This is where it started for me, even if I didn’t know it yet

In the early 1990s, I went to New York City with my mother and sister and saw Six Degrees of Separation at Lincoln Center. I remember sitting there and feeling something click, even though I couldn’t explain it yet.

It stayed with me.

Years later, a new version of the film came out with Will Smith, portraying the character of Paul. Paul was based on a real life con artist who made his way into the homes of the rich by pretending to be something he was not. 

Watching a story unfold about proximity to wealth, performance, identity, and the strange, uncomfortable reality of living just outside the center of power fascinated me.

At its core, it was a film about what it means to orbit the rich.

And I’ve spent my entire career doing exactly that.

Let’s stop pretending—the job I do is serving the rich

No one really likes to say it this way, but it’s the truth: I serve the rich. I am a servant to people with more money and more power than I will ever have. That is the job.

Where I come into the picture is this. I have expertise. I can take someone’s taste, their wants, their aspirations, and translate them into something real. Not theoretical. Not referential. Real.

I make it exist.

With builders, painters, wallpaper installers, and upholstery workrooms. With budgets, timelines, and constraints. I take something that lives in their head make it even better in my head and build it into a space they can walk through and touch while making it look easy.

I’m the expert, but only in a particular way

And in doing that, I occupy a very specific, and sometimes very strange, position. I am the expert in the room, but only in my small and narrow lane.

And I am working for people who are used to being the smartest person in every room they enter.

Balancing this role can be tricky. It was especially tricky in my early years in New York when I was younger. It’s easier now. I’m older, more experienced, more grounded. Being in Austin has shifted that dynamic in a meaningful way. People are more relatable here, at least compared to the world of New York.

But the core truth hasn’t changed. The power dynamic is not in my favor.

This isn’t a complaint, it’s clarity

I am completely comfortable with the role I play. I enjoy it. I don’t need to be the winner in the room. What I care about is impact. Yes, on my clients, but even more on my team and the people I work with every day. My vendors. My collaborators. The ecosystem that actually brings these projects to life.

That’s where I feel the most ownership.

But I keep coming back to a line from Six Degrees of Separation. It captures something I have felt, even if I didn’t always have the language for it: “Having a rich friend is like drowning and your friend makes lifeboats. Only your friend gets very touchy if you say one word: lifeboat.”

It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s true in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve been in those rooms.

There are rules. Unspoken ones. About what gets acknowledged and what doesn’t.

The time I designed Anna Wintour’s Office

One of the most defining experiences of my early career happened in New York when I was working for a firm designing the Vogue offices, specifically Anna Wintour’s office.

That office, by the way, is almost exactly what you see in The Devil Wears Prada. The layout, the feeling, it’s not exaggerated. It’s real.

One evening, my boss said, “Come with me. We need to hang art in Anna’s office tonight.” He knew I would be thrilled by the after-hours access to the space.

And a few hours later there I was, in that space. A space shaped by someone whose influence I had felt for years through fashion, media, and design. Someone who represented a very real and very rare kind of power.

Anna wasn’t performing power like the character of Paul. She was power!

I was standing in her office in the quiet, placing art pieces she would walk in and see the next morning.

And I remember feeling completely in awe.

Not intimidated. Not envious. Just aware.

Aware of where I was. Aware of what that room meant. Aware that I was participating in something significant, even if my role in it was small.

And also very aware that it wasn’t mine.  The space and the power it represented was not mine.

That moment clarified something for me that has only gotten stronger over time….my role is to help create spaces that I do not occupy or own.

This is the part of the job people don’t like to admit we do not get to keep what we create for others.

The work I do sits in a very nuanced space.

As high-end interior designers, we are given access to incredibly personal, incredibly powerful environments. We are trusted to shape them, to interpret identity, taste, and aspiration.

That’s power.

And at the same time, we are interchangeable.

That’s the part people don’t love to say out loud, but it’s true. There are other designers. Other options. Other people who can step in.

Holding both of those truths at once, that you are valuable and replaceable, is part of the job.

And strangely, being comfortable with that is where real confidence comes from.

I understand the system, and I move through it expertly.

In the universe of The Devil Wears Prada – I’m not trying to be Miranda Priestly. I don’t have that kind of authority.. And I’m definitely not Andy. Because the truth is, I saw early on what she spends the story figuring out.

If I relate to anyone, it’s probably Paul from Six Degrees of Separation. The one who understands the system, who sees it clearly, who feels both inside it and outside of it at the same time and who navigates it expertly.

Of course we all want what Miranda has. We want her influence, her clarity, her authority and her power. 

Paul knows it. I know it.

But wanting something and needing to become it are two very different things.

The shift is simple, even if it takes time to get there

For me, the real shift has been this.

Understanding my role. Being honest about it. And then playing it well.

There is power in that. There is freedom in that.

I get to move through extraordinary spaces. I get to shape environments that reflect lives very different from my own. I get to work alongside people at the top of their fields.

And I get to go home to a life that is fully, authentically mine.

Being adjacent to power, while having your own version of it, is not a compromise.

It’s a position.