I have always been intrigued by the behind-the-scenes: the hidden process of how things magically come together and the spark of inspiration that incites a journey. When it comes to the design of our homes—and the carefully curated objects that comprise them—what intrigues me most is how the decisions that lead to an end result are rarely obvious. The aesthetics we create are an accumulation of seemingly small decor influences—a sofa you first spied in a shelter magazine that sent you on a hunt, ancient Greek columns that solved a hallway dilemma, or a mural that guides the painterly palette of your home. From a wellspring of inspiration, a dialogue begins, and the language of a room takes form, gently carrying you to the next decision. I want to amplify these quieter creative moments, because they are far louder than they seem. These are the choices that reflect our individuality and shape the alchemy in our homes.

You know how you can initially be moved by a piece of art, and yet gain a far stronger attachment once you learn about the artist’s approach? This is precisely how I feel about design. Oftentimes, this visual chemistry is difficult to articulate. It is the composition and silent space in between things, a wordless expression, a hybrid of contrasts that can cause both tension and curiosity. It is a personal journey steeped in spontaneity and trusting our eye.

In my work, I continually ask other creatives to pull back the curtain on their design practices. I want to better understand the fluidity of their process and the principles at play: How do you achieve the right balance of scale, texture, patina, and layering? Is it the mix of materials, periods, or styles? Is it the blend of high and low? Is it intuitive or more studied? Is it worth staying true to the architecture of the house, or is it better to diverge to reflect your own tastes? Understanding each fork in the road is fascinating and enlightening to me. The path is full of twists and turns.

Through the prism of the creatives in this book, I found beauty—the intrinsic essence of which is both intangible and highly personal. Not only did it teach me something about their unique lens on the aesthetic world around us, but, more important, it also helped me understand my own eye. Each designer here—through an accumulation of gestures, anecdotes, and histories—brings a version of living beautiful to life. In summoning all of these sumptuous, enigmatic homes together, I’m trying to understand as much about them as I am about conscious or unconscious design practices at play, not in an effort to mimic, but rather to help inform my own process. To Live Beautiful simply means to tinker with, explore, and ultimately find your own design gold at home. While beauty is different for each of the nineteen creatives I’ve interviewed, the journey for achieving it is remarkably similar—design unfolds piece by piece in an intuitive, emotional, and heartfelt process.

As much as this book is about intimate creative portraits, it is also a practical deep dive, offering actionable ideas that will help you design your home. The inspiring photography here is accompanied by extractable tips on “why the design works,” the resources each homeowner drew from, and teacherly insight to help you understand the principles at play. Whether you are embarking on a gut renovation like Pamela Shamshiri or renting an apartment you can’t alter like Signe Bindslev Henriksen, Live Beautiful will hopefully inspire and help you make choices in your own home, no matter your budget.

Over the past twenty years, I have owned and renovated eight homes. Yes, I am the rare bird who moves every two to three years and thoroughly enjoys every bit of it! Some may find the thought of ping-ponging around Brooklyn—as we have—to be unsettling. But to our family of three, it just feels natural and exciting. Every home has allowed me to strengthen my architecture and design muscles. I love to reinvent a space. I get silly excited by the all-encompassing research and find the scavenging and collecting of objects downright thrilling. I fixate on the problem-solving until I find resolution, and I crave the knowledge these renovations offer me. Most of all, I love the journey. It’s exhilarating—if you allow yourself to be led.

This acute appreciation for design likely began when I was a child growing up in our modest ranch-style home on Long Island, New York. My mom would rearrange the furniture on a weekly basis. Never complacent, she continually made small tweaks to improve and experiment with the aesthetics of our house. I’d often walk into a room only to find the floorplan flip-flopped. It was exciting to be a bystander to these transformations and experience the ways in which a layout, a color, or a piece of furniture could completely alter a space.

As an adult, my foray into design and real estate began in Dumbo, Brooklyn, in 1998; over the years, each home became a reflection of my changing tastes and our needs as a family of three. By 2006, I embarked on my third renovation in Dumbo, which was also my most ambitious yet—and it led me to believe that perhaps I needed to explore interiors further. When our son was three, I went back to school at Parsons to study interior design. Within a year, I cofounded my own interior design business, Rawlins Calderone Design. While I learned invaluable lessons working for clients, it was within my own homes that I learned to trust my instincts. I never wanted to repeat myself, so in each home, I explored a new style. My homes throughout the years became my design laboratory: Amagansett—rustic modernity (this page)—and Cobble Hill—sophisticated form (this page). Actualizing a vision, seeing it go from concept to fruition, was something I found incredibly rewarding.

Just as in cooking, a home is made up of simple, raw ingredients—architecture, finishes, and furnishings. Once united, they become greater than the sum of their parts. Each element elevates what sits beside it, turning it into something new. These often-invisible steps can be unmasked and shared, kindling exploration in others. A chain reaction that leads to a decision is unique to each of us. At the home of Gabriel Hendifar and Jeremy Anderson, a chance find of a pastoral Danish mural became the design catalyst for their loft, informing not only their color palette but even the physical contours of the space. In Jenna Lyons’s apartment (opposite), Italian firm Dimore Studio encouraged not just her unapologetic color mixing, but also the unexpected use of brass in her kitchen. These lightning-rod moments of inspiration have the power to become nothing short of contagious.

My website, EyeSwoon, was born in 2011 when I was awash in design inspiration after the overhaul of our midcentury-modern beach house on the East End of Long Island. It was a lesson in exploration and unrelenting inquisitiveness, yielding beautiful results. As I elaborate in the chapter on this page, I mitigated the austerity of the modern architecture by utilizing rope in novel ways. My old design partner used to call me a “super sleuth,” because after seeing something I swooned over, I would fixate on it until I found a way to make it a reality.

We live in such a visually saturated time, our eyes feeding our creativity and recording everything that intrigues us. I believe images get stashed away in little drawers in our mind. We all borrow from one another, don’t we? We take bits and bobs of other people’s genius and filter them through our own lens and into our homes. In seemingly spontaneous bursts of inspiration, we never know when one of these drawers will fly open to reveal a brilliant idea. When Giancarlo Valle and Jane Keltner de Valle visited a local Connecticut shop, they were awestruck by a marble Gae Aulenti table that inadvertently triggered a memory of an iconic David Hicks–designed room. It ultimately shaped the direction of their family room. This cascade of inspiration is design magic to me.

In this book, I ask each homeowner and designer about the inspiration, travel, art, objects, photographs, and stories that have illuminated their design pathway. The pieces they’ve collected over time tell us about more than their taste in furnishings—they reveal the contours of life’s path, like a visual diary. In the home of Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent (opposite), a collection of patina-rich pots hailing from Peru to Vietnam tell the tale of their travels, transporting them to a place and a time at every glance. My own homes tell a story of precious memories from my evolution as woman, wife, mother, and designer. They reflect my past and will hold my future. Most every piece in my homes conjures a time or place, triggering the journey of its origin, while its placement and juxtaposition reveals that which excites my eye.

The items we choose to surround ourselves with are profoundly intimate. We collect what resonates with us without always knowing where it may eventually land, but each object holds such power in the greater universe of our inimitable home. The way we arrange the pieces we bring into our home—and their significance—is unique to us. Even if two people acquire the same object, that treasure is only a starting place. It will live on in our homes in deeply personal ways. Being the seeker that I am, I want to understand design in its most personal form—how others have followed their intuition, and how their spaces have unfolded. On a higher level, I want to illustrate the ways in which great design can improve the quality of our lives. Selfishly, I am also simply curious about other people’s design journeys—because understanding another’s process helps me define and refine what Live Beautiful means to me. I hope you are as intrigued as I am.