The Day Has Come: Kensington Design House Is Officially Open
We Spend Too Much of Our Lives at Home to Treat It as a Backdrop
Today, Kensington Design House officially opens its doors. Here is why we built a design studio that begins with the experience of living in a home, not simply how it looks.
Americans spend roughly 90 percent of their time indoors. Far from being a backdrop to our lives, the home is one of the environments we experience most consistently. It shapes how we move through a morning, where we gather, whether we can focus, how easily we rest and how much effort ordinary routines require.
And yet when we decide to change our homes, we often begin with what we want them to look like.
Kensington Design House begins somewhere else.
Before we ask what a room should become, we want to understand what it is like to live there now.
That idea has been taking shape for Rich and me for years, long before we had a name for it.
We have designed, renovated and built homes together through many different seasons of our lives. Each one taught us something, but perhaps the most important lesson was that a home has to reflect the life you are actually living, not the version of life you think you should be living.
Our last home was a Scandinavian inspired farmhouse we built during COVID. It was beautiful, and I loved much of what we created there. But it was also a period when I was deeply stressed, burned out and trying to hold too much.
I began noticing where I went when I needed to settle.
It was the screened porch, surrounded by trees, air and the sounds outside. It was our color washed blue television room, which felt enclosed and quiet in a way the larger spaces did not.
Those were not necessarily the rooms someone would have identified as the most important in the house.
But they became the most important to me.
I started wondering why.
Why does one room draw us in while another, equally beautiful room goes unused? Why can a kitchen look extraordinary and still make the morning harder than it needs to be? Why does being close to nature change the experience of a room? Why do we so often adapt ourselves to our homes without noticing how much effort we are making?
Those questions became the beginning of Kensington Design House.
Looking Beyond the Photograph
We care deeply about beautiful interiors. Beauty creates pleasure, identity, memory and a sense of place.
But we do not think the success of a home can be understood from a photograph alone.
The experience of a home is cumulative.
Natural light changes throughout the day. Sound travels between rooms. Temperature shifts. Circulation determines whether movement feels intuitive or awkward. Privacy affects where we retreat. Materials, texture, color and visual complexity shape the sensory character of a room. The relationship between indoors and nature can change how connected or enclosed a space feels.
A single point of friction may be easy to dismiss. Experienced every day, it becomes part of life in the home.
This is where our interest in wellness begins.
Not with a wellness room or a collection of amenities. Not with the assumption that there is one universally healthy aesthetic.
We are interested in something more fundamental: whether the home is supporting the people who live within it or quietly asking them to compensate for it.
For us, the more useful question is not simply, What do you want this room to look like?
It is:
How is this home shaping the life taking place inside it?
Why Now
There is another reason this studio is launching now.
I turned 50 this year, and our youngest was preparing to leave for college. The structure of family life that Rich and I had spent decades building was changing.
That transition made me reconsider more than where we wanted to live. I began thinking about how I wanted the next chapter of my life to feel and what I wanted to create within it.
There is something clarifying about reaching a point where the old markers no longer answer the question for you.
Rich and I kept returning to interiors, architecture, nature, materials, wellbeing and the effect of place on everyday life.
Then we came to Charleston.
Walking through the city, we noticed how often the architecture responded to lived experience. Porches created shade and connection. Courtyards offered enclosure without isolation. Mature trees, air movement and the relationship between indoors and out were not simply decorative ideas. They were part of how the buildings worked.
For Rich, after more than three decades working across architecture, construction and project management, Charleston offered a different architectural context and an opportunity to consider how traditional ideas can support contemporary life.
For me, the move represented something more personal.
Kensington Design House is named for South Kensington in London, where I lived at 22. It was the first time I experienced a real sense of independence and began to understand what it meant to build a life that felt like my own.
At 50, I find myself asking some of those questions again, but from a very different place.
This time, Rich and I are answering them together.
A Different Place to Begin
Kensington Design House is an interior design and architecture studio, but our process does not begin with an inspiration board.
We begin with lived experience.
How do you move through the house? Where does everyone naturally gather? Which room do you avoid? What feels effortless? What feels harder than it should? Where do you go when you need privacy? What do you wish the home allowed you to do more often? How do you want a particular space to feel?
Only then do we look more closely at the physical environment and ask what may be contributing to those experiences.
That is where Rich and I bring different but complementary perspectives.
Rich looks at structure, proportion, circulation, natural light, airflow, materials, constructability and how a home will perform over time.
I begin inside the experience of the room. My background in psychology, strategy and design, together with my continued study of human behavior and the science of how we experience our surroundings, shapes the questions I ask about how people actually live within a space.
Architecture establishes much of the physical framework of a home. Interiors shape much of what we see, touch and live with each day.
We study both because no one experiences them separately.
The Home Environment Study
The Home Environment Study grew out of that philosophy and a concern that design can move too quickly toward solutions.
It is an architect led review of the physical and sensory conditions shaping how a home feels and functions before larger design decisions are made. The approach is informed by established wellness frameworks, including WELL principles, together with our study of design and human experience.
Depending on the home, we may consider natural and artificial light, airflow, sound, thermal comfort, materials, circulation, visual complexity, privacy, rest, daily routines, connection to nature and adaptability.
But the study begins with observation and experience.
What is working well already? Where does daily life repeatedly become more difficult? What has the household simply learned to work around? Is the problem actually the room someone thinks needs renovating, or is something else creating the friction?
Sometimes the answer is architectural. Sometimes it is an interior decision. Sometimes the most useful change is relatively small.
And sometimes the most important conclusion is that something should be preserved rather than redesigned.
The Home Environment Study is evidence informed and non diagnostic. It is not intended to medicalize the home or replace the expertise of environmental, medical or other qualified professionals.
Its purpose is much simpler.
Understand the home before spending money solving the wrong problem.
Read more about the Home Environment Study.
Beauty With a Reason
None of this moves beauty to the side.
If anything, it asks more of it.
We want rooms with depth, materiality, personality and a clear point of view. We believe art matters. Craft matters. Color matters. Beautiful objects matter.
But we are interested in homes where those choices belong to a larger idea about how someone wants to live.
That philosophy also informs our Living Showroom.
As we travel, we collect decorative objects that stay with us because of their materiality, craft, story or sense of place. We bring them into our own rooms and live with them before deciding what we want to share through KDH.
The pieces that remain meaningful become part of small collections, pop ups and events.
We are not interested in filling a home simply because a surface is empty.
We are interested in what deserves to be there.
What Comes Next
Kensington Design House will work with clients considering renovations, kitchens and baths, whole home interiors, spatial changes and homes that need to respond to a different stage of life.
That last category is particularly meaningful to me because I am living it.
Children leave. Work changes. Parents age. Bodies change. The way we gather changes. What we need from privacy, rest, connection and even beauty can change with it.
Sometimes life evolves before the home does.
The Daniel Island project will be one of the places where we explore these questions in real time. We are looking at smaller footprint living, filtered light, natural materials, storage and what it means to create a home for this chapter rather than recreate the one before it.
Kensington Design House brings together what Rich and I have spent years designing, building, living and questioning.
But the idea underneath it is quite simple.
We spend too much of our lives at home to treat it as a backdrop.
A home should be beautiful. It should also understand something about the people living there, the lives they are living now and the lives they hope to make possible next.
That is the work we want to do.
Welcome to Kensington Design House.
Read more about the Home Environment Study