Julie Palm
Low is a self-taught interior designer, albeit one who grew up with a mother who is an interior designer and a father who is a general contractor. At one point, Low’s mother asked her to take Sandra Funk’s Interior Design Standard program focused on the business side of design and to implement its templates, processes and recommendations in her mother’s business. “I went through the entire course in one day,” Low recalls, “and by the end of the day, I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you run a business!’”
We’re also seeing a generational shift in how people view shopping and buying. Why is this happening? Because the older generations were accumulators and the younger generations, well, not so much. we have a generation of accumulators shedding their belongings and not restocking. And we have younger generations who are less interested in shopping as sport and more worried about the environmental impact of their purchases. Oh, and they have relatively fewer financial resources than some previous generations at the same point in their lives.
With prices rising the past couple of years across virtually every category of goods and services, consumers are tired of paying more and more for the same thing — or, in the case of shrinkflation, paying the same amount for less product.
That makes receiving a small, unexpected gift from a company especially delightful right now.
The CEO, principal and creative director of Savvy Interiors in San Diego, hadn’t worked on a space that met guidelines emanating from the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, she did what she always does when faced with a new challenge: She read everything she could, reached out to medical experts, consulted with design colleagues who’d worked on such spaces and, of course, talked to the teen and his parents about his unique situation.
Interior designers interested in earning the new certification will take 25 sequential, hourlong online classes, or chapters, focusing on biophilia, color contrast and intensity, fractals and other topics related to the “evolutionary inheritance” that affects how humans recognize and respond to beauty and good design, Peterson says.
For luxury lighting producer Mavisten Edition, it’s all about the light. Executive Editor Julie A. Palm talks with co-founder Michael Almodova about his passion for home furnishings design, invention.