to store them.” As such, Reidy can relate to her clients’ storage needs. “Through Tiffanni, I found Mathew Laflamme at Robbins Custom Builders, and together we created the kitchen of my dreams in an extremely tight space,” says Hampden homeowner Plauson. “Perhaps my favorite discussions with her were about paint, wallpaper, and lighting choices. She has such a wonderful eye.”

Reidy often develops close relationships with her customers. “I get to know my clients so well,” she says. “I’m about building a sense of friendship.”

One of those friends is Amanda Mack, who owns the bakery Crust by Mack with her husband, Jarrod, in Whitehall Market. “I met Tiffanni through Instagram, and we met at a coffee shop before I had a storefront,” says Mack. “She was trying to figure out how to get into designing small businesses and focusing on the food and beverage industry.”

When Mack decided to open a shop in the former mill, she turned to Reidy for advice. “I like her aesthetic and attention to detail,” Mack says. “She knew the history of my mission in Baltimore. She was involved from start to finish.”

The outcome is a gleaming sweets shop with a pristine, white quartz countertop and dusty-rose paint accents to showcase Mack’s baked goods, which often sell out early in the day. “I’m over the moon with the result,” Mack says. “Tiffanni helped personalize the store, so things would flow well in the 453-square-foot space. She helped make the space feel like you were going to an intimate setting instead of an 18,000-square-foot market.”

Reidy’s seemingly total takeover of Whitehall Mill continues. She was also involved in another Mack project there, a 3,000-square-foot event space called Layers the Loft, where she created architectural drawings and 3D models as well as recommending finishes and fixtures. She also worked with owner Jasmine Norton on the design of The Urban Burger Bar in the mill market. Outside the market, she was instrumental in designing the recently opened Vegan Juiceology, a storefront on Howard Street in the city’s Market Center-Bromo Arts District.

Though quiet by nature, Reidy is a fierce advocate for her charges. “She is sweet and introverted, but when it comes to business, she is a monster,” Mack says. “She makes sure her clients get what they need.”

When the coronavirus pandemic lockdown started in spring of last year, professionals in the architecture, interior design, and construction world braced for a major drop in business. But after an initial slowdown, most report not just being busy, but overwhelmed.

That’s because, for those people with the wherewithal, it was time for the big home renovation.

“It went crazy,” says Gavin Scherr, president of Scherr Contracting. “Most people have never spent that much time in their home before. For the first time, people weren’t just thinking about their house aesthetically, but asking, ‘How do we all function in this house together on a permanent basis?’”

In the warm summer months, spending on exterior projects soared as homeowners heeded advice to limit entertaining to small groups outside, escalating demand for decks, patios, fences, and even pool houses. Plenty of people also caught up on deferred maintenance—the broken door or crooked gutter that had been a mere nuisance pre-pandemic became an intolerable eyesore. The demand, combined with COVID-related supply-chain challenges, was so intense that it created a lumber shortage, raising prices 170 percent, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.

And once some schools announced they would not return in-person, the home-improvement people got even more emails and calls.

“There was a huge increase in basement, kitchen, and even bathroom jobs,” says Scherr. “People were looking at any space that wasn’t being used muched, even a screened porch that could be enclosed into an office or a recreational space, as everyone was trying to find more room.”

And with the movement toward work-from-home, as well as school-from-home, the importance of a home-based office space took on new meaning. With families suddenly flung together, it wasn’t uncommon to have two parents working from the dining-room table, older children doing Zoom school at a kitchen counter, and younger children suddenly in need of a school space that could be overseen by an adult. Home became loud and crowded.

“People would tell us their dining room table was filled with their third grader’s schoolwork when they were trying to work,” says Gina Adams, of Delbert Adams Construction. “So we found ways to make life easier for them within their home. Office nooks were a solution—a desk in an area that may not have had one before was an option.”

Adams says they tucked workspaces into architectural niches, landings, and unused bedrooms. One of the cleverest solutions they created was a “Murphy bed”-style desk that could be pulled out when needed and stored behind a wall after office hours.

“Everything was being used by more people, so there was a lot more wear and tear, particularly in the kitchen,” she adds. “We made changes to accommodate more users.”

Not every change was driven by practicality, Adams says. Some people simply wanted to make cosmetic changes, including things like soaking tubs, a touch of luxury that’s private at a time when privacy is in short supply.

Indeed, with multiple family members on Zoom, bickering kids, and dishes from three meals a day piling up, lockdown life can become unbearable. So perhaps that open floor-plan that was so fabulous when you bought the house becomes a lot less appealing.

This, says Sheryl T. McLean, principal of McLean & Tircuit Design, has compelled some clients to take a hard look at the rooms they rarely use, especially the dining room.

“Suddenly they needed that space that they only use at Christmas and Thanksgiving,” she says. “Many clients put up doors and added built-ins to their dining rooms and sunrooms—and those changes are permanent.”

Another design change she believes has staying power is the shift from the mudroom being a dumping ground to an official “receiving station.”

“In the past, the mudroom is where you took off your shoes and left the backpacks,” she says. “During the pandemic, it became a staging area for receiving groceries and deliveries to be wiped down, a room that could be disinfected…I think sanitation is burned into our brains now, and the expansion of the mudroom works well, is a good idea, and is a way to further protect your home.”

Those lucky enough to have outdoor space expanded into their yards, not just with patios and decks, but also with actual structures such as accessible dwelling units, “She Sheds,” and tiny houses. These flex spaces could be used as an office, quarantine quarters, a homeschool meeting spot, or another place for some sanity-saving privacy.

“Little personalized nooks have become so important, and I think that’s a trend that will stay,” says McLean. “Clients are looking for a space away.”

If there’s one lasting impact that Ashley Ingraham hopes to see from the pandemic, it’s that people will think before they acquire more belongings. As owner of Home Perspective, which does home organization, estate cleaning, and moving assistance, she’s been booked solid since June as homeowners came to terms with all their stuff.

“I got so many calls from people saying, ‘I’m so overwhelmed, I need to get organized,’” she says. “After two or more months of quarantine, everyone is looking at their space differently and re-evaluating it. There’s a calmness that comes from organization and people are looking to create home spaces that are stress-free.”

“People realized they had too much stuff they aren’t using and not enough of the things they did need,” she says. “If you made it through three months of quarantine and never baked bread, I think it’s safe to say you don’t need the bread maker.”

And then there’s the whole remote job thing: Ingraham says that having a long-term solution for working from home is very different than having a desk at home where you maybe sat occasionally to pay some bills or do the taxes. Certainly no one was set up for months of home school, either. Efficiency, storage, clarity—these needs became top of mind.

Her clients now also want organized pantries and storage areas so they can see exactly what they have and what they need to put in their Instacart—or to make that trip to the store as quick as possible. Clients are willing to jettison the things they aren’t using to find room for the extra toilet paper or the craft supplies. They’ve faced the areas of the home they could once avoid and reclaimed them for schoolrooms or for privacy.

Ingraham, too, has seen the impacts of social-media scrolling.

“I have so many clients that are younger than what I normally have who have spent six months binge-watching The Home Edit on Netflix and scrolling though Instagram and now want aspirational closets,” she says.

At some point, about 660 million vaccine doses from now, some parts of life will return to normal. Still, professionals believe many of the impacts COVID made on home design will last.

“I think everything is going to be different,” says Ingraham. “People see that working from home is a viable option and people have re-evaluated the way they live.”

Scherr says that after months of isolation, people want to gather again at home.

“We’re seeing growth in additions because people want a home that’s more versatile, that has places for family to stay and spend time together,” he says.

Hopefully, the coronavirus pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime event, all our designers agree, but it will be a while before we shake off the concern that something else could be just around the corner. Regardless of what the “new normal” is, we’ve forever deepened our relationship with our homes.

“People have been walking around asleep in their own homes,” says Sheryl McLean. “Now they’re aware of what they have.”

Laura Hodges is passionate about her two greatest accomplishments—being a mom and running a design firm. They weave together like a beautiful tapestry—each satisfying on their own, but even more beautiful when intertwined.

Her business, Laura Hodges Studio, a boutique interior-design firm, and Domain by Laura Hodges Studio, her home décor shop, share a storefront along Catonsville’s Main Street—not far from where Hodges lives with her husband and two sons.

Hodges was born in northern England (to a British mother and Jamaican father) and lived there until she was five—you can still catch a slight accent when she speaks—but grew up in Montgomery County before heading to New York for college to study business, followed by the New York School of Interior Design. Hodges interned for award-winning designer Jamie Drake and worked as a design assistant for Thomas Jayne of the renowned Jayne Design Studio. “But I always knew I wanted to do my thing,” she says.

That entrepreneurial spirit was kicking in, even when she was a design novice. One of Hodges’ first solo projects was a client she found on Craigslist. The woman was looking for a trade—someone willing to help design her Manhattan apartment without charge, but in return the designer would have free rein.

“I could get my feet wet with her,” Hodges says. “She gave me complete creative freedom and the freedom to not worry about getting things wrong or all the liability when someone is paying you.”

They crafted a headboard together and shopped the local flea markets. She loved working one-on-one with a client outside the design firm. “I definitely want to do this on my own,” she remembers thinking. The end result was a happy client. Twelve years later and “we’re still friends,” she says.

In 2011—while living in Jersey City—Hodges had her first son. “I wanted to stay home with him for the first few years,” she says. And the baby made her realize she “wanted to be closer to family.”

Having grown up next door to her grandparents, she wanted the same for her children, and so the family moved back to Maryland—this time, Baltimore County. A second son followed, and Hodges relished her days as a stay-at-home mom. But she still had that interior designer itch, and the need to start creating again was strong.

“I didn’t want to jump straight into it,” says Hodges. But as her younger son started preschool and she was able to carve out more time, she dipped her toe into small projects here or there. “My first design project in Baltimore was from a mom’s group on Facebook,” she says.

Someone had requested a recommendation for an interior designer. A friend replied with her name. And soon she realized her limited free hours—nights and weekends when her husband was home and able to watch the kids—were actually an asset.

“Sure, I can meet you on Saturday at 2 p.m.,” she would say. Clients felt like she was being super accommodating. She’d piece together 15 hours a week she could dedicate to her part-time gig. (Plus, some evenings staying up until 2 a.m. and lots of weekends.) Not only was her availability influenced by being a parent, her design style was, too.

“I’m always thinking of the lifestyle of our clients, not just the aesthetics of the design,” says Hodges. “As a mom myself, I’m very aware of the practicalities of design planning, whether it’s the importance of organization, the durability of fabrics and finishes, or the ins and outs of balancing home life and work life.”

She also started to realize that interior design is not only about selling someone on your designs, but about selling them on yourself.

“You have to stand behind what you are coming up with and pitch it to them and make them see it in the same way you are seeing and imagining it,” she says.

Part of that is with renderings and drawings, she notes, but the other part is just being a good listener and knowing that your role sometimes extends beyond designer.

“There’s the sales part and the psychology part of it,” she says. “You have to have a really good connection with your clients. They have to trust you fully—because you’re spending all their money,” she adds with a laugh. “You’re also part marriage counselor because spouses want different things…you’re the middleman who has to make it all work.”

Two years ago, Hodges’ husband, Tim, left his job to come work with her and handle the business and operations side of the company so she could focus solely on clients and design. “We treat it like a third child,” says Hodges of their business.

Working with her husband is also a bonus for their clients, says Hodges. “I tell them, ‘You’re going to get a lot more time out of us.’”

It’s not unusual for Hodges to wake up in the morning and immediately ask her husband, “Do you remember the desk we ordered? Is it on the way?” she says. “He’s like, ‘I’m brushing my teeth—can you stop?’”

One of the big changes they were able to accomplish was putting Domain online. When they got word in 2019 that Hodges was being named a “Next Wave” designer (AKA rising star) by House Beautiful design magazine and that the shop was also getting a mention, they knew they needed to take things from just brick-and-mortar to e-commerce as well. The timing was oddly fortuitous. That was December—three months before the pandemic hit.

Domain is a “small but very curated collection of fair trade, sustainable, beautiful
items,” says Hodges. It’s a “representation of our design aesthetic.” Having a shop in addition to her design firm had always felt like a “pipe dream,” she says.

When they found and bought the Frederick Road place, with its big picture window, it was initially as an investment property to rent out to another retailer, but Hodges fell in love with the space. “If not now, when?” she thought. After all, the timing was right. Her boys were both in school full-time. Her parents lived across the street as extra support, and business was booming. She decided to take the plunge.

“It’s no longer an investment—it’s now a life change,” her husband told her.

The shop and her new design office opened in 2018—the same year Home & Design featured Hodges as one of their “Designers to Watch.” Currently, Domain does more online business than walk-ins. “It’s been great and unexpected.” And she relishes calling her local vendors and telling them, “I just sold a piece of your art to someone in California.”

When COVID-19 first hit, business ground to a halt. Everyone was scrambling to get groceries and toilet paper. No one was thinking about a full-house renovation in Hodges’ signature style—warm, tailored, layers with an international feel from fabrics, colors, and textures.

Eventually, when things started picking back up, clients were still worried about finances. Calls ranged from, “We’re going to hold off” to “The budget is a quarter of what it once was.” Hodges understood.

“We’re a luxury,” she says. Someone isn’t going to buy cheaper drywall, she explains, but perhaps they don’t need a headboard made of the finest fabric. But as everyone settled into the long-term realities of the pandemic, she started getting calls.

“Well, if we’re going to be home, we want it to be nicer,” people said. Hodges was happy to do her part for the economy. And the way she saw it, work for her company also meant work for local upholsters and contractors, furniture makers, and electricians. “A lot of people benefit from all those projects.”

It’s been a stellar year, work-wise, and she’s excited to see what 2021 will bring.

“As much as we loved the growth this past year, I don’t actually have a desire to have a big company,” says Hodges. “I love doing the design. I love the technical aspect of it. Not just managing other people’s work—but getting in there and doing the drawings and meeting with clients, selecting fabrics, and coming up with clever solutions for design and storage issues, and designing custom furniture and cabinetry.”

Says Hodges, “We’re a small studio, we’re a small shop. Right now—we’re good just where we are.”

If you’re at a cocktail party with Mariah Gillis, you will definitely not be the person with the most interesting job.

Gillis, a restorative painter, also worked in the greens department during all six seasons of House of Cards, the popular Netflix show filmed in and around Baltimore. That meant dealing with and creating the artificial plants and landscaping for shots, no matter the challenge. (Shooting in February for a scene that’s supposed to take place in July? Turning a construction landfill near Edgewood into New Mexico? No problem.)

Gillis, originally from Ithaca, New York, studied art at Towson University. And while she majored in painting, she also dabbled in sculpture and ceramics—which came in handy after graduation when she began building and painting sets for Center Stage, Everyman Theatre, and Olney Theatre Center. The gratification of doing something she loved was overwhelming. “To be able to find a job with creative fulfillment—it’s great.”

In 2002, she began working with Thomas Moore Studios, a design and architectural finishes firm. Suddenly, she found herself doing restorations inside countless historical buildings and homes.

“I love old buildings. I love architecture. And getting to be in some of these historic spaces is really cool. You get to see stuff that the public doesn’t get to see and get up in the ceilings and see how things are built—it’s just so fascinating to me.”

While working a job at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, Gillis found names etched into a surface dated 1859.

“It’s like finding a ghost. I can imagine them up there on a scaffold scratching this into wet plaster. If they had any idea that, 160 years after that, you’d have a crew of women up there in the ceiling finding this,” she says, laughing.

She has also spent years helping with the meticulous restoration project at the impressive Clifton Mansion, originally built in 1803 and purchased by Johns Hopkins in 1838. Now that Gillis and the rest of the crew—including two art conservators and three other restorative painters—have finished the dining room, Gillis is back on set. This time it’s for Showtime’s series pilot The President Is Missing, an adaptation of the novel by President Bill Clinton and James Patterson.

But she’s very happy to keep herself planted in both worlds. Recently, the Baltimore Builders Congress and Exchange, a trade organization that was founded in 1888, awarded Gillis the Master Craftsman’s Award—the first time in their history that a woman has received the lifetime achievement honor. At the ceremony, Gillis was thinking of her mom, who passed away in 2015.

“She always told this story. I was 4 or 5 and we came upon road construction, and the flag person was a woman. I looked out and said, ‘See, Mom. That’s a lady worker, and that’s always nice to see.’”

That night, Gillis held her award and thought, “See, Mom. That’s nice to see.”

HISTORICAL MUSINGS: The architecture [in Bolton Hill] is what first drew me in—I love these houses. The crazy thing is that this is the first block I ever walked in this neighborhood. I would kill for the blueprints of some of these houses because they’ve been changed so much.

EYE FOR DESIGN: I got into interior design when I was 10 or 12. I think it comes from my grandmother—she had stacks of interior-design magazines. My taste has changed over time, but my home growing up was so far from what I wanted that [dreaming of what my aesthetic could do] built up over time. Typically, for me, I work with whatever I’m interested in. I don’t try to fit into a taste.

CUT AND PASTE: I made the collage above the fireplace. For a long time, I was looking for a large piece to put there. Collages, for me, are like puzzles. I like art forms that require arranging: interior design, floral design. It takes the pressure off, I think, because I’m a perfectionist, so I like things I can move around. Even decorating my home, I go back and forth.

ONE FOR THE BOOKS: I had the bookcases custom-built for my first apartment from a guy on Etsy. I’ve been a reader all my life. Books were a luxury growing up. It was a dream to have a ton of books, and it’s been a lot of fun as an adult to see that come true. A lot have come from The Book Thing. I haven’t read all of them, especially the older books. Some aren’t well-written, but I’ve saved them for the art and design. That’s the fun, though. It’s like owning your own library. You can grab something you’ve never read. There’s no such thing as too many books.

LASTING COMFORTS: This blanket from the pre-Civil War era is actually the oldest thing in my place. It was a popular style and was actually used in the war. I started looking for them after I saw one in an interior-design magazine. I like the juxtaposition of something old and modern. They’re typically blue and white or red and white—occasionally they’ll be rainbow colors.

People can’t believe I use something this old. There’s something beautiful about something ser ving a purpose for that long, from the 1840s until now. I think people have more of this awareness now: to go back to well-made things versus mass-produced.

ART FOR ART’S SAKE: I’ll hang anything on the walls. I’m bad at planning in advance, so behind these pictures are about 10 holes. Some of these are family photos, two are vintage panoramas from a girls’ summer camp that I liked, and some are photos from my friends who do photography. There’s a calendar I bought in Nepal—it’s been 2013 for a lot of years now.

If the interiors designed by Sheryl T. McLean have a global vibe, it’s no accident. McLean is president and creative director of McLean & Tircuit, a business she opened in 2003, but prior to that, she spent 26 years as a flight attendant for United Airlines.

“Sometimes I will do a project and say, ‘This reminds me of something I saw in France or Brazil,’ but mostly it’s blended into who I am,” she says. “The exposure to color and culture—that enriches you.”

In addition to their underlying international flair, McLean’s designs are marked by bold use of color (think shimmering cobalt blue drapes and bright magenta wing chairs). She also has a penchant for art, which she selects, “with intention, not just as decoration.”

“So many people have beautiful homes, but they’re disconnected from them,” she says. “Art is a link that helps people connect to their environment more.”

The room she crafted for the Historic Ellicott City 2019 Decorator Show House exemplifies her grasp of color, art, and global flair. McLean paired black walls, a Japanese-inspired crane wallpaper, and a large painting from artist Ronald Jackson with a luxurious velvet sofa and handcrafted Peruvian accent pieces. The room could be in Paris or Madrid, New York or Buenos Aires.

McLean’s approach to interior design is a reflection of her own journey. Born in New Orleans, McLean and her family joined a migration of southerners who left the region in the 1960s. She was 11 when her family moved to California, but New Orleans remained in her heart and inspires her to this day, particularly her appreciation for art.

“In New Orleans, they have three great things: great music, great food, and great art—it’s in my culture,” she says. “My mother and father are also extremely creative people,” she adds. “My mother used to paint and do stained-glass windows as a hobby. I think that’s where I get my appreciation for art and color.”

In the late 1970s, McLean became a flight attendant. She intended to work for a few years and see the world, but stayed in the business for almost three decades. While flying, she also attended UCLA. She began taking interior design courses, but, at the encouragement of a dean, she entered the architecture program. In 1989, she became the first female African-American to graduate from that school’s masters in architecture program.

For a time, she worked in architecture and flew on weekends, but after 9/11, flying lost its luster, and she committed to design full-time. When she opened her own firm in 2003, she chose to focus exclusively on interiors.

“As much as I love architecture, I love interior design more,” she says, noting that her architecture background does influence her approach to design. “I’m sensitive to things other interior designers are not because I always go back to the structure.”

Throughout her career, McLean’s fearless love of color has remained consistent.

“Color does a lot for your mood and for your space,” she explains. “I can use the right color in the right texture and you just feel good in the room, or I can make you feel angry or feel anxious—as a designer we have those tools and, when used correctly, we can affect people’s lives.”

Although her business is based in Bethesda, she does a lot of work for Baltimore clients. One such undertaking is a penthouse at Silo Point, where she embraced colors from the home’s view. The gray of the water and industrial buildings inspired a steely wallpaper touched with a hint of sparkle, while the grid system for hanging a series of photographs was wrapped in a red leather, an idea she got from a sign at nearby Under Armour.

McLean explains that she makes a study of her clients to understand how to push them out of their comfort zone. “Often people don’t feel comfortable working with an interior designer because they think they’re being judged, which they’re not, but they are being observed,” she says. “Someone might have a very traditional home, and then I look at them and they’re wearing funky, fabulous earrings and I think, ‘Aha!’ I find that little place that I can push them out of the box.”

Observing and learning to work with clients is another skill set she attributes to her years traveling the world. “I’ve had to work with so many different cultures in my life, people who, if I hadn’t flown, I would never have known how they live, what kind of structures they live in and why. It is because of the climate? The religion?” she continues. “I have an appreciation for our differences.”

The year 1967 looked to be a good one for Robert Long. Several years earlier, the custom lighting maker had packed his family into a VW bus and driven cross-country from Savannah, Georgia, to Sausalito, California, to be at the center of progressive design. His firm, Robert Long Lighting, was taking off, and he had recently published his first catalog. Then,later that same year, Long, his wife, one of their sons, and the child’s maternal grandmother were all killed in a car accident.

Two sons survived, and one, Robert M. Long, now continues his father’s lighting legacy in an eccentric workshop in Hampstead.

After the accident, Long and his older brother were sent to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. When she died of a stroke, they went to Savannah to be raised by another aunt. Long, who was only 2 years old when his parents died, says he was about 7 when he started to put together the pieces of his father’s work.

“It helped that we grew up with desk and floor lamps in the house that had been made by my dad,” says Long, “or we would drive by my parents’ friends’ houses and there would be his fixtures on their houses.”

The business tried to carry on without his father but went bankrupt in 1989. “After college, I looked up the company and took a rental car to see it,” Long recalls. “Shortly thereafter, it went under.”

Upon graduation, Long entered the insurance business with his uncle, but after more than a decade in that line of work and with a failed marriage behind him, he quit and moved to California, ostensibly to go to graduate school for counseling psychology.

“I was pretty aware that my whole move to California was a reconnection with my parents,” says Long. “I had spent years working with my uncle trying to get something from him he couldn’t give—he wasn’t my father.”

When he was in his 20s (he’s now 53), a cousin sent Long his dad’s catalogs, and, for the first time, he thought about resurrecting the brand. Living in California, doing graduate work in psychology, and learning about himself in the process, the idea galvanized.

“I needed to make this stuff to bring this all full circle,” he recalls. “There was a spiritual element to it.”

Long digitized his father’s catalogs and went looking for buyers among interior designers and architects. One designer placed an order for her hotel project in 2011 and Robert Long Lighting was back in business.

Initially, Long found people to make prototype lights for him, but the results were disappointing. “I’m a little particular when it comes to design-related things, so it suited me to make the lights myself.”

He opened a studio across the street from his father’s old location and reconnected with some of his father’s former employees and vendors. And he taught himself much of the art and science of both electricity and metal design.

While the business was in California, Long’s life had moved east. Through a cousin, he had met his interior-designer girlfriend, who lived in Baltimore County, but the bicoastal element of the romance was wearing. A conversation with a business coach helped him realize he had done what he needed to do in California and he could run the business from anywhere.

In August of last year, Long packed his inventory in a truck and moved cross-country to a charmingly shabby office space in Hampstead that had once been a water-treatment plant. His office, which looks like an old-fashioned high-school science lab, is full of prototype lights and bins for the washes he uses for hand finishes. In a separate shop, he and one other worker make each light to order.

The line of elegant, mid-century designs are created today as they were by Long’s father—by hand in solid brass and copper. All glass is hand-blown by the same company that Long’s father used. Each piece has a “living finish,” which means its patina will evolve over time.

The business is now international, driven primarily by designers, architects, and high-end homeowners who seek out the lights for their quality and simplicity, as well as for Long’s attentive customer service.

These days, Long is working on a redesign of his father’s oil lanterns. The updated version will feature a spring-loaded candle. Though he may tweak things, Long is committed to using only his father’s proven, 1960s designs.

“I will hit roadblocks with certain fixtures and I’ll think, ‘What would my dad do?’ There’s always that conversation in everything I do,” he says. “I’m constantly in that space of feeling connected and that I’m carrying forward my father’s legacy with this work.”

When Patrick Sutton first arrived in Baltimore, it was 1985 and he figured he’d give it a year. More than 30 years later, he says with a laugh, “I just never left, you know?”

Sutton grew up in New York. His father, Horace Sutton, was a fairly renowned travel writer with a big personality, and Sutton had a self-described fanciful and magical childhood as he traveled the globe with his parents. “I was afforded the ability to see the world’s most beautiful places and most storied locations,” he says. But that wasn’t his whole story. Sutton’s mom had schizophrenia. “It was not something you talked about.” And this very deep, dark secret shaped the future designer. “In order to survive, I had to become a very fast student of everybody else,” he says. “And so I became intent on watching everybody’s interaction with one another, and I became a de-facto expert on people’s non-verbal communication—just being observant. I also learned empathy. That came out of survival.” And it shaped his entire career. “I’m able to listen intently to what someone is saying and, quite frankly, what they’re not saying.”

After graduating from architecture school, Sutton had offers at firms in his hometown, but knowing what a huge shadow was cast by his father, Sutton looked elsewhere. He had an opportunity in D.C., but he didn’t have an instant connection to the city. One of the firms mentioned their Baltimore headquarters and, after a visit, Sutton was charmed. And “to be truthful, in 1985, Baltimore was not the bastion of design,” he says. “Nobody was really spending any money or investing in design the way it is now.”

His fingerprints are now all over the city, from the Sagamore Pendry Hotel to restaurant interiors—including Cinghiale, Tagliata, and Rye Street Tavern—to countless home renovations, and, most recently, a big, beautiful book aptly titled Storied Interiors. The book not only includes gorgeous photos but the inspirations behind the designs. Sutton studied architecture but felt “it wasn’t fulfilling because I wasn’t able to complete the story from beginning to end.” So he switched to interior design. Now at the pinnacle of his career, a book was just the next natural step, especially for the son of a storyteller—the book is dedicated to his father.

Sutton says he was influenced by Under Armour chair Kevin Plank, for whom the designer has worked for more than a decade. Plank is also a teller of stories. “We see the world in a very similar way,” Sutton explains. “And he was always like, ‘What’s the story behind this?’ He in some ways helped me formalize the fact that I was writing narratives before I was doing projects.” And because of that, he knew his book had to be more than just a pretty coffee table book. It had to combine both his love of design and his need to tell its story.

It took some convincing to his book editor. “The reality is she’s right that the majority of people who buy coffee table books flip through the pictures. But that isn’t who I am, and that’s not the story I have to tell.” And each project tells a different narrative. Sutton’s ability to adapt and not pigeonhole himself in one style has been his biggest success.

“The approach towards storytelling in a residence versus a restaurant or hotel is about the attention span that you’re designing towards,” he says. “So, if it’s a residential project, you are creating an environment that has to be adaptive for a lifetime. When it’s a restaurant, I want it to capture attention for two hours, and if it’s a hotel, a couple of days.”

“I’ve had clients—and these are big clients, these are people who interviewed designers from Paris—and they said to me, ‘You know, it’s interesting. I looked at your work that you did, and none of it was anything that I wanted. However, all of it was very well done. And so what that told me is that if you can do this for each one of those clients, you can take what I want and deliver it for me.’”

As Sutton looks around his Federal Hill office, he says, “This city has afforded me the opportunity to shine.”

A retail store lasting for 20 years is no small feat. For Nick Johnson, owner of décor and furniture company Su Casa, the key to thriving has been support from the Baltimore community—through unpredictable weather, new locations, and everything in between.

After a long period of personal and product-driven growth, the team at Su Casa has no immediate plans for expansion and is focusing efforts on its current locations in Fells Point, Ellicott City, Bethany Beach, and Ocean View, Delaware. Collaborating with local artisans like Max’s Candles, Oak & Iron Designs, and Charlie Barton, Johnson places huge emphasis on the importance of small businesses supporting and sustaining each other.

We sat down with Johnson to chat about the history, evolution, and future of the interior design company.

What was the initial inspiration behind Su Casa?
Back then, we had this model all centered around the Big Iguana. It was basically a hippie store, lots of clothes, jewelry, accessories, and then we started doing candles, candle holders, and art—that sort of thing. Our model was to open a new store based on the parts that are doing really well. We wanted to sell more artwork and accessories and small pieces of furniture than would fit into this little hippie store. So, we created Su Casa. I would have never thought 20 years ago that we would end up with four stores, two warehouses, and this customer service model. We just wanted to sell more mirrors and glassware. Then, whoops it became serious.

How has the community in Baltimore treated you over the past 20 years?
We’ve loved it. I think part of it is our focus on the customer. We’ve never been the typical furniture store. It’s never about having Fourth of July or Memorial Day sales. We don’t do any of those things. Our customers have been super supportive, they come back to us over and over. We built policies around taking care of the customer first and the business second. We’ve moved with people and, when you take care of the people, they then support you and do whatever they can to help you out.

The flood in Ellicott City is the perfect example. The second time around was a lot harder for us than the first time, except that we knew what the challenges were and what we would have to do to overcome them. But in the end, we got an incredible amount of support, so we feel we’ve built a much better business the third time around because of the support we received.

What did you have to do for the Ellicott City location after the flooding occurred?
The first time around, we had to do a lot of actual construction because it had never happened to that store before. In the rebuilding, we did things like half-jokingly put in a waterproof floor and we’re like, “Oh, if it ever happens again, the floor’s going to be great. Because it will never happen again.”

And then it happened again. We were truly all set to leave Ellicott City because we had inches of mud covering the entire first floor. And we didn’t know if we could go through this again. We literally, in three days, took every piece of inventory, floor to ceiling, walls, everything, out. Then, the landlord said, “The store looks great, when are you going to reopen?” The store looked terrible. But as it turns out, he understood the importance of businesses coming back and so he jumped into action, cleaned out the store for us, made it happen, and then everybody that supported us financially and emotionally made it so we could come back.

Just like you expanded into furniture, do you plan on expanding the business into anything else in the future?
I would leave that up to my wife. If there’s one person who is more driven than me, it’s her. She has four different businesses right now and she keeps expanding. I love what we do. Other people are like, “You work seven days a week?” But at the same time, I love being at work. I don’t have any crazy ideas of how to pull a concept out of this store and create its own concept right now. But that being said, we have a history of doing that. So, who knows?

Do you have any advice for someone just starting out?
Work hard. Ultimately, some of the areas where we’ve had challenges I’ve overcome it by plowing into it and putting in the hours. I worry that a lot of people these days who start businesses don’t understand that you can overcome a lot just by putting more of yourself into that business. You can overcome being short on cash. You can overcome being short on staff. You can overcome losing the identity of your business, by being your business.

What has Baltimore meant to you?
The city is a great place. It has a lot of challenges right now. But I always end up remembering how fortunate we are to be in this area with things like Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, Under Armour. They drive a lot of the economy here and being in the city is a part of that. Because I don’t think you get that elsewhere. You don’t have these main drivers in employment and in an economy in every region. So, the city has been great for that—people shouldn’t take that for granted.

Why did you choose to incorporate local artisans?
That has been the most fundamental change for us in the last five years. Some of the things I’m most proud of are the people who started off making things in their garage who wanted to sell it. There are a few stories like that I really love where it’s people who end up aligning what they do with what we do. It becomes a symbiotic relationship where we feed their business, they feed our business, and their business grows into other people’s stores.

Do you have any goals for the next 20 years?
We eventually want to open more stores. We’ve really embraced this idea of being a part of a community and I think that’s the hardest thing to replicate. We don’t want to lose focus on how important a business is to a neighborhood. You can’t just open a new store and suddenly be a part of that. We look at areas where we know we have some influence or we have some support from customers or staff. We’d love to expand into Annapolis or go back up to Towson. But longer term, it’s growth, being mindful of the impact we have, and how we can support and help the communities we are in.

Are you doing anything to celebrate the anniversary?
We hope to throw some sort of party. But being in four different locations, it’s tough figuring out how to handle that logistically. But we will continue to do sales and things throughout the year, where we reinforce the fact that we’ve been around a long time and we hope to be around a lot longer.

TRANSPLANT: I’m from New York, but I’ve been in Baltimore for 19 years. My husband is from here. We bought this three-story house when we graduated from college.

WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? We live in the Penn North neighborhood. There’s a lot of revitalization going on near Coppin State University. It’s an interesting time to live in the city.

THE START OF A CAREER: Interior design was sort of a hobby for me—I went to school for public relations and advertising. I would do stuff around the house like paint and redecorate. Friends would ask, “Have you ever thought about doing this for a living?” I started taking on projects from family members.

PERSONAL STYLE: I like classic lines and pops of color. But I also like vintage pieces. They tell a story—having a vintage piece in every room is important. It’s one-of-a-kind, it has a history, and it’s always a conversation starter.

THE PLAN: This room is a crazy story. It was actually my master bedroom. We live in an older home built in the 1920s. Storage space is almost nonexistent. No room has a closet. We used an armoire or would jerry-rig storage. But I realized, in the bedroom, you just sleep. So we moved into the guest room.

DESIGN WITHIN REACH: Our old bedroom is now my dressing room and office. I work in there. Plus that’s where I keep all my clothes, shoes, and jewelry. I love that the shoes are visible and almost become pieces of art.

THE FIRST PIECE: The sofa came from Ryan’s Relics in White Marsh on Belair Road. It was such a bold color, I thought, “This is going to be the piece. We’ll just design around it.”

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX: The cabinetry is from Ikea. I used bookcases, even though they’re not meant for shoes. But the shelving is adjustable, so it can be made taller for boots or shorter for flats.

OVER THE YEARS: I’ve had this room for about 10 years. I like the traditional style of cabinetry, that the rug is modern, the sofa is vintage, and I love how all those pieces can work together. I’m just grateful we have a space that allows it.

When it comes to interior design and home furnishings, Charm City was, for a long time, a pretty conservative town, its aesthetic rooted in 300 years of European tradition. But you won’t find much of what the antique dealers call “brown furniture” at Design Distillery’s newish Federal Hill space.

Instead, there’s a live-edge dining table shorn from the trunk of an acacia tree, and owner Karen Graveline’s current favorite, a black homage to the Windsor chair with a curved spindle back, molded from plastic. Then there are bar stools, bedside tables, and tufted sofas with clean lines and slender legs, all in an array of colors from turquoise and cocoa to beige.

What you won’t find here is the stuff your parents are pushing on you: the carved mahogany sideboards, bedroom sets in turned walnut, or the dining-room table with extra leaves—which speaks to the current dictum, “Your kids don’t want your brown furniture.”

With designs inspired by 20th-century icons Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll, the showroom houses staged vignettes showing clean, airy living spaces with soft shag rugs and arched matte-black floor lamps.

“Our roots are in modernism,” says Graveline, who recently rebranded the business she started as Home on the Harbor in 2002. “It’s really about design that is functional, simple, and sustainable.”

Graveline, who grew up in a modern house in Montgomery County, learned to love design from her architect father. The family attended Orioles games in the city, and, as they made their way through Baltimore neighborhoods to Memorial Stadium, Graveline loved seeing people sitting on their stoops and decided she wanted to live here. Graveline studied interior design at University of Maryland but became a graphic designer. When she and her engineer husband, Stanley, bought a rowhouse near Riverside Park, she says, “That’s when I got interested in furniture again.”

She would buy mid-century modern castoffs from auctions and estate sales to fix up and sell at the Antique Center at Federal Hill. Then, when she and Stanley saw a store (with an apartment upstairs) for rent in the neighborhood, they decided to give retail a go, opening Home on the Harbor in 2002 with a unique niche—smaller, modern pieces made to scale.

But in a country of giant rooms and giant furniture, they had some ’splainin’ to do. “Back then,” she says, “people didn’t know what to make of us. So I said, ‘It fits in rowhouses.’” That, she says, became the hook: “furniture that fits.”

A couple of years later, she opened a second store in Mt. Washington, then relocated to a repurposed industrial space in 2010, and doubled the store’s size to 9,500 square feet in 2016, while also renaming the business.

When she’s choosing furniture for the store, Graveline has an important requirement: “I have to picture it in a Baltimore home.” While, at one time, that simply meant a sofa had to fit through the narrow door of a Federal Hill rowhouse, she has refined the notion over the years. “Baltimore wants proven design,” she says, but nothing too fussy. “Baltimore tends to be informal.”

Entering the new luxury apartments at 414 Light Street, one would think they just stepped into a trendy New York high rise. The crushed velvet sofas, funky, floating birdcage chairs, and ornate gold art pieces are just a few of the unique touches in the main lobby to enhance that feeling.

Los Angeles-based interior designer Kari Whitman drew her inspiration for the building from her past experiences working on projects in Los Angeles and New York City. As her first time designing in Baltimore, she wanted to incorporate very modern and eclectic designs—think mixed metals and unusual fabric pairings—to bring a new twist to Charm City.

“I wanted to come in and change the look,” Whitman said. “It’s more New York, L.A., and Miami-looking. It’s very different for Baltimore. I wanted to do something that was kind of crazy. Ninety-five-percent of all the furniture and fixtures are custom-made from my designs.”

Similar to New York and Los Angeles, the lease-only apartments come with a heft monthly payment. A two-bedroom apartment starts at $3,300.

Whitman took us through some of her favorite spaces in the building and explained her design concepts:

I grew up basically in one house. My four kids have lived in five houses, all in Baltimore, and the oldest is only 11. Some were upgrades due to space; others were due to money/school/life. It’s because of all these moves that I’ve been thinking a lot about what a home means. As a writer my first instinct is to always put thought to paper.

But as much as I’ve written about my family before, I haven’t really written about our houses. I think because for me, mostly, our house has brought me joy by what I’ve filled it with. Not the location (we’ve had some really great locations) and not by it’s size (we tend to be on top of each other regardless of how many bedrooms we have) but the other stuff. Obviously, there are a million “first” memories: first garden, first laundry room on the top floor (man I miss that), first birds nest, first mouse, first rat, first parking spot, first neighbor to entrust with a key, first car broken into, first baby brought home, first snowstorm, and on and on.

For me, it’s also about the other stuff. The family photos that literally infest our home, the plants I’ve kept alive for more than a year, all my books, and my husband’s cookbooks, the dishes that belonged to my great-grandma, the pieces of art we’ve collected in Israel, Ireland, Jamaica, and Greece. And I’m not talking expensive pieces, but the ones that take us back to an exact moment of a memory. The piece of pottery we found on our honeymoon 14 years ago that (luckily) fit into the “seat trunk” of our Vespa as we zipped around Santorini. We have tons of local art pieces that line our walls, bought at farmers’ markets and local craft shows. People think I’m crazy, but I usually have all my art up on my walls within the first week of a move. Only then does our house feel like a home.

Here are some of my favorite places in my house:

Now, as the new features editor for Baltimore Home—tasked with expanding our digital presence, creating a social media buzz, and rethinking our Home quarterly, I intend to define what home really means. To me it’s not just about the zip code, but the actual neighborhood and neighbors. That a house can be an itty-bitty row house (been there!) or a sprawling estate. We want our editorial content to be relevant, innovative, useful, and enjoyable. We want to cover everything that it means to live in a house, from renovations to raising families in small spaces, to interviews with local creative designers, to trends our city is embracing, and what it means to be a neighbor.

Everyone defines home differently and our goal is to convey that. We’ll be introducing some Home bloggers over the next few weeks, from a recovering architect turned photographer (who, along with her husband, has used her skills to renovate two of their own homes) to someone taking the steps of co-habitation, to easy DIY projects (and for real we mean easy) to folks living through their own home renovations to my occasional blog “Kid vs. House.” We’d love to hear from you. What stuff do you have in our house that makes you happy? What makes your neighborhood amazing? What topics would you like to see our Home section cover?

I’m writing this on my (well-loved Crate & Barrel) couch, the sunlight streaming through my windows, a new piece of art ready to be hung, my kids playing upstairs (ohh, summer) and really, wherever that is, I’m home.

Janelle Diamond is the managing editor of Baltimore Weddings and new features editor of Baltimore Home. Email her with your ideas and pitches about your favorite local spaces, places, and faces that make the city home.

Remember Home on the Harbor? Well, now the Key Highway home of interior design goals is bigger and better than ever before. After undergoing a rebrand and redesign in 2016, Design Distillery was born. The new expanded space features even more modern design inspiration, curated vignettes, and a free Skee-Ball machine. We talked with owner, Karen Graveline and her design dream team—Seth Kaiser, Pearl Laaveg, and Erin Friedel—about the new and improved store, current trends, and guilty pleasures.

If you could describe Design Distillery in one sentence what would it be?

Karen Graveline: It’s the place you come to find a piece that you connect with and can live with.

What does Design Distillery specialize in?

KG: So our collection is based on the idea of modernism. Clean, simple, and classic designs and we really try to offer items for an urban space, whether it’s a big loft or a tiny row home, we have things that fit.

Why did you change your name?

KG: Home on the Harbor was established 15 years ago and it was a much different store during a much different time. We were selling mainly vintage and we were in a very small space, so when we were able to expand our space, we thought it was a good time to rebrand and really choose a name that fits us better for what we do now. Design Distillery still captures what Home on the Harbor started, which is finding really good designs and distilling it down to the best that is out there and staying really curated.

What do you think sets Design Distillery apart from other businesses?

KG: It’s a fun atmosphere—we are trying to keep furniture shopping fun. I also think it’s about the way we help people. We are more so a coach and want them to really be a part of the design process and make the design their own. And we have Skee-Ball.

If you could have one super power, what would it be?

Erin Friedel: We could move things without lifting them.

Seth Kaiser: Telepathy. The ability to move furniture with your mind—Jean Gray style. That would make floor sets so much easier.

Pearl Laaveg: I’d fly. I know that’s not original but how fun.

SK: As long as it has a good costume change, I don’t really care what the super power is.

Who is your interior design hero?

KG: A source we go to a lot is Dwell magazine. It’s just very inspirational. But I think more of our heroes are furniture designers like Patricia Urquiola. We think she is amazing and there’s not too many women at that level so she is kind of my design hero.

SK: One of my favorite blogs that I continue to return to is desiretoinspire.net, they run the gamut on styles but they always have really refined photography that is really modern but original.

What is your favorite item currently in store?

KG: It’s on its way! The velvet womb chair by Knoll. It’s a classic design, I have one in my house, and I love it. We are getting it in this teal velvet.

EF: I would say the Saarinen dining table because it’s so iconic and you could put it in any kind of home and make it work.

PL: I sat on the Eilerson Plano sofa recently and I wanted to move in. Like, I actually got busted by a customer as I was saying, ‘I want to live here.’

SK: I was going to say the same thing! That sofa is awesome. It’s different than a lot of things on the market. It’s really been drawing people in and is insanely comfortable.

What is your favorite home decor trend right now?

SK: Dark, saturated walls. I’m still really vibing on the really dark charcoal walls and then pops of pink and a really light or bleached oak wood. Those things combined create something really beautiful for me right now.

KG: I’m always drawn to the Scandinavian aesthetic, the light wood hues and soft colors. Old spaces with more modern furniture.

What’s the most embarrassing trend that you used to love?

KG: It was, I guess, the early 2000s, and I liked the chocolate brown and avocado or lime green. There was also the orange and chocolate thing and I think I bought a bunch of orange at that time. So that’s one thing I don’t want to see right now.

SK: I used to like the really heavy industrial stuff when I got into this industry and that’s definitely faded. But it’s all going to come back and get us, right?

What is your guilty pleasure?

PL: Glitter!

SK: Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

KG: Chocolate.

EF: That’s mine, too!

Listen up, parents-to-be—gray is the new pink or blue. When it comes to decorating the nursery, more and more families are opting for soft, neutral tones over the bright, themed, gender-specific designs of the past.

But that’s not the only change going on in the world of baby-room design. We checked in with some of the metro area’s top interior designers to find out what’s hot and what’s not, and they offered lots of advice on things to consider before you buy that big bag of garish stick-on wall giraffes.

For starters, the décor tastes of grown-ups are being taken a little more seriously.

“A lot of my clients request a nursery that isn’t too juvenile,” says Elizabeth Lawson, a Baltimore-based interior designer who works with clients across the country. “They want the room to grow with their child. They also want a nursery with a gender-neutral color scheme, because, later on, the room may be used for a second child.”

A project Lawson recently completed for a family expecting a baby girl, for example, opted for cool-toned blueish-gray walls rather than pink. Layered rugs over the hardwood floor add warmth and texture, while a white dresser’s gold-bar drawer pulls give the room a grown-up, luxe touch. 

Absent are the typical baby animals or ABCs art—instead, a framed photo print of a dusty pink handkerchief on a sandy beach complements the room’s soft color palette. 

“We’re also designing with a lot of wood tones and natural materials,” Lawson adds, pointing to the wicker baskets used for storage, unstained natural wood crib, and watercolor bedding.

While it’s a good idea to let a favorite print or accent color inspire your design, Lawson points out one reason parents should avoid anything too “theme-y.” “Grandparents and other family members have the tendency to get carried away, and you’ll be seeing elephants and ducks for years to come,” she says with a laugh.

Nurseries are also adopting a cleaner, less busy look, following in the footsteps of popular interior-design trends, such as minimalist decor and mid-century modern furniture. “The hottest trend right now is eclectic minimalism, and by that I mean nurseries that don’t follow a formula and are relatively sparse compared to nurseries of five years ago,” says Mary Bauer, founder and president of Bratt Decor, a Baltimore-based company that makes designer children’s furniture. “Parents today are breaking old rules of full matching suites of furniture with one voice. We are seeing ornate cribs with modern dressers and custom bedding. Black and white nurseries are a thing right now, too.”

The grown-ups can also win this one: Creating a room that will outlive its initial raison d’être can mean adopting furniture styles and color palettes found in the kitchen and adult living areas.

While two white models of Bratt Decor’s classic-looking iron cribs are its best sellers, Bauer says she’s seeing a rise in black, too. But regardless of the color or style, parents most value furniture that grows with their child. 

“Always choose a crib that will transition into a toddler bed, daybed, or full bed,” Bauer advises. “All of our designs can be used indefinitely.”

The concept extends beyond the crib. “When designing, we think a lot about how the nursery will grow with the child, because they grow quickly,” Lawson says. “Rather than using a changing table that is strictly a changing table, I always recommend using a dresser and placing a changing pad on top.”

It’s a concept Ashley Barbalato took to heart when putting together the nursery for her now 14-month-old son, Julien, in the Riverside rowhome she and her husband recently remodeled.

“I wanted to be able to reuse many of the pieces in the future and have things that would grow with my son,” she recalls. “I love monochromatic schemes that allow for a lot of flexibility with accessories. I tried to keep things timeless and simple, but still playful.” 

While Barbalato stuck to the neutral tones across the walls and furniture, she infused the space with pops of texture and personality with a few fun pieces, including a fluffy “rocking sheep”—a Nordic take on the traditional rocking horse—made from natural carved wood and soft cream-colored fur. In the center of the ceiling hangs a fanciful light in the shape of a gold crown that looks as though it was plucked from the head of Max in Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are.

“Once my son outgrew the infant stage, I wanted to have as little of a transition as possible into the toddler stage,” Barbalato adds. “I didn’t want to spend more money on things like artwork, bedding and storage. Instead, I chose pieces that I knew would keep up with my child’s interests and growth.”

Finally, Mom and Dad can be a little self-indulgent: As a new parent, you’ll be spending countless—sometimes stressful—hours in this space, so Lawson recommends a tranquil design where you can relax. “Simplicity is key,” Lawson adds. “Parenting is stressful and exhausting and the nursery should be a calming refuge at all times.”

With that in mind, parents shouldn’t skimp on aspects of the room that will make the space enjoyable for them, too. “It needs to be comfortable for both parents and baby,” says Lawson. “A comfortable chair or glider is a must.”

Barbalato agrees. “Keep your baby’s room clean and simple. It will create a calm space for you and your little one. Accessorize for play and imagination. Lastly, remember this is a space that you will spend a lot of time in, too. How do you want to feel in the space? What would you like to see? Moms are allowed to be selfish sometimes, too!”

The Nursery Checklist

Our panel of designers also offered some useful advice on planning the space.  

Don’t Rush
“My clients usually want to get started designing their nursery right away, because they’re excited,” Lawson says. “But the first thing new parents should consider when designing is functionality and making sure they have the appropriate furniture pieces.”

Most expectant moms do the bulk of nursery prep in the second trimester, according to a reader survey by The Bump, a website for first-time millennial parents. Cribs and other furniture can take 10 or more weeks to be delivered, so experts recommend parents make selecting and ordering it a priority.

Customize
Nursery checklists are a great place to get started—just be sure to customize them to your family’s needs. As rowhome residents, for example, the Barbalato family learned to select pieces that served multiple functions in order to maximize the tight space. “I’ve actually learned that less is more when it comes to my child’s room,” she says. “When I was first designing and furnishing it, I felt like I had to have everything on ‘The Baby List,’ but that’s not the case.” 

Think about the space
With space at a premium, Barbalato says she reevaluated larger pieces that some books and websites cited as must-haves. “Do we really need something like a huge ottoman to accompany our glider? I learned that we don’t. Instead, we have an oversized floor pouf that worked great during those sleepless nights and is now serving as an awesome climbing gym for my son.”

It’s all in the details
When creating your own checklist, think about your specific needs. Will the baby’s room be hit with a strong afternoon sun? Blackout curtains are a must, then, for making mid-day naps easier. Live on a busy street? Consider a sound machine to cancel out outside noises that could keep baby up. Flexible lighting options—like a soft lamp and night light in addition to the overhead light—can help you adapt the brightness for the room’s many uses, from playtime to middle-of-the-night diaper changes and feedings.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: We bought a hand-blown chandelier and two sconces maybe 35 years ago in Murano, Italy, and we thought one day we’d have a house to put them in. We actually hadn’t taken them out of the box since we got back from that trip. The chandelier is a more traditional fixture but we put it in this room and mixed it up with some modern stuff. 

SET THE TABLE: For the table, we found this company that handles hand-blown Murano glass tripods, and then we just cut a glass top to fit them, making it more clear, neutral, and modern. 

HAPPY ACCIDENT: I found the installation in the window by accident. I’m a collector of antique cars and motorcycles and while I was online looking up auctions, I saw one by a guy in Minnesota who went into bankruptcy. I had a car in mind, but when I checked the catalog, there was also a mention of this glass piece, and they had a picture of it. I did some research on the artist, and I thought since it was a car auction, no one would be paying attention to this glass piece. And of course there were three or four more people who knew exactly what it was and bid against me. But I was still able to buy it for less than 15 percent of what he paid for it 30 years ago. 

SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: The gold and brown artwork on the right was actually painted by my daughter, Emily, who is an artist that lives in Portland, OR now. When she painted it, it got a little press and someone stole it and started making productions from it. My daughter got a few calls from friends saying they had seen her work in other places, so she found the guy that copied it. And interestingly enough, he started an internet fight with her, saying he painted it and Emily stole it from him. However, she blew up a portion of the picture and you can see her name woven into the geometric design.

CENTER OF ATTENTION: I was at a doctor’s appointment in D.C. and just came down the stairs in the office building and there was an art gallery on the first floor. The rhino we have on the table was in the window. It’s a cast acrylic piece by an artist in North Carolina, and I thought it would be a great touch of color.   

COLOR GUARD: I think in general I tend to gravitate toward color. If you were to look at the rest of our house you would see it’s a pretty wide color palette. 

SHORT STORY: We get a lot of compliments on the picture hanging in the dining room and I wish I had a better story for it. My husband always tells me we need to make up interesting stories for things that we don’t have good stories for. The reality of that picture is that it was on clearance at CB2, but he likes to tell people that it is our aunt and uncle and then people always do a double take and are like, “Wait, really?” 

TABLE TALK: We’ve had the table since 2004. It’s a Heywood-Wakefield table and I found it while browsing eBay. That mid-century modern trend was just coming into vogue with the popularity of Mad Men and all of that stuff, but I was really drawn to the clean lines and natural materials. 

SPECIAL MEASURES: There is a guy in Hagerstown who owns a place called Strictly Hey-Wake and all he does is refinish Heywood-Wakefield furniture. He does a really beautiful job and he refinished our dining room table for us, as well as another record cabinet and king-sized bed. 

TRIAL AND ERROR: I picked the chairs up on sale at Anthropologie for like $40 apiece, which was a great find. However, it’s one of those lessons in buying furniture online before actually seeing it. The way the chairs are built, the center of gravity is slightly off, so if you lean forward a little bit you end up on the floor. My chairs always come with a warning. 

AHEAD OF ITS TIME: The clock on the wall is by an Italian designer and we picked it up from a shop in Philly years ago. It was one of those things we were drawn to immediately but we didn’t really have a place to put it. When we finally finished the kitchen we found a spot where we think it worked well. 

GIVE THE GREEN LIGHT: I find lighting really hard to wrap my head around, and I just really love light fixtures. The pendants over the bar and the sconces over the stove are from Schoolhouse Electric, and the dining room fixture is from Rejuvenation. 

OPEN HOUSE: The kitchen was originally closed off and there was a doorway on the left where the clock is now. With our kids getting a little bit older, it was important for us to renovate the kitchen because we wanted to open it up and get as much use out of it as possible. I think the only downside is that we used to use the dining room table a lot more and now, because we have that bar area, we don’t as much. 

HAPPY PLACE: The vision for the room was to create a refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city. Our goal was to find warm and comfortable pieces to create a place where we could relax. 

COMFORT ZONE: The space was pretty bare when we got it. Normally, we tend to gravitate towards mid-century modern stuff but it’s typically not the coziest style, so we went with things that were cozier to lounge in. It’s definitely a touch bohemian, and then the plan was to add a lot of greenery to bring in more color. 

LIFE CHANGING: We wanted there to be some life in the room so we got hanging plants from B. Willow in Remington. We also found this vintage birdcage that we stuck a fern into and it’s since thrived so we’ve kept it there. 

UNDER THE INFLUENCE: We follow local stores like Wishbone Reserve in Mt. Washington, Cedar and Cotton in Southwest Baltimore, and Off Main in Catonsville on Instagram. They are always inspiring us with different pieces and design ideas. 

SITTING PRETTY: The rocking chair is an old Eames rocking chair. We aren’t sure how old it is but my guess would be that it was made in the sixties. We found it at Home Anthology in Catonsville! 

CUT A RUG: The carpet is a hundred-year-old Kazak rug from Wishbone Reserve. We loved how vibrant it was and how the pattern had blues and greens in it, which is hard to find. It’s more geometric and tribal, which makes it unique from all of the floral patterns you typically see. However, when we got it, it had some tears and a hole in it. The excellent folks at Main Street Oriental in Ellicott City did an absolutely wonderful job of repairing it. They even matched the pattern and workmanship and their work probably doubled the value of the piece. 

TABLE IT: The table (also from Wishbone Reserve—Julie has a great eye!) is pretty unusual. It’s stone with little pebbles encased on a resin top, so it’s really earthy and free-flowing as far as shapes. We don’t like anything that has lines that are too rigid. 

SHED LIGHT ON: We recently put curtains up in the room to keep it cooler during the summer months. Finding curtains that had a little texture and were sheer enough to diffuse light through was difficult. We ended up going with a Belgian flax fabric from Pottery Barn. 

The first time that National Aquarium, Baltimore chief executive officer John Racanelli visited Baltimore, he was 20 and on board The Explorer, one of a fleet of tall ships sailing to the Inner Harbor as part of the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. “The ship had been built in 1904 and was the official tall ship of Washington and Oregon,” recalls Racanelli. “It had sailed around Cape Horn and charted the waters of Alaska and the Puget Sound for decades before being restored. It was not a beautiful ship—we called ourselves ‘The Bicentennial Pirate Ship.’”

At the time, the lifelong sailor, who was the navigator from Costa Rica to Baltimore, coincidentally pulled into port on Pier 3 where the aquarium is now situated. “Back then, I needed some life skills in addition to my schooling,” explains Racanelli, who took a leave of absence from the University of California, “so I took excursions away from school for a while, the first of which was this sailing trip on a small boat where I worked as a crewmember and sailed down the coast of Costa Rica.”

While in Costa Rica, the young seaman met the captain of The Explorer. “I went down to the ship, and a lot of people were getting off because they’d been at sea for 37 days,” says Racanelli. Among those who disembarked was the ship’s navigator. “The captain asked me, ‘Can you celestial navigate?’ Back then, I knew enough to say ‘yes,’ and he said, ‘Okay, then you can be our navigator.’ I studied everything I could. It turned out that there was a beautiful bronze sextant with a chronograph and the almanacs and all the things I needed to get from there to here.”

Racanelli recalls that Charm City was a lot less charming when he first arrived in 1976. “At the time, Pier 3 was just a flat pier,” he says. “The Inner Harbor was still very much a working harbor, and the aquarium hadn’t even been built. When people hear I spent a lot of time on the waterfront, they say, ‘Wow, back then it was pretty rough—old bars and sailors.’ And I say, ‘Well, I was one of those sailors in one of those bars. What’s the issue?’”

The salt spray long washed away, Racanelli now sits on the polished-cotton living-room sofa in the Canton townhome where he moved with his wife, Susan, in 2011. Despite being longtime Californians (who most recently lived in the hills of suburban San Francisco’s picturesque Marin County), Racanelli and Susan love living in Canton.

Through the years, Racanelli had visited Baltimore on several occasions, most memorably when he was on a reconnaissance mission as vice president of marketing and development with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and ended up on a V.I.P. tour of the National Aquarium (along with Liberace and his longtime boyfriend, Scott Thorson). But it wasn’t until he came back to interview for the aquarium job that he found himself truly smitten with Baltimore.

“When I came here for my second round of interviews, we spent the weekend,” says Racanelli. “We went for brunch to Mr. Rain’s Fun House and got the best Bloody Marys we’ve ever had, and we enjoyed AVAM [American Visionary Art Museum]. We went to Annapolis for dinner, found our way through Fells Point, and walked around the Inner Harbor. A lot of the things that we loved about San Francisco—the food scene, the arts, and culture—we also liked about Baltimore.”

Of course, Racanelli notes that one of the biggest differences between the two cities is the affordable housing market in Baltimore.

“We never could have had this much space in San Francisco,” says Racanelli. His current home includes three bedrooms and four and a half baths in 3,700 square feet that serves as a repository for a lifetime of collected furniture, art, and artifacts from 27 years of marriage and world travel. And as much as Racanelli appreciates all the room to spread out, he happily defers to Susan in the décor department. “I am a willing student of the vision of Susan Racanelli when it comes to home decoration,” he says with a laugh. Chimes in Susan, who works for Seacology, an international environmental organization that preserves island habitats all over the world, “I have a French-Northern Italian aesthetic, but we travel so much, I didn’t want only one thumbprint. Much of our home is a collection of all the places we’ve been.”

On the first level alone, the media room boasts a hand-carved chess set and hand-beaded candelabra from Nairobi, Kenya, as well as a pounded tapa cloth from Samoa, coasters from Uganda, a tin lizard sculpture from Madagascar, a pair of ostrich eggs from Tanzania, and a handmade Berber rug from a desert trek through Morocco. The second level, where the kitchen, living room, and dining area are located, features brightly colored pottery from Italy and Mexico, an alabaster Buddha head from Vietnam, and a pair of nesting tables from Florence, Italy. The third-floor décor includes a few stateside touches with an alligator head purchased from Miccosukee Indians in Florida (and now on display in the room of their son, Pierson, who is a senior at Cornell University) and a blanket chest from Susan’s childhood spent in Michigan. The top floor is a paean to the family—with photos of grandparents, parents, stepsiblings, and a dramatic snapshot of Yaka the Killer Whale retrieving a mackerel from Racanelli’s mouth on his last day of work at northern California’s Marine World in the early 1980s. Not surprisingly, also on display is a school of various crystal fish. “People are always giving me fishy things,” says Racanelli with a laugh. 

“They’re pretty, so I don’t get upset, but I don’t know where to put them all.”

Though Susan was in charge of interior design, Racanelli did have one rule: “There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place,” he states. “And Susan has no problem with going along with that. It’s a sailor saying, ‘When you need something on a boat, you need to know where it is supposed to be.’ The same rule applies in a home, especially in a home with all these stairs and where we’re often yelling to each other from the top floor.” (Jokes Susan, “I usually just yell, ‘Ahoy, mate.’”)

Another edict was to have a more traditional-style home. “I grew up in an Eichler house,” he says of the iconic, mid-century modern tract-style housing built by real-estate developer Joseph Eichler. “Now, these are the hipster houses—all glass, wood, and steel with a flat roof. I didn’t like that house—it had a radiant-heated floor, but the pipes were galvanized so you had three or four patches in the whole house where the heat came up. As a kid, I’d lay on the floor like a cat, holding onto those patches of warmth.”

Racanelli’s favorite features of his Canton home include three decks, a patio, and commanding views of the water. “I love coming home—it’s such a refuge,” says Racanelli. “The outdoors is welcomed in here—that’s a very California thing. Being in a home that’s really comfortable for me near the water is a form of renewal and rejuvenation.”

Besides his uninvited collection of fishy bric-a-brac, people also assume he has the live kind, too. “People always ask me if I have an aquarium at home,” he says, “and I say I have this big aquarium right outside of my window.”

Living on the water also keeps his mission—both personal and professional—in the forefront. “Every time I walk down the [waterfront] promenade outside, I think, ‘We’re going to make that promenade healthy,’” says Racanelli. “Every time it rains and Harris Creek fills up with plastic water bottles, I think, ‘I have to make it my mission to help fix that—this can’t be the case in 10 years.’”

To that end, Racanelli says that the next stage for the aquarium is to focus on local exhibits in the hopes of hitting home with its 1.3 million visitors a year. “We are going to spend the next few years remaking the exhibits that are about the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Shore,” says Racanelli, who oversaw the new, $12.6 million Blacktip Reef exhibit from conception to completion last year. “The next big step is to not only show off our own backyard, but how we can be better engaged in taking care of it. We have this little window of time to get through to people that there are real threats to our planet and our oceans and all of our aquatic systems,” he says, his voice straining. “We all have to be part of the solution.”

Racanelli comes by his love of all things aquatic—scuba diving, sailing, surfing, and open-water swimming—honestly. “When I was a kid, we’d pile in the station wagon and go to this great beach town called Santa Cruz,” he remembers. “The water was frigid there, but I didn’t know any better, and I’d spend all day in it. There’s some genetic twist-up in my makeup because I’m as comfortable in the water as I am in the air.”

From an early age, it was clear that Racanelli, who has competed in swimming races in the treacherous waters surrounding Alcatraz Island, was destined to work on the water. (He’s also twice swum the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.) He first studied marine biology at the University of California, San Diego, but quickly transferred to the less competitive Santa Cruz campus. “Their mascot is the banana slug,” says Racanelli laughing. “It was counterculture. If you didn’t like the class, you could just drop it and there was no record you’d ever taken it, and thus, no incentive to try harder—this was the ’70s. So I majored in surf with a minor in environmental studies.”

Though Racanelli enjoyed tremendous professional success, including his stint as first-ever vice president of marketing and development at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, serving as the first CEO of The Florida Aquarium in Tampa, and founding his own consulting firm with a focus on cultural and conservation organizations, he accomplished it all without a formal degree. “It took me decades to finish college,” says Racanelli, who finally graduated in 2006 from Dominican University of California with a degree in strategic management. “It was unfinished business, and I wanted to get a degree before my son did.”
The sheepskin is just another emblem of how Racanelli has come full circle in his life. Not long ago, while hanging a small photograph of The Explorer on the first floor of his home, Racanelli was reminded of the ship’s own story. “I had taped a flyer to the back of that photo,” he says. “And it explains that the ship was built in Fells Point and was coming home to Baltimore when we sailed it here. There’s a nice synergy there,” he says smiling. “I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be in my life.”

Got a feeling: When we bought this house, we just went by karma. It seemed like a happy house.

Scaling back:
We got into this period of design when my husband and I moved into a
Federal Hill row house, and we couldn’t find furniture to fit, so we
started to look for mid-century modern pieces because the scale was
smaller. I got addicted at that point.

Please be seated: The first pieces we bought were these Arne Jacobsen chairs from a dealer in Chicago. The design is from the mid-’50s.

Table it:
The black marble table is a classic design made by Knoll, designed by
Eero Saarinen. We eat dinner as a family here every night and do craft
projects on it.

Feeling blue: Traditionally, red is a dining-room color, and I wanted to go in the opposite direction.

Sew nice: The curtain fabric is from IKEA. I got a sewing machine to make these. This was my first sewing project.

Dragon days:
I found the dragon at a local vintage shop (Denova in Hampden), which
is now closed. I liked the contrast of it against the blue wall and its
intricate silhouette adds interest to all the clean-lined furnishings.

Words to live by: Part of my rule before I buy something [for my store] is that I have to be willing to live with it in case it doesn’t sell.

Plain truth:
The biggest influence on my aesthetic is my father, who is an
architect. He is so modern and very minimal. We had no tchotchkes
growing up.

Before you think about replacing a rather large (and expensive) piece
such as a couch, breathe new life into it by simply adding some accent
pillows. Mix and match seasonally with a different color palette and fun
patterns and be amazed by the fresh look.

From top to bottom:
D. L. Rhein The Amalfi orange-and-white pillow ($118) at Curiosity.
Coyuchi green-and-white chevron pillow ($78) at Trohv. Customized toss
pillow ($45) at Su Casa. D. L. Rhein Frequency pillow ($156) at
Curiosity. Customized toss pillow ($45) at Su Casa. Geometric tile
pillow ($88) at The Kellogg Collection. Wooden ladder ($200) at Su Casa.