Beneath the Beauty: Our Conversation on the Room to Think Podcast

A beautiful home should do more than look good. It should actively support the way you live. We recently sat down with the Room to Think podcast to explore the visible and invisible elements that shape our everyday experience.

In this episode, we bring psychology, interior design, and architecture into one conversation. We discuss how homes can quietly create stress without us realizing it, the impact of natural light and air quality, and why the small points of friction you have learned to live around are actually solvable design problems.

Watch the full conversation here, or read through the condensed transcript.

The Transcript

A Home Is an Active Part of Your Life

Host: What if the most important parts of your home are the ones you never see? Today, I am sitting down with Elizabeth and Rich Landry, the husband and wife team behind Kensington Design House. We talk about how our homes can quietly create stress without us realizing it, from clutter and bad lighting to layouts that make everyday life harder. Elizabeth and Rich, welcome to Room to Think.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. We are so excited.

Host: For someone who has never heard of Kensington Design House, who are you, and what do you do?

Elizabeth: We are an interior design and architecture firm based in Charleston, focused not only on building beautiful houses but also on the way people live and feel. We spend so much of our time indoors, so we believe the home is an active part of your life. Think about all those parts of your home: the light, the materials, the texture, the access to nature. It is all affecting you. That is what we study, the invisible and visible parts of the home that help restore you and create calm, but also the parts that create friction and stress.

Rich: We come at design from two different approaches. I am more focused on the architectural side: the structure, the layout, how the home connects to nature, and how the spaces relate to one another. Elizabeth works with how all of that relates to the way we feel and live, and whether the house is supporting that. We bring those approaches together as one cohesive system to form a design that is well thought out, comprehensive, and meets the client’s needs now and into the future.

The Personal Story Behind Kensington Design House

Host: How did you decide to work together and pursue this specific direction?

Elizabeth: To take a step back, we were high school sweethearts. He was 15, and I was 16 when we met. So yes, I was the older woman in the relationship. We had no intention of ever working together. He went to architecture school. I studied psychology. We got married, had two kids, and lived a life. What we ended up doing was designing and building houses for different stages of our lives. We built a house when we first met, another when the kids were little, and finally a house for when our kids were in high school. That last house was deeply meaningful because it was the first time we could feel the difference of what a home could do to restore you. That was where the first kernel of Kensington Design House began.

Rich: Building those homes gave me a good view of how talented Elizabeth was as a designer. I am the architect, the guy who is supposed to be designing everything. But I realized early on that I was good at planning and designing the space, and Elizabeth had a natural talent for interior design. She would come up with ideas I initially thought were crazy. Once we implemented them, they were gorgeous.

The Porch That Changed How They Thought About Design

Host: Elizabeth, you have talked about sitting on your screened porch and noticing that you felt physically different. Can you tell us about that?

Elizabeth: This was the last house we built, and it was one of my favorite homes. It was designed perfectly for that moment in our lives, when our kids were in high school. At the same time, I was going through a deeply stressful period. I had tightness in my chest and racing thoughts. I felt like a zombie. I would go to this screened porch, and I do not know another way to explain it, but I was pleasantly accosted by all the senses. I could feel the sun and wind. I could hear the birds and the trees. I could see nature. I felt settled. Over time, I felt more present.

Rich: The design of that porch started with a restaurant we visited in Cabo San Lucas with our children. We walked into this space, and it felt amazing. It was hard to put into words. There were natural materials, a view of the water, and a hillside that protected you from behind. It opened up to this view, and you were surrounded by nature. We decided we wanted to create that feeling on our porch. That was the first time we sat down and asked, “How do we create a specific feeling with this design?”

Clutter, Memory, and the Things We Keep

Host: Before we recorded, we were talking about clutter. I believe that when your space is messy, your mind is messy.

Elizabeth: One hundred percent. We all fall into that trap. My son and I both hold on to things because we see personal meaning in them. Think about the artwork your kids bring home. You cannot part with it because it means everything. Or a family member’s stamp collection: They have passed away, and getting rid of it feels horrible. Those things accumulate, and you do not always realize it. Your eyes and mind are constantly trying to make sense of it and create order. When your brain cannot settle, you feel it.

Is Your Home Working for You, or Are You Working Around It?

Host: You talk about how we can unknowingly adapt ourselves to our homes. What does that mean?

Elizabeth: There are points of friction throughout a home that we do not always notice. I was recently in a home with a flickering light. It was not completely obvious, but it was a nuisance. For a while, I tried to deal with it, and then I shut it off. Little things like that can compound.

Rich: As time passes, your needs change. As people get older, perhaps the house is not designed well for their movement. Maybe the kitchen no longer works for them, so they cook less, invite people over less, and begin losing social connection. Part of what we think about is helping people extend their health span, not just how long they live, but how long they remain healthy and capable of doing the things that matter to them.

What a Home Should Ultimately Do

Host: After everything you have learned about how people live, what do you think a home should ultimately do for us?

Elizabeth: Our home is an active part of our lives. It is there through every important moment and life stage: the calm moments, the sad moments, the stressful times, and the moments when we connect with people we love. We want to design the experience so those moments can be as lovely, stress free, and happy as possible, allowing people to focus on living them.

Rich: A home should work for you. It should be an assistant in your life, supporting how you want to live. It should not just be a place where you keep your things and sleep at night. We interact with it all day. We breathe its air, live within its light, and deal with how it functions. I believe strongly in form following function. The home should support your lifestyle and health, and that means different things for different people.