I’m on the plane back to New York. Two weeks away in Italy with my family and then friends for the last few days. My husband next to me, my son across the aisle, a phone in my hand that I keep turning face down and then turning back over. A habit at this point.

Two years ago this trip couldn’t happen. Or it happens, but I’m not really present. My mind can’t actually escape the chaos of my day to day. Because that business didn’t run without me. I’m working from a lounge chair, on call for a decision that could’ve waited a day, micromanaging from thousands of miles away. Once I even canceled a trip outright because the business was too crazy to leave. It just wasn’t the right time. But it took me quite some time to realize (and then admit to myself) that wasn’t dedication. That was me refusing to build something that could survive without me standing in the middle of it.

Here’s the thing about starting a business with your name on the door: Your name on the door becomes the whole selling point. The client isn’t just buying the work, they’re buying you. And somewhere in there you start to believe that’s the only thing keeping the lights on. Without you, it doesn’t exist. Without you, who would ever hire this company? I think every entrepreneur goes through this. Especially creatives, women and caregivers. We all think no one else can do it the way that I do it. It’s faster if I just do it. So I built a team I micromanaged, giving them tasks, not ownership. Nobody owns anything if you never let them.

So this trip was a test. Not of them. Of me. Was I really practicing what I preached?

Short answer: Yes. And here’s the framework.

My EA is the only one who can reach me while I’m out. One check in a week on Friday. This checkin is a summary of anything urgent at the top, with everything else filed under “to action.” The “to action” items are not serious enough they can’t wait until I’m back in the office. My design director owns everything client facing. The design team has the authority to make calls that don’t alter the design or the vision the client signed off on. If I want trust from my clients, I have to trust my team. And I tell the clients that up front. That’s the deal when you hire us. We don’t bother you for every little thing. Let us handle it.

On the first Friday, one thing needed my response. I answered it in an email and put my phone back down. Anyone else love a European timezone the way I do?

The second Friday: nothing.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bracing for it the whole time. You build the systems, you tell yourself you trust them, and some part of you is still waiting for the call that says it’s on fire. It didn’t come. And I stayed off my phone maybe seventy five percent of the time, which for me is a small miracle. I am coming home to one of the busiest weeks the company has ever had, and everything is on schedule as it should be.

Two years ago this didn’t happen. I left, micromanaged, and didn’t find out about a catastrophic error until I got back. There was no system to follow. The rules were simple: leave me alone. So while on one hand I was controlling their every move from a different timezone, on the other, I wasn’t asked about something that actually mattered.

The shop drawings had been signed off without me.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers.

What was actually different in those drawings, what it cost me, and the conversation I had with my team about the difference between authority and silence. Plus the exact infrastructure behind two weeks of not being needed: the hire that changed everything, the one that failed the first time I tried it, and what it costs to build a business that runs when you’re not in the room.

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I was poolside in Palm Springs. Rose in one hand, March AD in the other, my son in the corner of my eye doing canon balls in the hotel pool. My phone was on the table face down, the way I make myself leave it when I’m away. It buzzed anyway.

An away message doesn’t stop a client who wants you. She already emailed and received the automated reply telling her I was out of office and unreachable. However, she texted my cell anyway. I don’t give my number out anymore, but this was an older project and pre-boundary Nicole gave her cell away.

It read: “I know you’re away but…”

The sentence followed by some drama happening on site I didn’t read.

I didn’t answer her. I took a screenshot and sent it straight to my assistant. “Figure out who needs to handle this.” And so it did, and all was well in the world again.

I was away and would not reply until I was back in the office. I had a system working exactly as designed. (Except for the fact that they had my cell.)

I want to be clear about that, because the story doesn’t end there. Tidy and righteous, boundary set, problem solved.

It didn’t feel tidy. I was furious. And then, almost immediately behind the fury, came the question I always ask myself first, before I ask it of anyone else.

What did I do to let that happen?

Not what did she do. What did I do? I think a good leader always needs to look inward.

I have thought about that reflex more than I’ve thought about the text itself. A client broke a boundary I built on purpose, with intention, at real cost to my own peace of mind, and my first instinct wasn’t anger at her. It was an audit of myself. Where was the gap? What did I leave open? As if the correct response to someone else’s overreach is always to go looking for what I did to invite it.

I didn’t do anything to invite it. She had my number. That’s the whole story.

My business coach has one line he repeats to me more than any other. “Show your shit.” Not to brag. To inspire. You’re not just selling design, he says, you’re selling a life, and people don’t buy a life they’ve never seen. He’s right, and it took me years to actually act on it, because I grew up on the idea that the shoemaker’s kids have no shoes, that the person doing the work isn’t supposed to be the one enjoying the fruits of it in public. That’s not me anymore. I worked for what I have. The first class seat, the five star room, the trip itself. Wanting it and having it doesn’t make me less serious about the work.

But here’s what nobody tells you about showing your shit. The more of it you show, the more people believe they’re owed a piece of you along with it. The bigger the following, the bigger the team, the more square footage of my life is visible, the more that woman in Palm Springs felt entitled to my personal number and my Saturday afternoon. She wasn’t wrong to be a client with an emergency. She was wrong to think my visibility was an invitation. And some days I can’t tell you where the line is between the two, only that I keep finding myself on the wrong side of my own audit when someone else crosses it.

The boundary held. My team did exactly what I built them to do.

I didn’t.

What follows is the actual system. Not the philosophy of having boundaries, the operational structure of them: what my team is authorized to decide without me, where the line sits, and the two real calls they made last month that I only heard about after the fact. If you’re building something you actually want to be able to leave, this is the part worth paying for.

The Framework:

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She had been elbow deep in every project for two years. I was already working eighty hour weeks, and there was no version of absorbing what she had been carrying. I called my financial advisor that same day and told her I needed to close the business. I have never felt more defeated as a founder.

She did not tell me to hang in there. She told me to read a book and get it together.

I read it in one day, walking and listening to every word as I cried. No joke, balling through most of the book. Not because the subject matter was sad in any way. But because for the first time in my career I felt seen as an entrepreneur. As someone who came from nothing, who used the hard parts of her life as fuel, who had been grinding toward something she did not have growing up. The book named what I was doing and showed me exactly why it was destroying me. Then it told me how to fix it.

Today, I talked about this on The Interior Collective podcast. The episode is one of the most honest conversations I have had publicly about how I actually run this business. And I’m not gatekeeping. Because someone shining a light in the right direction is what I needed. And I know what other people need as well.

The framework in this book sounds almost too simple. Find what you are spending the most time on. Hire for that, and buy your time back.

What it actually requires is harder than it sounds. You have to admit that the thing consuming your hours is not the thing only you can do. For someone who built everything herself, from nothing, that is not an easy thing to accept. Nor do you think that can ever be someone else’s responsibility. We’re taught, especially as women, to put the weight of the world on our shoulders. But rest assured, it doesn’t have to be that way.

The first hire I made using this framework was an executive assistant.

My inbox, my calendar, my calls, deliveries, scheduling, the endless fielding of things that needed a human but did not need me specifically. All of it. Handed over completely. And yes, business AND personal. That sounds crazy when I write it. It was the single biggest operational change I have made since starting NFI.

The time that came back was not just time. It was my thinking. The part of my brain that actually designs and leads and builds had been completely occupied by things that required none of what I am actually good at. Lightbulb moment.

The author of this book became my business coach. I found him online, and I sent a DM. He puts his work into the world, I bought in completely, and I credit him with a version of this business that I could not have built on my own. When I say this book changed my life, I’m not lying. And I want to share every bit of information I pulled out of it and what we go deeper in on coaching.

The book is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell

One more thing: I am thinking about opening a group coaching cohort built around this framework and what I have applied to NFI specifically. If that is something you would want, tell me in the comments. I want to know before I build it.

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A few years ago, I was managing a massive build in New York. The contractor on site was the kind of person who made everything feel like it was fine. Charming. Funny. Always had a smile, a joke, and ultimately he always had a reason and a promise that next week would be different.

Week after week, something wasn’t done. Week after week, I let it go. I made small talk, I laughed at the jokes. I told myself that keeping the relationship warm was part of the job. And arguably the most important part of the job. It wasn’t. Or at least, it wasn’t the job I was hired to do.

I was so focused on whether this contractor liked me that I stopped focusing on whether he was doing what I was being paid to make sure he did. Ultimately, the client paid the price, the project was delayed, and the project ended poorly. Years of work into a project that I have nothing to show for because we ended on such bad terms. And for what? Because I wanted a builder to like me.

There’s this expectation that we stay likeable, warm, even approachable. That we find a way to get things done without ever making anyone uncomfortable in the process. That our competence comes wrapped in a painted smile.

Men don’t pay this tax. I know because I have watched it first hand, men being treated like an entirely different human being than a woman. This is the tax that gets levied on women in business. Not always. Not everywhere. But often enough that most of us recognize it without being told.

I have made a call and been sent straight to voicemail. I have watched a male counterpart make the same call and have it picked up. I have been in rooms with a male architect on site and watched clients direct every question to him, as if I were there to observe. As if I were not the one who had been running the project for months.

The construction industry makes the gap harder to ignore because it doesn’t try to hide it. A man can walk into a room and raise his voice and everyone in that room calls it authority. He is decisive and powerful. He has standards.

A woman walks into the same room and raises her voice and everyone in that room has a different word for it. She is difficult. She is emotional. She does not know how to handle herself. My own mother says I am the most intimidating person she knows. And I have learned that as a woman, exuding power does not make you impressive. It makes you a bitch.

Yes, I know. If you’re a woman reading this, that’ll make you cringe. I spent years fighting that word. The moment I stopped needing everyone to like me was not a single moment. It was a slow accumulation of evidence that the two things were in conflict. My likability and my standards. My warmth and my authority. Trying to hold both was costing me. If you are liked by everyone, you are not loved by anyone.

I got better at something harder and more useful: only working with people who understand my value, respect my time, and respect my team. That is the filter I use now. Not whether someone is pleasant. Whether they respect what I bring.

You do not have to like me, but you do have to respect me.

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Thirty seconds before it arrived, I had just been broken up with by a client. There was nothing malicious about it. It just wasn’t going to be the project we thought it was after months of work. Although it ended on a positive note, I hung up the phone and sat there in shock. Nothing like this has ever happened. I didn’t know whether to be hurt or annoyed or indifferent. But I hung up and sat in silence.

Back to emails.

No less than 30 seconds later, a new message popped into my inbox.

NFI had been selected for the Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse.

I put my head down and cried. Happy tears. The kind that catch you off guard because the rush of emotions somehow feel just too hard to keep inside. When your work gets noticed at that level, after everything it took to get there, you feel it somewhere in your gut. I had put Kips Bay on my three year vision board nine months earlier. I had written it down because I thought I needed more time. More work. More proof.

The universe apparently had a different timeline.

If you don’t know what Kips Bay is, here is the short version: it is the country’s most celebrated interior design showhouse. Once a year, one of Manhattan’s iconic residences is transformed into a destination for design enthusiasts, collectors, tastemakers, and industry leaders from around the world. Each room is given to a different standout designer. The assignment is simple: Make something extraordinary, very little time, with everything on the line.

It is not a competition. There are no judges, no elimination rounds, no panel deliberating on who wins. You are simply selected. Or you are not.

Over the last five years, the event has raised over $33 million dollars for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, an organization that funds educational and enrichment programs for New York City youth.

Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club creates access. Programs and opportunities for kids who would not otherwise have them. As someone who grew up without money, without those doors open to me, I have thought more than once about how different things might have looked if I had seen the light at the end of the tunnel a little sooner.

Beauty and charity are a powerful combination. And this organization does it better than anyone. Because it extends so much further than the walls of this townhouse. This organization is something so much bigger than what we’re doing. Being part of something that uses design to fund that mission is not a footnote to this experience. It is part of why it means what it means. And yet one more reason to feel humbled to be a part of this. And one more push of motivation to make it extraordinary.

I am going to knock it out of the park and make sure it gets every bit of attention it deserves, because attention drives visitors, visitors drive donations, and donations change kids’ lives. And at the end of the day, that’s what this event is here to do.

There are three levels of recognition in this industry.

A client calls your office and says they love your work and want to hire you. That matters. It is the foundation of everything.

A publication wants to feature a finished product in print. That matters differently. It means the work is traveling beyond the room it was built for.

And then there is this. The design industry itself telling you that your eye, your standards, and your vision belong in this elite company.

The Kips Bay Showhouse chairs are filled by none other than Bunny Williams, Jamie Drake, and Alex Hampton. If you know design, you know what those names mean. If you don’t, trust me when I say they are design royalty. And it’s an honor just to be in their company.

I will tell you something I don’t usually say out loud. I have always felt slightly on the outskirts of this industry. I am not formally trained. I did not come up through the traditional path. I built my own language, did things my own way, and spent years wondering whether that would always put a ceiling on how far I could go.

This felt like the ceiling lifting. That there is no end in sight.

I put Kips Bay on the vision board because I thought three years would give me enough time. Enough time to keep building, to keep proving. To finally deserve it.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then.

We already had.

Interior design is a team sport. I have never claimed otherwise and I never will. My team makes this possible. They are here every single day giving everything they have to the work, to the craft, to the standard. Only a certain kind of person chooses that. I knew when I told them about this that they would be excited instead of scared.

Terrified, but in a good way. We all love a challenge.

A challenge not only to finish this in rapid speed, but how do you successfully balance our existing client work. Because that train doesn’t stop.

That said, most designers don’t talk about the cost. The time cost, the stress cost, and of course, the money.

This Showhouse is my team’s full focus for two months straight. Relationships being called in. Favors being asked. After everything, we are looking at $60,000 - $100,000 out of pocket, and that is after the sponsorships that make it possible. On top of that, my team is not fully available for billable work during this window, which means the actual number is considerably higher than what I just said.

At the end of the day, I am a business woman. I always ask about return on investment before committing to something like this. And with this type of investment, I had to make sure there would be a return. And a good one.

In the last few weeks, we have had a flood of calls, emails, inquiries, and press just from being announced. And we haven’t even shown the room yet. The return is already showing up. More collaborations, product deals, speaking engagements, bigger projects. It’s been a sudden shift that feels like we’re heading in the right direction. And as I said before, the universe gives you what you’re ready for.

We don’t have an easy road ahead getting this to the finish line. This is a beautiful, chaotic, demanding thing we are in the middle of. But we are going to do it. And we are going to be proud of what we put in that room.

I am proud of how far we have come. As a designer. As a business woman. As a leader. As someone who grew up thinking rooms like this were for other people.

They are for us now.

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about the cost of living with a point of view. The taste, the sacrifice, the money, and the choices nobody talks about. If this landed, forward it to someone who’s in the middle of something that matters.

I’ve been working with a business coach for a few years now. And I’ve watched him operate for long enough to understand what was actually different about him.

It was not his resources. It was not his connections. It was not even his work ethic. I was working as hard as anyone I knew. Harder, probably, in the way that people who are trying to outrun something work hard. Otherwise known as burnout.

It was the size of what he was holding in his head.

His vision was absurd. Genuinely, uncomfortably large. The kind of thing that sounds delusional when you say it out loud at dinner. The kind of thing that makes people smile politely and change the subject. And he said it anyway. To anyone who would listen. Without apology. Without hedging. Without the qualifying language most of us use to protect ourselves from seeming too much.

I was not doing that.

I was managing the week in front of me. Obsessing over the day to day. Solving the problems that were immediately visible and calling that momentum. I thought I was being responsible. I thought I was being realistic. What I was actually doing was staying small enough to feel safe.

The specific feeling of watching someone operate from a vision that big, when you are operating from a vision that is not, is hard to name. It is not envy exactly. It is more like recognizing a version of yourself you have been too careful to become.

I sat with that feeling for longer than I should have. Then I did something about it.

Most people do not stay stuck because they lack ambition or ideas. They stay stuck because they are running on one of the three things you need and missing the other two. Here is what I figured out, in order, and what it cost.

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In 2024, the numbers worked.

More than they ever had. More than I expected, at least not that fast. The projects were bigger. The clients came from the right people. Press was running. My Instagram showed a version of my life that looked exactly like what I had set out to build.

From the outside, I had arrived.

Inside, I was unraveling in a way I didn’t have a word for. Not depression. Not burnout, at least not the kind people write books about. Something quieter and more disorienting. I would finish a client call and sit in the silence after and not know what I was supposed to feel. I kept asking myself the same question in different configurations, the way you do when you’re not quite ready to hear the answer.

Is this it?

Upstate living six year ago had started as necessity, moved to strategy and became a lifestyle. I told myself it made sense. Better cost structure. Different pace. Space for the life I said I wanted. And my family was happy. What more could I ask for?

What I didn’t fully account for was that the market I was in could not support the business I was trying to build. I was assembling a high performing caliber of team in a city that didn’t have hustle culture. I would hire someone who looked right on paper, work to shape them into what I needed, and watch them leave or plateau or decide they were comfortable right where they were.

I wasn’t.

And somewhere in the middle of what looked like my best year, I started to understand what it costs to be somewhere you haven’t outgrown yet.

The revenue was real. The disorientation was real. Both were true at once, and I had no framework for that. The money kept telling me I was fine. The rest of me wasn’t listening.

Then a key person backed out.

This was someone I had built a plan around. The arrangement was clear. They were coming with me as I moved into the next phase. It wouldn’t disrupt the flow of work, it wouldn’t throw the team into a frenzy. Then they said no.

And what I felt was not what I expected…

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Not beautiful. Not gorgeous. Masterpiece.

I asked my usual closing question. What do you like, what don’t you like, how are you feeling. I expected notes. Maybe a fabric swap. What I got instead was a kind of stunned silence, the specific quiet of two people who walked in expecting a presentation and walked out realizing they had just watched themselves get translated into a room. Then the wife said it. This is a masterpiece. And before I could respond, her husband said the line that actually changed our year. We just got an eight million dollar apartment. We want you to do that one too.

We hadn’t pitched anything. We hadn’t mentioned scope, capacity, or a single number. We had presented fabric and floor plans for a country house, and somehow that was the thing that convinced two strangers to hand us a problem worth thirty times the size of the one in front of us.

That is not a sales technique. I want to be precise about that, because the easy version of this story is “great presentations close bigger deals” and that is true but it is not the actual lesson. The actual lesson is that we were never designing a weekend house. We were designing the version of themselves they hadn’t been able to put into words.

Here is what almost no one tells you about why some design firms scale and others stay stuck doing pretty rooms for modest fees forever. The ones who stay stuck are selling square footage. Floor plans, finishes, a nice rendering of a nice room. The ones who scale are doing something closer to translation work. They are taking a person who cannot articulate what they want, reading the evidence sitting right in front of them, and handing back a version of their life so accurate it stops sounding like decorating and starts sounding like being seen.

This couple gave us almost nothing to work with on paper. No mood boards, no Pinterest folder, no language for what they wanted. What they gave us was an architect-designed house in a specific location, two young kids, aging in laws who’d be staying for long weekends, and an apartment in the city that told us absolutely nothing about who they were. That last detail mattered more than anything else in the brief. They had the taste and the money to hire a firm like ours and yet their own home revealed nothing. That is not a flaw. That is a signal. It told us they had never had the experience of seeing themselves reflected back in a space, which meant the bar for what would move them was lower than they realized and the impact would be higher than we expected.

We read people the way some people read a room’s load bearing walls. Not what they say. What’s actually there.

By the time we sat down to present, we already knew this house had nothing to do with what they’d typed into a brief. It had everything to do with who walked through that door.

This is the part of the work that never makes it into a portfolio. The fabric selection isn’t the skill. Anyone can pick a nice fabric. The skill is knowing, before you ever open a sample book, exactly which fabric belongs to people who haven’t told you who they are yet.

If you want to know exactly how we get there, paid subscribers get the full breakdown below, including the specific questions we ask before a single rendering exists, and the moment in this exact project where we knew we had it right before the client ever saw a single board.

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That changes today.

Starting now, Worth The Expense has a paid tier.

Every essay I write opens free. You’ll get the situation, the observation, the moment where something shifted. But the resolution: the real cost, the full decision, what actually happened. That’s for paid subscribers. Not because I’m withholding. Because the part that actually changes how you think about something is the part that’s hardest to say out loud. That’s what you’re paying for.

Paid subscribers also get one additional post per month. Longer. More specific. The version with the real numbers in it.

That’s it. No fluff. No promises about exclusive content I haven’t figured out yet. Just the resolution to every essay, and one more post a month that goes further than the free feed allows.

For the first 30 people who subscribe: $7/month or $75/year. The annual saves you one month.

After that it goes to $9/month and $90/year. I’m not manufacturing urgency. There are 216 of you and I genuinely want the people who’ve been reading since the beginning to get in first.

If you’ve been reading Worth The Expense and felt like something was being left unsaid, you were right. That part is behind the paywall now.

Subscribe for $7/month →
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Nicole

Not because the work wasn’t there. The work was always there. It was because I hired wrong, repeatedly, and every bad hire cost me something I could not get back. Money, obviously. But also client trust. Also my reputation. Also projects that spiraled so far out of control that I ended up working for free just to keep the relationship from going public.

That is what a bad hire actually costs. Not the salary. Not the severance. The version of you that has to stand in front of a client you respect and explain why the thing you promised did not happen the way you said it would. The version of you that works until midnight fixing something that should have been done at noon. The version of you that starts to wonder if maybe the problem is you.

For a while, I thought it was.

There was a day, not that long ago, when my number two gave her notice. The person who held the operation together. Gone. That same day I nearly closed the business. I had been working 80 hour weeks. There was no room for more hours, only smarter ones, and I did not have smarter ones left to give. I looked at years of work and saw nothing to show for it. I had the clients but not the team. I had the vision but not the infrastructure. I had put in everything and was watching it fail in front of my own eyes.

That is the worst feeling in the world. Not the failing. The effort behind the failing. The knowledge that you cared more than anyone around you and it still was not enough.

I did not close the business.

I rebuilt it. From the hiring up.

Here is how I hire now and I will not soften this for you.

I do not run a polished interview. I push. I probe. I want to see how you handle a demanding person in a room because that is who you will be working with every single day. I tell every candidate upfront: I am intense. I am demanding. The pace here is not for everyone and I have zero interest in convincing you to stay. You are in or you are out. There is no middle.

Most people who are wrong for this self-select before I have to make the call. That is the point. I am not trying to trap anyone. I am trying to save us both six months of pretending.

What I am looking for is not on a resume. It is not experience or credentials or a portfolio full of beautiful work someone else art directed. It is work ethic and something I would loosely call taste. Not aesthetic taste. The taste to know what matters, what can wait, and what needs to be done before anyone asks you to do it. You can teach almost anything. You cannot teach someone to care. You cannot teach hustle. You cannot teach the instinct to stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable. Those things are either there or they are not, and I know within five minutes which one I am looking at.

Once you are in, you get 90 days.

That is real. I throw you into everything on day one. Company deck, style book, platform access, SOPs filtered to your role. You start on a Monday so the team meeting is your first introduction. It is immersion, not abandonment. But it only works if you are willing to be immersed. After 90 days, you are either on the bus or off the bus. I did not invent that framework. I got it from Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time, a book I found the same day my number two walked out. It cracked something open that I have been building from ever since.

I will tell you what I expect because I think most founders are cowards about this part.

I do not expect you to work at midnight. But if something is not done, you will finish it. I do not care what time that happens. I care that it happens. I do not micromanage process. I manage outcomes. If the outcome is not there, the conversation will be direct and it will be fast and it will not feel good. That is not cruelty. That is clarity. And the right people do not just tolerate clarity. They crave it.

This year I offered the team summer Fridays. One condition: implement one AI tool into your workflow before you leave at noon. The reward is real. The cost is visible. People move when both of those things are true. And the best part is it forces the team to hold each other accountable, because nobody wants to be the person who could not figure it out.

The wrong people hear all of this and call it toxic. They want flexibility without accountability. They find structure oppressive instead of freeing. They want the title and the salary and the aesthetic of working at a design firm without the relentless, grinding, sometimes unglamorous work of actually building something that lasts.

I do not hire those people anymore.

The people I hire now understand something that took me six years and a near collapse to learn: the standard is the strategy. Every shortcut I ever took on talent cost me ten times what the right hire would have. Every time I lowered the bar because I needed a body in a seat, I paid for it in reputation, in client trust, in hours of my own life I will never get back.

I will not do that again.

The team I have now stayed through the hardest six months this company has ever had. Relocations, a studio launch, a complete operational rebuild. They showed up when it was chaotic and they performed when it was uncomfortable and I believe they are going to be extraordinary when things settle down.

They are worth the expense.

And if none of this scares you, send me a DM. I will tell you what we are hiring for.

I set it up the day he was born. Every year on his birthday, I sit down and write to him. Not a card, not a note in a baby book. A real email, addressed to a person who does not exist yet, telling him who he is this year, what he was like, what I saw in him that I am afraid I will forget by the time he is old enough to ask. I have done this every year of his life and seal it with a tear.

I don’t know if the tears are watching him grow into a boy I’m proud of, or knowing there’s so many aspects of his little life I’m not a part of. Will that gap just get bigger? Or will that gap bond us stronger when we are together? Only time will tell. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, all I can do is make thoughtful decisions that will one day serve him well.

I imagined I would hand the email account to him at eighteen. Some ceremonial unlocking, a stack of years he could finally read all at once. However, I am starting to think he will need it sooner than that. And if I am honest with myself, I think it will mean more to him the year I am not here to say any of it out loud.

That is not a morbid thought. It is just a true one, and I have learned the difference. When you take for granted the person in front of you, only to fully appreciate them when they’re gone.

My father died when I was twelve. I have spent a long time grieving what my father missed and what I missed, and at some point that grief turned into a decision. If I could not have what I lost, I was going to make sure my son never had to wonder. And wow, what I would do to have years of sentiment from him. Even if it were just twelve. Written down for me to see whenever I needed to feel something.

I say this because I practice it. In my 20s I lost my uncle. I didn’t think that gut punch of loss could be any deeper, and somehow it was. I was never one to be too sentimental, and by accident I kept an unorganized folder of voicemails on my phone. When he died, it took me sometime to realize I had something of his when I needed it. It is nothing special. No final words, no wisdom, no deathbed clarity. Just him, mid-sentence, cracking a joke because that is what he always did. He was one of the only people whose name could appear on my phone and I would never feel annoyed to see it. He was never calling with bad news. He left you better than he found you, every single time. The voicemail itself is nothing. What it holds is everything. On the days I need to hear his voice, I press play, and for thirty seconds he is there.

That is what I am building for my son. Not advice. Not wisdom dressed up as a parenting milestone. Proof. Proof that I was here, that I was paying attention, that I saw him clearly in real time instead of only in retrospect.

Here is the part I do not say out loud very often.

I am not always there. I was thinking about him constantly, building something I believed would give him a better life, and there were stretches where that meant I was somewhere else when I could have been in the room with him. I have wrestled with that. I expect I will keep wrestling with it for a long time, because there is no version of building a company and raising a child where you get to feel finished with the guilt. You just learn to carry it differently.

I think most parents who build something ambitious know this feeling and almost none of them say it plainly. We talk about hustle and sacrifice like they are clean, noble words. They are not clean. They cost something specific, and the thing they usually cost is time with the people you are supposedly doing all of it for. I am not interested in pretending that trade doesn’t exist. I made it. I am still making it. The least I can do is be honest about the bill.

The letters are not an apology. They are the closest thing I have to evidence.

I do not know exactly what age my son will be when he finally reads them. I do not know what his life will look like by then, what he will have already decided about who I was or wasn’t. I only know that I showed up, every year, on the one day that belongs entirely to him, and wrote down the truth as I saw it. That is the only thing I have ever been able to fully control in this. Not whether I was in every room. Whether I told him, in writing, that I was watching.

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about living with intention; the taste, the sacrifice, and everything it actually costs.

^{Our Hudson home, furnished.}

Not in the polite, quietly-skeptical way. Out loud. To our faces. My husband and I had just gotten married, taken a modest honeymoon in Napa, and were about to hand over every dollar of our $30,000 wedding money on a down payment for a house two hours from the city that neither of us had ever intended to live in full time.

We were broke. Still paying rent in New York. Now carrying a mortgage on a llama farm in the Hudson Valley that cost $237,000 and looked exactly like what you think: ugly.

I want to be honest about what broke feels like, because it gets smoothed over in stories like this. It is terrifying. It is the particular anxiety of having made a decision you cannot unmake, with money you no longer have, for a reason that sounds insane when you say it out loud. We did it anyway.

That decision turned into $3,000,000 over the next six years.

But that is not actually the story.

The story is what it cost. Not financially. The other kind.

I did not grow up with money. I did not have a mentor who showed me how to move it. What I had was a point of view, an eye trained over fifteen years in fashion and design, and an almost pathological comfort with discomfort. I can walk into a space that looks like a total loss and immediately see what it wants to become. I know which $50,000 renovation returns $300,000 and which one returns nothing. That is not instinct. That is expertise. And expertise, it turns out, has a dollar value that most people never bother to find out.

So I found out.

The llama farm was the education. I had no money left after the down payment, which meant I learned to do everything myself. I cut tile, I installed wallpaper, I used a router to rip door hinges. My husband learned to operate a riding mower, install light fixtures and swap dated outlets. Every weekend we drove up from the city and we worked, and every weekend it got a little better, and I got a little prouder, and I started to understand something important: I was not just renovating a house. I was building a system.

When COVID hit we moved up full time. Our son was nine months old. What that period actually looked like was chaos. A new baby, a design firm to run, a house that needed everything, in a town we’d chosen because the math worked rather than because the timing was right. It is not something I will romanticize. The hardest part was not the renovation. It was finding enough help with my son so I could do what I was good at. Balancing being a mother with being a builder and a business owner is something I do not think gets talked about honestly enough. Most days I did both badly. I kept going.

When the Hudson Valley market started to spike, I jumped. I pitched selling to my husband, found the top broker in the area and got to work on selling the dream.

Here is what you need to know about my husband. He does not like change. Not a little, genuinely, fundamentally, at his core. I like being uncomfortable. He likes comfort. Every single one of these moves required convincing, because every single one meant uprooting our son, dismantling friendships, asking him to trust a number on a spreadsheet over the life we had already built somewhere. I get it. He always wanted to know what happens if it doesn’t work. But it’s honestly something that has never crossed my mind. I have learned that comfort is the most expensive thing most people will ever choose. It costs them everything they could have had.

We sold the llama farm for $725,000.

The moment that deal closed I knew I had started something I would not be able to stop. Next property: $995,000, a building on Warren Street in Hudson that had been sitting on the market for over a year. The listing was technically classified as multi-family, invisible to every single-family search on Zillow. I saw a city townhouse waiting to be born. We gutted it, turned it into a single-family home, applied the same eye I use for clients every day to our own asset. It sold for $2.1M. Records broken.

The next one was $1.1M. Rotted siding, a fence falling down, duct tape over holes in the closets. Four thousand square feet, two acres, a 200-year-old property with the bones of something magnificent. We went in knowing we would touch everything and keep its character. And for the first time, we had enough capital to move on something simultaneously.

That simultaneously nearly broke my marriage.

We bought a property for $495,000 and decided to run it as a pure business. No personal attachment, no sentiment, just execution. What I did not do was lay out a business plan with my husband before I started. I did not set expectations or establish roles or build any kind of structure around what I was asking of us both. I just started, and when I needed him I expected him to show up like an employee. He did not. And I resented him for it, deeply, in a way that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the fact that I had built something without him and then blamed him for not being inside it.

That property sold for $695,000 five months later.

The profit was real. The damage was real. And I made a decision I have kept ever since: I will not run a business without systems. Not with my husband, not with anyone. The greatest threat to everything I am building is not the market. It is the assumption that the people I love will simply keep up with the pace I set without being told where we are going.

The $1.1M property just sold for $2.8M. Records broken again.

Here is what I want you to take from six years of this, and I am going to say it plainly because I am tired of the version of this conversation that tiptoes around the uncomfortable part.

People stay broke because they choose comfort over risk. Every time. They wait until the timing is right, until the market is right, until their husband is enthusiastic and their family thinks it’s a good idea. The timing is never right. The market is never right. And the people who love you will think you are insane right up until the moment you are not.

The edge I had was never money. It was the willingness to be terrified and keep moving.

^{The entry hall, before. The entry hall, lived in. The entry hall, the last day. Hudson, NY.}

NFI is now the foundation for the next phase of this. What started as a personal financial strategy is becoming a business vertical. Luxury transformation at scale, with a team behind it, with systems in place before a single dollar moves. The same eye. The same discipline. The same refusal to spend a dollar that does not earn two back.

I am just getting started.

We’re transforming luxury on a flip timeline. And I still hate the word flipping.

^{Our Hudson home, the last day.}

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about living with intention; the taste, the sacrifice, and everything it actually costs.

You’ve moved everything you had toward one moment, and then it passes. The world doesn’t stop turning, and your inbox doesn’t go quiet, and somewhere in the back of your head a new list is already forming. That’s the part nobody talks about. Not the celebration. Not the champagne. The 6am brain on four hours of sleep, already doing math on what comes next.

May 26th was probably the most exhausted I’ve ever felt in my life. And I mean that without drama. There’s a particular kind of tired that isn’t fixed by sleep. It’s the kind that sits behind your eyes and in your chest, and you know the only real cure is momentum. So you wake up and you move. But the giant exhale you take the next morning feels like a ton of bricks.

I’ve always been wired this way. I don’t think I’ll change. That ship has sailed. And I’ve made a kind of peace with the fact that not everyone is, that some people need time to land before they can take off again. I wish I could understand what that feels like. But that’s not me.

Knowing this about myself has been a massive breakthrough. I can see it, feel it, understand it. And now, I hire for it. That person who’s constantly moving toward a goal. And when they hit one, the next target is already formed. I hire for it because we speak the same language. And when you find that in someone else, it’s a magical thing.

The one thing that got me through the stretch between the move, the launch, and the debilitating exhaustion to follow?

The team.

That’s not a gracious answer. It’s the accurate one. I am not a one-woman show, and I have never been, and the last few months made that clearer than anything else could have. From design to social to marketing, there are so many hands in what we do. The train kept moving through all of it. Not a beat skipped. Clients were served. Projects ran. Revenue came in.

That’s not luck. That’s the right people in the right seats.

The best business advice I’ve ever received is exactly that. Not just finding great people, but placing them correctly. It sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most people get the hiring right and the placement wrong, and then wonder why the work feels like friction. I’ve been fortunate enough to finally have both, and it shows.

I’ve always been ambitious. I just didn’t always know what to do with it.

The answer, for me, was to stop trying to execute everything and start building the system that executes. To move from designer to firm. To understand that my name on the door isn’t a reason to be everywhere. It’s a reason to be right where it matters.

We are not heart surgeons. We are not saving lives. But we are handling a lot of money, a lot of trust, and a lot of people’s most private spaces. I take that seriously. I also refuse to be so serious about it that I forget to have fun.

The launch happened. The work continues. And I’m more certain than I’ve been in years that the people standing next to me are exactly the right ones.

That’s what it took.

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about living with intention; the taste, the sacrifice, and everything it actually costs.

He didn’t see 37. And for a long time, neither did I. I was living, but I wasn’t tracking the cost of how I was doing it. The drinking. The grinding. The constant forward motion with no pause to ask whether any of it was actually working. I was building something. I just wasn’t sure it was me.

Last year, when I turned 37, something shifted. Not because I had survived (that word implies luck, and what happened wasn’t luck). It was a decision. A series of decisions, made slowly and then all at once. I changed my life before that birthday arrived. I stopped waiting for a reason to take care of myself and made the reason the thing itself.

I drink less now. I work out every day. I read. I reflect. I set goals I actually intend to keep. I hired someone to run the logistics of my day so I can stop spending my most valuable hours on things that drain me. I press pause to be with my family, not as a reward for finishing the work, but as the point of the whole endeavor.

I know how this sounds.

It sounds selfish. And I’m not going to defend it, because I think the discomfort in that word is worth sitting with. We’ve built an entire culture around the idea that putting yourself first is something to apologize for. That it’s something to qualify, to soften, to frame as ultimately for someone else’s benefit. But here’s what I know to be true: when I’m not running at 100%, everyone around me pays for it. My family. My team. My clients. The people I love most absorb the cost of a version of me that isn’t fully present. That’s not noble. That’s just expensive.

So I stopped apologizing for the maintenance.

I write this on a plane to Paris.

I knew I wanted to take myself here today. Not as indulgence, but as an appreciation. Because I believe how you mark something tells you what you think it’s worth. And I have decided that another year of being alive and awake and choosing myself is worth marking in a way that feels true to who I am.

This is also when my year begins.

Not January 1st, with its collective reset and its borrowed energy and its resolutions built on someone else’s calendar. Today. This day, at 38, is when I look back at the last 12 months and take inventory. When I decide what I’m carrying forward and what I’m leaving behind. When I set the intentions that will shape the year ahead.

This year, there’s more to account for than usual.

The last six months were a sprint. Relocating my family. Moving the studio to Chelsea. Selling my house. Trading a home for an apartment, a life in one place for a life in motion, all in service of a larger vision I’ve been building toward for years. I raced toward the opening. I wanted to arrive. And I did arrive. But somewhere in the middle of all of it, I wore myself thin in ways I didn’t fully acknowledge until I sat down to write this.

That’s the part no one tells you about building something. The toll isn’t always visible. You can be executing beautifully and depleting quietly at the same time. The discipline required to keep going can become, if you’re not careful, the very thing that keeps you from noticing when you need to stop.

I noticed.

That’s the mindset shift I keep coming back to: looking inward. When something goes wrong with an employee, with a client, with a project, my first move now is to turn toward myself before I turn toward the situation. What did I do? What could I have done differently? What am I carrying into this moment that isn’t actually about this moment?

That practice changes everything. Not because it lets you off the hook, but because it makes you useful. You can’t lead from a place of reaction. You can’t build anything durable from defensiveness. When you look inward first, you stop trying to manage everything outside of you and start actually improving the one thing you have full control over.

At 38, I know more about what I’m made of than I did at 37. And I know more at 37 than I did at 36. My father didn’t get to find out who he would become after 36. I think about that. I think about it more than I say out loud.

So today, I celebrate.

Not in spite of how hard it’s been, but because of it. Because the difficulty is the proof. Because the fact that I wore myself thin and noticed and sat down to account for it. That’s the work. That’s what it looks like to stay alive on purpose.

The year begins today.

I know exactly what I’m building.

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about living with intention; the taste, the sacrifice, and everything it actually costs.

That part I wasn’t worried about. I know what I’m capable of. I know what I can push through, and I know when I’ve done the work. The space would be right. The install would land. That wasn’t the question.

The question, the one I kept circling, the one I didn’t say out loud to anyone, was simpler and much harder: Is anyone going to give a shit?

That’s it. That’s what was sitting in the back of my mind through all of it. Not whether the work was good. The work was good. But good work in an empty room is just a room. And I’d put too much on the line for this to just be a room.

I grew up dancing. And every single performance, without fail, I would get nauseous beforehand. Like physically sick with nerves. I’d pull through, I always pulled through, but the feeling was always there: this wave of nerves right before I had to go on.

I haven’t felt that in a long time. I stopped caring about outcomes in that visceral way. You get older, you get more seasoned, and at some point you just stop giving that much of yourself to the unknown. You make decisions and you execute and you don’t waste energy on what you can’t control.

The morning of the launch, it came back.

Not dramatically. Just… there. Butterflies, I guess. That old, specific wave of anxiety. And I think what it meant was that this one counted. That I’d let this one matter in the same way things mattered when I was young enough to feel everything in my body before I could reason it away.

That’s not something I take lightly. I work very hard at not letting things get to me. So when something does, I pay attention.

There’s a version of launching something where you control everything and nothing surprises you and you feel nothing because you’ve managed it into submission. I’ve done that. It’s safe and it produces forgettable results.

This wasn’t that.

This had other people’s hands on it. My team did what I trained them to do, which means I had to trust them in the way I always ask clients to trust me, fully, without interference, even when every instinct says go check on that. The tension between wanting to control the final outcome and knowing that the only way to actually scale is to let go of it. That doesn’t disappear. You just get better at tolerating it.

What I won’t compromise on, ever, is taste. Not the style of it, that shifts with every project. The standard of it. The sense that something is either right or it isn’t, and you know the difference in your body before you can explain it. That part is non-negotiable. Not because it makes me rigid, but because without it, there’s nothing to anchor the rest of the work to.

Taste is the line. Everything else is execution.

The work is always the answer. Not the celebration after.

I’m curious, what’s the one thing you refuse to let slide, even when it would be easier? Tell me in the comments. I read them.

Worth The Expense is a newsletter about living with intention; the taste, the sacrifice, and everything it actually costs. If this landed, forward it to someone who’s in the middle of something that matters.

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Because that’s where they actually live.

In our work, it’s rarely the big gestures that define a space. It’s the millwork alignment that’s off by half an inch. The seam that wasn’t quite resolved. The fabric looked good in isolation, but didn’t quite hold the room together once everything arrived. These are small things. Easy to overlook. Easy to rationalize. Easy to fix later.

But they’re never just about the detail. They’re about the standard.

And the truth is, standards aren’t aspirational. They’re operational. They don’t exist in what we say we care about. They exist in what we actually allow.

There’s a version of leadership that people like to talk about. Vision. Growth. Strategy. All of that matters. But after a certain point, the thing that quietly defines a studio is much simpler.

What do you let slide?

If you say details matter, but you approve something you know isn’t right because you’re tired or behind schedule, you’ve just made a decision. Not just about that one detail, but about the culture of the work. If you avoid a difficult conversation with a contractor or a team member because it feels uncomfortable, that’s also a decision.

Not a neutral one.

Over time, those decisions accumulate. And eventually, they become the room you’re standing in.

In interiors, we talk a lot about layering. Texture over texture. Old against new. Tension that resolves into something cohesive.

Standards work the same way.

A well-run studio feels calm on the surface, but it’s built on a series of small, consistent choices made over and over again. The discipline to correct something early. The willingness to revisit a decision that isn’t holding. The restraint to say no when something doesn’t belong, even if it would be easier to move on.

It’s not glamorous work. It slows you down. It asks more of you than you sometimes want to give.

But that’s where the integrity of the space comes from.

And, more importantly, the integrity of the team.

There’s also a personal layer to this that I don’t think we talk about enough.

The standards you hold externally are usually a reflection of the ones you hold internally.

If you don’t fully trust your eye, you hesitate. You overexplain. You soften your position. You start negotiating with yourself in small ways. And those small negotiations show up everywhere — in your work, in your communication, in the way your team reads your decisions.

When you are clear, things simplify. Not easier, but cleaner. You don’t need to convince anyone of what you already know to be true. You just have to stand in it.

One of the harder realizations, especially as a business owner, is that maintaining a standard often creates short-term discomfort.

You have to slow things down when you’d rather move quickly. You have to address something directly when it would be easier to let it pass. You have to risk being misunderstood in order to be clear.

Most people avoid that. It’s human.

But the tradeoff is predictable. Short-term comfort becomes long-term dysfunction. Misalignment compounds. The work starts to drift. And eventually, the people who care the most — the ones with the highest standards themselves — stop wanting to stay.

Not because the work is hard, but because the standard isn’t being protected.

In a studio like ours, where the goal is to create spaces that feel deeply personal and completely lived in, that standard matters even more. The work sits at the intersection of home, fashion, and culture. It’s layered, expressive, sometimes a little unexpected.

That kind of work requires clarity.

It requires a point of view that isn’t diluted over time for the sake of ease or approval. It requires a willingness to hold the line — on quality, on process, on how things are executed — even when no one would necessarily notice if you didn’t.

Because the client may not be able to articulate why a space feels right, but they will feel it.

And that feeling is built on hundreds of decisions they’ll never see.

I’m still learning how to do this well.

There are moments when I catch something late and think, I should have addressed that earlier. Moments where I realize I’ve been clear in my head but not consistent in my actions. Moments where I’ve chosen speed over precision, or comfort over correction.

But the work is in noticing.

In coming back to the standard. In tightening it, reinforcing it, and living it a little more fully the next time.

If you’re leading a team, or building something of your own, it’s worth asking yourself a simple question:

Where am I letting things slide?

Not in theory. Not in intention. In practice. Because whatever that answer is — that’s the standard you’re actually setting.

And over time, that becomes everything.

An office is a container. A headquarters functions as an operating system. It’s where decisions are sharpened, standards are protected, and the work is given the conditions it needs to evolve. When done well, it does more than house a team. It reflects how that team thinks.

For a long time, we’ve been designing spaces for other people’s lives and businesses while quietly refining our own. The way we collaborate. The way we review work. The way we move between solitude and conversation, focus and exchange. Those internal rhythms matter more than square footage ever could.

That’s why New York, specifically Midtown, entered the conversation. Midtown is often misunderstood. It’s efficient, direct, and unapologetically serious. Infrastructure lives there. Momentum is visible. Things are expected to work. That expectation is precisely what makes it compelling as a creative base.

This new space isn’t driven by prestige or visibility. It’s about proximity…to collaborators, to clients, to a tempo that matches the level of work we’re doing now. It’s about establishing a foothold that supports scale without sacrificing care.

Designing a headquarters requires a different set of questions than designing a home. How does a space support judgment calls made under pressure? Where do ideas get tested before they’re shared? What does focus look like when the work is complex and the stakes are high? These questions begin with operations, not aesthetics.

The aesthetics come later.

We’re approaching this buildout the same way we approach any project. With intention. With restraint. With a clear refusal to design for optics alone. Every decision, from layout to materials to light, is being filtered through how we actually work, not through assumptions about what an office should look like.

There will be moments of beauty, of course. There always are. But the priority is clarity. Circulation. Flexibility. Spaces that support deep work and honest conversation. A headquarters that feels layered and alive, never performative.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing this process in real time. Site visits. Design decisions. Constraints that force better thinking. The Midtown streets that frame the workday. Not as a highlight reel, but as a record of how a creative environment takes shape when it’s treated as a tool rather than a backdrop.

The standards remain the same. The care remains the same. What’s evolving is the infrastructure that supports it all, quietly and deliberately, with an eye toward longevity.

A creative headquarters isn’t finished when the doors open. It’s shaped over time. Through use. Through refinement. Through the work itself.

We’re looking forward to bringing you inside as it takes form.

As the studio comes together, we’ll be offering a small number of private previews, followed by early client conversations and small gatherings. Details to come for those on the list.

I keep thinking about how politely we talk about growth. We say we want it. We admire it in hindsight. We celebrate it once it looks clean and inevitable. But living inside growth feels nothing like that.

It feels like tension you can’t quite name. Like the sense that something familiar no longer fits, but nothing new has fully arrived yet. Like asking yourself questions you can’t un-ask once they surface.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the idea that growth isn’t just an individual act. It’s relational. It happens between people, between roles, between versions of ourselves that are no longer aligned by default. And that’s where things get complicated. Growing together isn’t about liking each other. It isn’t about shared taste, shared history, or shared ambition. It’s about what happens when change enters the room, and no one pretends it isn’t there. I’ve learned this the hard way.

When one person evolves, the relationship has to renegotiate its terms. When a team stretches, the weak seams show. When a business matures, what used to feel scrappy becomes unclear, and what once felt flexible becomes evasive. Growth exposes things: needs, limits, boundaries we were willing to ignore before.

And not everyone wants to look directly at that moment. What we often call “misalignment” is really unspoken growth. One person is moving. The other is standing still. Or moving in a different direction. The real damage doesn’t come from that divergence — it comes from pretending it isn’t happening. Silence breeds resentment. Clarity creates options.

The part I don’t hear talked about enough is the word agreement. To grow together requires consent. It requires naming what growth actually means here. It requires checking in when the pace changes. It requires the humility to say: I’m changing. Are you willing to change too? That question is powerful. It’s also terrifying.

Because the answer might be no. Or not anymore. Or not in the same way.

I’ve come to believe that growing together doesn’t mean growing forever. Some people are meant to walk with you for a season. Some for a chapter. A few for a lifetime. Letting that be true isn’t failure — it’s respect.

What is a failure is clinging to sameness long after it has stopped serving anyone.

In leadership, in partnership, in friendship, the most generous thing we can do is create environments where evolution is expected, not punished. Where curiosity is protected. Where feedback isn’t treated as a threat. Where people are allowed to outgrow roles without shame.

I recently heard someone describe ending a relationship not because of conflict, but because curiosity had disappeared. That landed hard for me. Because curiosity is the engine of growth. When it’s gone, the relationship becomes maintenance, not movement. So this is the question I keep returning to — in my work, in my life, in the quiet moments when things feel unsettled but honest: Who am I growing with? And have we actually agreed to grow together… or am I just assuming we are?

Growth is inevitable. Shared growth is a choice.

And like all real choices, it asks something of us — honesty, courage, and a willingness to let things change, even when we don’t yet know what they’ll become. If you’re in that in-between space right now, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re probably just telling the truth sooner than most.

Long before Nicole Fisher Interior Design existed, the city shaped my understanding of craft, pace, and expectation. It’s where I learned to think in scenes and sequences, to care about how things come together under pressure, and to trust that the smallest details carry the most meaning. That sensibility followed me from fashion into interiors, and it continues to inform how I approach every project today.

Over time, New York quietly became part of our studio’s rhythm as well. Client meetings layered into travel days… Site visits folded into working weeks… Familiar streets became places where decisions were sharpened and ideas clarified. What began as proximity slowly became alignment.

We’re now in the final stages of securing a permanent New York studio.

The lease is being finalized. The shape of the space is clear. Doors are set to open this spring.

This is an expansion of how we work, not a relocation. Our Hudson Valley presence remains an essential part of our practice. Upstate continues to support depth, focus, and long-term thinking. The Manhattan studio extends that foundation, creating a sistered rhythm between reflection and immediacy, strategy and execution.

As this next chapter comes into focus, we’re also beginning to build our New York City–based team. Designers, project managers, and collaborators who share our standards and our way of working. People who understand that good design depends on judgment and execution as much as taste.

Being present in New York allows us to work more deliberately across both contexts. It shortens the distance between idea and action. It supports deeper collaboration, more frequent site presence, and a studio rhythm that reflects the pace and complexity of our clients and partners in the city.

The work itself doesn’t change. The standards don’t change. What’s evolving is the infrastructure supporting it.

In the months ahead, we’ll share more as this studio takes shape. The space. The people. The decisions that define a creative practice long before the doors open.

For now, this moment is about naming what’s already underway:

A New York studio.

A continued Hudson presence.

A spring opening.

More soon.

I see this exhaustion daily in my design practice. Women who run companies, manage teams, hold entire ecosystems together, yet stand in their own living rooms, unsure where to begin. This hesitation is not about a lack of taste. It is not about not knowing what we like. It is about how choice itself has started to feel risky. Somewhere along the way, decisions that should feel personal began to carry consequences.

In my recent podcast episode, Home as a Mirror, I talked about how homes reveal self-trust before they reveal style. I want to sit with that idea longer here because it reaches far beyond interiors. It reaches into how many high-performing women are living right now.

When you are good at things… truly good…. people come to expect certainty from you. You become the one who knows, the one who decides, the one who does not hesitate. Over time, that competence becomes something you wear constantly. Even when something should feel intimate, a home, a wardrobe, a pause, it quietly turns into another arena for performance.

I have watched women delay joy in their own homes for years. They tell themselves they will decide once they are sure. They will do it later, when they have more clarity. They do not want to rush into the wrong thing. What they are really saying is that they do not trust themselves to choose without repercussions.

That hesitation makes sense. Many of these women have been rewarded for precision. Their lives have been built by getting things right. But homes are not spreadsheets, and neither is a life.

Indecision often disguises itself as restraint. Neutral palettes. Temporary furniture. Rooms that feel perpetually unfinished. But indecision carries weight. It creates friction. It hums quietly in the background, asking you to hold space for something unresolved. That same pattern shows up elsewhere too, in relationships that never quite deepen, in rest that never quite arrives, in desires that are edited down before they are fully expressed.

What looks like control is often fatigue. Not an absence of desire, but exhaustion from having to justify every want. Not confusion, but a lack of energy to listen inwardly.

One of the most damaging ideas we have absorbed is the belief that there is a correct choice, and that everyone else somehow knows it. Social media has turned inspiration into surveillance. Taste into a public record. Desire into something that needs explanation. Making a choice stops being about how it feels and starts being about how it will be perceived.

And perception, especially for women, has always come at a cost.

What I have learned through my own life and through years of client work is this. Most people are not afraid of making the wrong choice. They are afraid of being seen choosing. Choosing reveals preference. Preference reveals exposure. Exposure requires vulnerability.

The shift back to self-trust rarely arrives as a dramatic overhaul. It is quieter than that. It looks like deciding to stop waiting. Allowing something to be imperfect. Choosing comfort without apology. Designing a home, or a life, that supports who you are now, not who you thought you needed to become.

When women begin trusting themselves again, their homes soften. There is more flow. More honesty. Less performance. And interestingly, they become more powerful everywhere else. Self-trust is not indulgent. It is stabilizing. It restores clarity. It returns energy to the places where it actually matters.

If your life looks successful but feels unresolved in small ways, start by noticing where. This is not about fixing or correcting. It is about paying attention. What feels unfinished. What have you been postponing? What would feel supportive, rather than impressive, right now?

You do not need to act immediately. Perspective does not demand urgency. It asks for honesty.

Sometimes that is the most luxurious thing of all.