My Job: To Help You Discover Your Unique Style
When I was in third grade, my hobby was moving the furniture in the bedroom around. I use the term "my bedroom" advisedly. I shared the room with my little brother. In moving the furniture, I was trying to build a warm, private nest for myself while screening out that pesky annoyance.
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Fast forward a few decades, and I'm doing much the same thing. I'm a remodeling consultant. I help people maintain their independence, health and happiness by improving the layout, design, and furnishing of their homes. Often, I work with folks in their middle years, but I also consult with parents of children with disabilities. Some of my clients are radiantly healthy and simply interested in staying that way by removing toxic paints, finishes, and materials from their home. Some of them just want to update and improve a place that has grown a bit tired.
Because the goal is your comfort and happiness, I have called my interior design business is called Comfort and Joy Interior Design.
What's Sustainable Style?
I strive for what I call “sustainable style” in designing your home. In using that term, I’m not just thinking about the environment – though that’s certainly a part of it – I’m also thinking about sustaining the best aspects of the human lives inside the house.
From this holistic standpoint, for an interior to meet my criteria for sustainable style, it would need to enhance:
- Residents’ physical health (avoiding toxics, providing good light and access and adaptations for aging in place)
- Residents’ emotional health (visual appeal, affirming color palette and the niceties of layout that are sometimes called “feng shui”)
- Social interactions (appropriate space and furnishings for family activities and rituals, as well as privacy)
- Economic needs (cost-effective over time, within budget)
- Green/sustainability criteria (green materials, recycling of furnishings and materials, carbon footprint)
Nicolette's Qualifications
The most important degree Nicolette holds, from her client's point of view, is a master's degree from the School of Hard Knocks. She is the adult survivor of two wall-to-wall home renovations (that's her at left on the job with the general contractor of one of them). She's alsot the veteran of countless smaller remodeling and decorating projects.
As a child, Nicolette had hands-on experience in building two homes from scratch. Luckily for Nicolette, her parents had nothing against child labor: They saw nothing wrong with a four-year-old sitting on the roof helping her father install shingles, in a twelve-year-old laying flagstone for a hearth and stapling up insulation, or in a sixteen-year-old running planks through a dado saw and nailing up siding!
Later on, Nicolette earned a master's degree in design from the renowned Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the school that nurtured the Prairie School (or Chicago Group) of architects in America. The Institute was founded by famed architect Mies Van Der Rohe, one of the pioneers of the International Style of architecture. Van der Rohe's school was the direct descendant of the Bauhaus School, the German institution that married modern technology with the Arts and Craft Movement to create modern, human-centered design. Her training there emphasized the dictum "form follows function" and included a strong emphasis on ergonomics.
Nicolette is a certified green building professional, trained by and affiliated with the California nonprofit Build It Green. She is also trained in application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and multiply experienced in designing for disabilities.