From Healthcare to Interior Design: My Unlikely Path | Davis ReDesign

Why I Design: My Unlikely Path to Interior Design

I was seven years old the first time I fell in love with a room. It was mine — a Strawberry Shortcake canopy bed with matching curtains, the whole thing coordinated down to the last detail. I didn't know yet that this was a "thing" you could do with your life. I just knew I loved it. I cleaned and reorganized my room weekly, adding posters, trinkets, and more. At sleepovers, I'd rearrange my friends' rooms too, much to their parents' confusion.

But life took me somewhere else first. For 15 years, I worked in operational management and organizational development in private-practice healthcare—a world of systems, productivity, and patient experience. I was good at it. I built real skills there: staying calm under pressure, managing a hundred moving pieces at once, making sure nothing fell through the cracks.

Then 2020 happened. In the span of one week, my kids were suddenly home full-time as schools shut down, my father passed away unexpectedly, and I lost my job. It was, without exaggeration, one of the hardest stretches of my life.

In the middle of all of it, my husband bought a house in Palm Springs — a total dump, honestly. Somehow, in the middle of grief and uncertainty, we renovated and designed that house together. It became something I could pour myself into when so much else felt out of my control. I found something in that process I hadn't let myself fully chase before: the thing I'd loved since I was seven, finally taking center stage.

Before Photo: Living room. More beige than I could handle.

After: The Davis ReDesign touch

We loved this pool....but the outside was so sad.

After: The Davis ReDesign touch

That house became the spark. In the years that followed, I designed several more Airbnbs for clients — hands-on, learning as I went, but without any formal training behind me yet. Eventually, I enrolled at the Heritage School of Interior Design to make it official, earning my Master's certificate and giving real structure to something I'd already proven I could do.That house in Palm Springs was the beginning of Davis ReDesign. Heritage was where I learned to do it well.

I bring everything from that chapter of my life into my work now — the operational discipline from healthcare, the calm-under-pressure instinct from navigating genuine hardship, and the pure joy of a Strawberry-Shortcake-canopy-bed kid who never really stopped loving a beautifully designed room.

If you're looking for someone to help you create a space that feels like you — bold, joyful, and genuinely yours — I'd love to help.