I grew up in Houston, Texas, and if you'd told my parents I'd end up running an interior design studio, they might not have been surprised — but they definitely wouldn't have guessed the route I took to get there.
As a kid, I was the definition of a tomboy — building forts, playing every sport I could find, making "stews" out of mud in the backyard, and drawing and painting constantly. In middle school, I started taking oil painting classes, and I kept at it all through high school — mostly landscapes and still lifes, and eventually I was even commissioned by a few of my parents' friends. For a while I thought I might become a veterinarian, until I realized I was probably too soft-hearted for it — I knew I'd fall apart every time an animal didn't make it.
I also loved fashion. I went to a private school with uniforms, so "free dress days" were basically my personal runway. By high school, I was seriously considering fashion as a career — until I really looked into the industry and realized I might spend years working as a seamstress before ever getting a real shot. That didn't sound appealing.
The turning point came in my high school art class. I was flipping through interior design magazines with my art teacher — something I did constantly, since I'd already painted my bedroom twice and rearranged the bedding and curtains more times than I could count — and I mentioned how much I loved it. She told me that was actually a career: interior design. My brain immediately went, "Oh — that's like fashion, but for homes. Even better." I started building foam-core models and drawing floor plans that same week, and spent the rest of high school steering every art class assignment toward interiors.
I built a portfolio, applied to ten art schools, and got into all of them except RISD. I toured the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy of Art in San Francisco, ruled out the New York School of Interior Design, and completely fell for San Francisco. I moved right after graduation and never looked back.
It was meant to be a five-year program, but I loved it so much I did winter and summer sessions and finished in four and a half — and I finished my portfolio early so I could start applying to jobs before winter break even hit. That timing paid off: I landed two jobs at once, an internship at Applegate Tran Interiors and a lighting assistant position at Lightswitch. I was quickly promoted at both — and then the 2008 recession hit. Applegate Tran laid me off, and my hours at Lightswitch got cut. I picked up work at Lamps Plus (retail was nothing new — I'd worked it all through high school and college) and even flew to LA to get my Residential Lighting Specialist certification through the ALA.
Not long after, I started working for a small design studio run by a designer named Holly — HSH Interiors, which now has studios in both San Francisco and Tahoe. We clicked immediately, and she offered me a full-time position. I stayed for seven years and learned more than I can really summarize in one post.
Life moved alongside the career: I got married during those years, and a year later my husband and I took a honeymoon through Amsterdam, Croatia, Germany, and Bosnia. Amsterdam alone had me in tears — it was that beautiful. We planned to make trips like that a yearly thing. Then we had our son less than a year later, which, fair enough, changed the plan.
Pregnancy did not slow down my work — if anything, it ramped up. I flew to LA to help install an entire staged house in Beverly Hills, port-a-potty and all. At seven months pregnant, I found myself installing a 6,500-square-foot new build in Mill Valley — a highly custom project I'd already been working on for five years, and there was no way I wasn't going to see it through to the finish. I rented a car and drove to the site every single day during that install. When our dining table — which we'd waited six months for — arrived from New York the same day the street happened to be closed, I called the city of Mill Valley myself, explained the whole situation, mentioned I was pregnant for good measure, and ended up in a 30-minute conversation with a city official who eventually caved and reopened the street just to get the table delivered.
That pregnancy also came with its own leap of faith at home. My husband had decided to leave his nonprofit job and go all-in on Hack Reactor, a coding bootcamp with something like a 3% acceptance rate. For twelve weeks, he was gone 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week — which meant for a while, it was just my income. So I worked. A lot. Somewhere in the 50-to-70-hour-a-week range, pregnant the entire time, because I wanted to bank enough to actually take real time off once the baby came and bond with him without financial stress hanging over it. My doctor was not a fan — I got threatened with bedrest more than once if I didn't slow down — but I loved my job too much to ease off, and I worked right up until four days before I went into labor. Somehow, it all worked out: my husband finished the program, got to stay home for our son's first month, and then landed a great job right after.
Once our 650-square-foot apartment started feeling very small — right around the time our son started walking — we knew it was time for a change. We looked at Austin (too hot, tech salaries too low), fell in love with Detroit but worried about raising a toddler there, and even considered Omaha for the appeal of a big property with a cool old house — until we remembered we are, at our core, city people, and six hours of cornfields in every direction was not going to work for us.
Minneapolis–St. Paul won. My husband's dad lived in Wisconsin, so it wasn't totally out of nowhere. We moved into a seventh-floor apartment in Lowertown St. Paul with huge windows, river views, and restaurants within walking distance — a must after years of not owning a car in SF. A month after we landed, I got a job at Heather Peterson Design, and we bought our first car and found daycare almost overnight. I was there for five and a half years before finally starting Lauren Hunter Design.
Looking back, none of it was a straight line — vet school daydreams, a fashion phase, a recession that knocked me sideways right as my career was taking off — but every part of it fed into what I do now. I wouldn't change the route.
