Sometimes people ask me how did I know I wanted to be an interior designer? And I always think back to a few key memories from my youth...
When I was in fourth grade my dad taught me how to draw my furniture to scale and sketch out a floorplan of my room on graph paper. I would then move the furniture around on the floorplan and create different ways to arrange the layout of my room. I think, in all honesty, he was just tired of me rearranging my room every month and assumed this would satisfy me instead! No such luck.
My father use to develop neighborhoods in Atlanta, so about this same time, my parents took me to my first designer showhouse for a neighborhood he had developed. I was hooked! I remember grabbing up all the brochures, photos and floorplans to take home with me. I begged him to take me to a showhouse pretty much every weekend after that. Again, we are talking 5th/6th grade here. [Dork]
My dad always had blueprints lying around his office in our house. I use to take them and just stare at them. I know it sounds ridiculous but to this day I get excited opening up a set of blueprints! I especially loved the draftsman handwriting and would practice it for hours. My cousin is an architect in New York and I realized that him and my father had the same handwriting. I thought this was super cool that an entire industry had a special style of writing and wanted so badly to be "in the club."
In middle school, we had a career day where you spent the day going around with an adult and shadowing them. Most kids, I assume, went around with one of their parents. My father's business partner was an interior designer and so he set it up for me to spend the day with her. I remember every detail of that day. She was a great mentor and really showed me the ropes. We went to the Merchandise Mart, a lighting store, a wallpaper store, a fabric store and to a couple of client's homes she was designing in the Country Club of the South. I remember thinking that I cannot believe this is an actual job where people pay you money! As I said before...I was hooked.
I could go on into the teen years of me painting my room on the weekends, rearranging my REM and U2 posters in a artful manner, asking for a closet organizing system for my 15th birthday...but I will stop. I think you get the idea! So to all my other designer/blogger friends...I am curious to know your stories! How did you know you wanted to be an interior designer? Is there a special memory? Or did you just fall into it? Do tell!