If you’ve followed along for any length of time, you probably had the same reaction a lot of you sent in when you heard that I was meeting with our interior designer for the lake house: Wait, aren’t you an interior designer?! Why would you hire an interior designer?
It’s a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly, because the real answer has more layers than “we needed help.”
First, a small correction: I’m not an interior designer. I design our homes, and I design our brand, and I design a lot of products that live in a lot of your homes. I have a lot of experience and a clear point of view, but I don’t design other people’s houses. Especially a whole house. That’s a different skill set and a genuinely different job. Chris and I are two people who have spent seventeen years learning, in public, how we like to live and executing it in real time. We are very learn-as-you-go people. If we want to have hidden storage (like in our primary bathroom), we’re gonna figure it out. I have no problem with a pivot mid-project for something I didn’t foresee because we’re usually just doing one, or a few, rooms at a time. It’s all I can handle. It’s all I’ve ever done.
Here’s the part I don’t talk about much, mostly because it’s just the nature of what we do: when you’re mid-project, home can be a stressful place to be. We’re in year five at our current house. Five years of living inside of our own before-and-afters. We’re taking a breather before starting the girls’ bathroom(s), and that feels good. There’s no rush and my brain needed a reset before diving into designing rooms again. It’s exciting before and during a renovation. It’s also stressful. And exhausting. And then it’s over and you are so happy to be in your new space and can’t believe you ever lived through that, and you look through photos of the befores, so proud of what you created and can barely remember that it used to look like that and you then give yourself a break until you’re excited again. It’s a cycle. It’s our life cycle.
Shortly after we bought the lake house, when we were even coming up with the name, Merrimore House, we sat down and asked ourselves what we wanted this house to feel like — and the answer was more joy. More happiness. This is the place we come to escape. So the idea of turning it into our familiar renovation-life-cycle, similar to how we already live, felt like the opposite of 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 already work with at our house, would start in November ’26 and wrap by May ’27. We already had them on the books. That short window means there’s only a small sliver of lake season we’d actually miss, which sounded close to ideal. The full design would have to come together by August of this year, so we could have everything permitted and ordered to stay on schedule.
The starting line. Merrimore House, fully furnished and exactly as purchased.
But I had never designed a whole-house renovation, on a deadline, on top of everything already in motion at our own home and secret design projects I was working on. The lake house added a very specific kind of pressure and stress that I had never experienced. I couldn’t tell if it was a good challenge for me or one that would be detrimental. I’ve renovated a whole house before. I’ve just never done it all at once.
I have brought in designers to help me on a project before and every time, the changes they handed back have been incredible. 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 exactly what I want, but there are so many things I don’t know how to do, or that simply aren’t in my skill set. Knowing what you want and knowing how to execute it are two different things, and the gap between them is where a great designer lives. I could already feel myself thinking of a great idea, and then dumbing it down so that it was more manageable for us to figure out and execute.
In March, I pitched the idea of hiring a designer for Merrimore House to Chris. He was so incredibly for it, immediately, because of what we wanted the lake house to always be for us. And he had been telling me I had to take something off my plate for months. With his blessing, I went looking for someone who could take our point of view and then elevate it somewhere we weren’t already thinking.
We found her close to home: Kate, of Noble Studio Interiors, and her team. They already work with our contractors on other projects — that’s actually how I found them — and when we met, we clicked right away.
What sold me was something Kate said early on: whatever your style is, I want to absorb it. Before we even met in person, I sent over all of my inspiration for the lake house — how we wanted it to feel, what we wanted it to look like. Then we did a walk-through of Merrimore and showed them every layout change we had in mind. By the time we sat down in their studio, we were going through even more images, some mine, some theirs. And honestly, it felt like being at the eye doctor — one, or two? one, or two? — Kate quietly made sure she understood our style completely before she added a single idea of her own.
That’s the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I do.
This is our first time working with an interior designer at this scale, and it feels like the best gift we could give ourselves. We’re investing in this renovation. Not just monetarily, though, obviously that too. We’re choosing not to sacrifice our sanity for any amount of time to make Merrimore a place we genuinely love being. No “let me just get through this year, and then we’ll enjoy it forever.” (My honest inner thoughts) Kate has already met with the contractors, which means I’m not going to spend the whole winter babysitting a job site. I get to spend it excited. I didn’t know this was an option. I can’t believe we get to do this. I say it every day.
And then there’s the part I might be most excited about. For seventeen years, we’ve worked behind the scenes on these big before-and-afters and then handed you the finished reveal. This time, for the first time, we’re going to have the reveal with you, as it happens. Walking in to lamps on, steamed sheets, candles lit. I think that’s going to be its own wonderful layer to share together.
Selfishly, too: I just really wanted to know what this feels like from the other side. On this one, I’m not the designer. I’m the client. And it has been so fun to hear I’m so decisive (music to my ears!) and also learn how they source things and how much I didn’t know about the process. (I’m going to share everything! I promise!)
So that’s the honest answer. We didn’t hire a designer because we couldn’t picture it. We hired one because we could picture it perfectly, and we wanted Merrimore to feel like joy from the very first day, not just at the finish line.
Go back to the beginning of the lake house story:
- We Bought a Lake House
- The First Tour: A Walk Through Merrimore House by the Lake
- Lake House Update: Renovation Plans, FAQs & What’s Next
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