The concept of having staple pieces with clean, basic lines, and adding accessories to funk it all up is one that applies to both fashion and decorating. There are so many parallels.

I became interested in building furniture, because I couldn't find pieces I really loved for myself and my clients. I picked stuff up from the street, and tweaked those pieces to make them what I really wanted. It became a career!

I don't have formal training at all, but I did grow up around design. My parents both flipped homes. A typical weekend for us was walking through model home units. I loved walking through interesting floor plans and seeing different design aesthetics.

It's important to pull tons of pieces! If you have lots of options to choose from, you can play around and see that things that you wouldn't originally have expected to work together actually do! That applies to both clothing and decorating.

My design has always been a derivative of people I meet. I want to translate who they are and their personality into a room.

When I first became really interested in building furniture, I went to Toys-R-Us, and spent $200 on Transformers toys. By taking the toys apart and studying how they moved, I was able to figure out how to hide a table leaf, what type of contraption I'd need to slide it under the table. I'm a really visual learner.

I think it's really important to bring your own personality to the space you're in.