A Decorator's Daughter

The inheritance of an eye

My mother is an interior designer, and a significant amount of my childhood was spent in backrooms filled with furniture and design centers overflowing with material samples. There were countless hours in Betty Rumpf, a store with a vast showroom downstairs and a quieter, more tactile world upstairs, where paint chips, fabric swatches, and wallpaper books lived. I was given a surprising amount of autonomy, allowed to wander, look closely, and develop opinions. Stacks of sample books would be pulled, and I’d sit on the floor in a corner, leafing through the pages, leaving Post-It notes on favorite patterns. I don’t recall whose job it was to remove the notes, as I most definitely thought my own discerning eye could benefit someone’s home renovation and should not be tossed aside.

In larger design centers, I’d trail behind my mother as she moved from showroom to showroom, deciding between fabrics, trim, and wallpaper at Brunschwig & Fils, Schumacher, or Scalamandre. Beyond the seemingly endless universes of color, pattern, and texture, what fascinated me most was seeing the same pattern rendered in different palettes, and how radically its character would shift. This was how I learned that color isn’t merely decorative; it reshapes how a pattern is experienced. Its power lies in instability — a red warming or cooling, advancing or dulling, simply because of the color beside it. When I later studied Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, I discovered formal language for what I had already sensed intuitively: that color is never fixed, but defined by its relationships.

I’m only fully realizing now, as someone running a design studio of my own, how influential that time with my mother really was. I had a front row seat to her design process, listening in as she talked herself through decisions. I absorbed how individual choices were measured against one another and brought into a cohesive whole, while developing my own instincts through the same materials she worked with.

That early training was put into sharp relief a few years ago, when I was teaching students who hadn’t grown up inside visual culture. I spent a semester at an all-boys college in rural Virginia (yes, somehow those still exist) teaching painting, color theory, and design principles to future finance bros and army recruits. In one of my introductory painting classes, I gave students a simple assignment to help them become comfortable with the materials: mix and paint one hundred distinct colors. One of my students sat there genuinely stunned and said he didn’t know there even were a hundred colors.

Teaching them wasn’t about supplying language so much as opening a door, showing what comes into focus when you’re asked to look carefully. Watching them begin to understand how the world is structured visually was far more rewarding than I anticipated. It was a reminder that what feels foundational inside art and design circles isn’t innate or universal. Seeing is an active skill, one that has to be taught, practiced, and reinforced.

What feels most formative now wasn’t just watching my mother make design decisions, but being given the space to make my own alongside her. Innumerable afternoons roaming showrooms, red Brunschwig & Fils pencil and notepad in hand, noticing what worked and what didn’t. A foundation first learned through fabrics and furniture settled into a habit of analyzing restaurant menus, wine labels, store signage, upholstery details, matchbooks, lighting fixtures, and hotel stationery. I find it to be the greatest inheritance: a calibrated eye, shaped early by my mother and carried forward into how I see and evaluate everything around me.