If you’ve followed along for any length of time, you probably had the same reaction many of you posted when you heard I was meeting with our lake house interior designer: Wait, aren’t you an interior designer?! Why would you hire an interior designer?
It’s a good question, and I want to answer it honestly, because the real answer has more layers than “we needed help.”
First, a small correction: I am not an interior designer. I design our homes, and I design our brand, and I design many products that live in many of your homes. I have a lot of experience and a clear vision, but I don’t design houses for other people. Mostly the whole house. That’s a different skill set and a really different job. Chris and I are two people who have spent seventeen years learning, publicly, how we want to live and achieving it in real time. We are people who learn as much as you go. If we want to have hidden storage (like in our master bathroom), we’ll find it. I don’t mind a central pivot project for something I didn’t foresee because we usually do one room, or a few, at a time. That’s all I can handle. It’s all I’ve ever been done.
Here’s the part I don’t talk about much, mostly because of the nature of what we do: when you’re in the middle of a project, home can be a stressful place. We are in our fifth year in our current house. Five years of our lives before and after. We take a breather before starting the girls’ bathroom, and that feels good. There is no rush and my mind needs a reset before entering the design rooms again. It’s fun before and during the repair. It’s also stressful. And it’s exhausting. And then it’s over and you’re so happy to be in your new place and you can’t believe you ever lived that way, and you look at the previous pictures, you’re proud of what you’ve created and you can’t remember what it looked like and you give yourself a break until you’re happy again. It’s a cycle. The cycle of our life.
Shortly after buying the lake house, when we came up with the name, Merrimore House, we sat down and asked ourselves what we wanted this house to be. to hear like – and the answer was more happiness. More happiness. This is a place to escape from. So the idea of turning it into a standard repair life cycle, similar to the way we already live, felt beside the point.
So we made a decision: do it all at once, and do it in the off-season. Our contractors – Kennon Construction, the same team we are already working with on our house, will start in November ’26 and wrap up in May ’27. We already had them on the books. That short window meant there was only a small chunk of the lake season to miss, which felt close to qualifying. The full design will have to come together in August of this year, so that we have everything approved and ordered to stay on schedule.
The first line. Merrimore House, fully furnished and exactly as purchased.
But I had never designed a complete-house renovations, on deadline, on top of everything already moving in our home and secret design projects I was working on. The lake house added a kind of pressure and stress that I had never experienced before. I couldn’t tell if it was a good challenge for me or if it would be dangerous. I have renovated the whole house before. I never did it all at once.
I brought in designers to help me with the project before and throughout, the changes they brought back were amazing. Jean helped us with our bathroom and our kitchen; Shea helped us with the exterior of our last home in Idaho. And here’s the truth I keep coming back to: I might know indeed what I want, but there are so many things I don’t know how to do, or that aren’t in my skill set. Knowing what you want and knowing how to do it are two different things, and the gap between them is where a great designer lives. I just felt myself thinking of a good idea, and I closed it so that it would be easy for us to find and use it.
In March, I pitched the idea of hiring a Merrimore House designer to Chris. He was so surprisingly so, quickly, because of what we wanted the lake house to be for us all the time. Again he’s been telling me to take something off my plate for months. With his blessing, I went looking for someone who could take our idea and elevate it somewhere we hadn’t thought of yet.
We found her close to home: Kate, of Noble Studio Interiors, and her team. They’ve already worked with our contractors on other projects – that’s how I found them – and when we met, we clicked right away.
What sold me was what Kate said at the beginning: whatever your style is, i want to hold it. Before we met in person, I sent over all my inspiration for the lake house – how we wanted it to feel, how we wanted it to look. We then did a walk-through of Merrimore and showed them all the changes we had in mind. When we sat down in their studio, we were looking at a lot of pictures, some of them, some of them. And honestly, it feels like being at the eye doctor – one, or two? one, or two? – Kate quietly confirmed that she fully understood our style before adding one more opinion of her own.
That’s the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I did.
This is our first time working with an interior designer on this scale, and it feels like the best gift we could have given ourselves. We are investing in this renovation. Not just financially, though, that’s obvious too. We choose not sacrificing our mind at any moment to make Merrimore the place we sincerely love to be. No “let me get through this year, and we will enjoy it forever.” (My honest inner thoughts) Kate has already met with the contractor, which means I won’t be spending the whole winter patrolling the job site. I find it a joy to use. I didn’t know this was an option. I can’t believe we can do this. I say it every day.
And then there’s the part I’m really excited about. For seventeen years, we worked behind the scenes on these great front and back scenes and then gave you the finished rendering. This time, first, we will have a revelation with you, as it happens. As he walks, he turns on the lights, the thick sheets are lit, and the candles are lit. I think that will be a beautiful layer of it that we can share together.
Selfishly, again: I just wanted to know how this feels from the other end. In this case, I am not a designer. I am the client. And it was great to hear that I was there final (music to my ears!) and learn how things are found and how little I knew about the process. (I’ll share it all! I promise!)
So that’s the honest answer. We didn’t hire a designer because we couldn’t photograph it. We rented one because we could film it completelyand we wanted Merrimore to feel like a joy from day one, not just at the finish line.
Go back to the beginning of the lake house story:
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