What I Bring Home: Lessons from Lithuania, Italy and Beyond
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Updated: 3 days ago
People often ask me where my style comes from. The honest answer is: everywhere I've been, and everyone who has shaped me. Every home I design carries a few souvenirs, not the kind you find at the airport, but lessons I've gathered along the way. These are the ones I bring home most often.
Lithuania: where it all began
I grew up in Lithuania, the daughter of a bronze artist and a formidable businesswoman. My dad took me everywhere with him, into the homes and studios of the artists he worked with: rooms filled with cigarette smoke and red wine, shelves overflowing with books, and conversations I only understood years later. As a child, I just knew it was magic. Now I know it was the wonderful, slightly crazy world of artists, and my dad, always calm and endlessly positive, guided me through it in the best possible way. My mom gave me the other half: how to run a business, keep a dozen people and personalities moving in the same direction, and stay steady when a project starts to feel like a circus. Add a lifelong awe of Gothic architecture, and you have the beginnings of a designer.
What I bring home: rooms that feel truly lived in, full of books, art and conversation, and projects run with calm, care and precision.
Italy: patina over perfection
Every summer, we return to Ravenna, a city of mosaics, quiet courtyards and walls that have seen centuries. Italian walls are never flat. Warm plaster holds the light softly, and where we found old brick in our own home, we left patches of it showing. Things here are allowed to get older: a worn step, a chipped bowl, a faded linen. And life happens outdoors. Breakfast in the courtyard, dinner under the plum tree.
What I bring home: warmth that only time can give, finds from Italian markets, and the belief that every home deserves an outdoor room you'll actually use.
Japan: the beauty of empty space
The Japanese have a word, ma, for the pause between things: the space that lets everything else breathe. It's one of the most powerful ideas in design, and one of the hardest to practise. For a client who loves Japanese culture, we built a Russian Hill home around it, softened with a little Scandinavian warmth.
What I bring home: the courage to leave a wall bare, a shelf half full and a room quiet enough to rest in.
Africa: pattern, colour and the hands behind them
Few things move me like African craft: the graphic power of mudcloth and kuba cloth, the joyful colour of a juju feather hat, the bold forms of painted Nupe stools and carved masks. Every piece carries the mark of the person who made it, and a story much older than any of us.
What I bring home: pattern and colour with real soul, and pieces that start conversations the moment guests walk in.
California: light, and life in between
California taught me to design for the light: soft and grey in a San Francisco morning, golden by afternoon. It taught me to blur the line between inside and out, and gave me a soft spot for the clean, warm lines of mid-century modern.
What I bring home: rooms that glow at every hour, and doors that open to the garden.
A home is a collection of journeys
Mine, and yours. The best homes I've designed hold the treasures their owners gathered on their own travels, with a few of mine woven in. So tell me where you've been and what you've carried home. That's where we'll begin.
