I've been quietly working on something I'm excited to finally share: a book! Reclaiming Home, coming soon, explores my approach to interior design and challenges the traditional notions of luxury that have made beautiful, thoughtfully designed homes feel inaccessible to so many. At its heart is a philosophy that guides everything I do at Reclamation Home: great design isn't about status, price tags, or following someone else's rules. It's about creating a home that reflects your personality, tells your story, and makes you genuinely happy to be there. I'm sharing the book's introduction below as a little preview of what's to come.
Interior design media and, specifically, social media, has found a way of accidentally convincing people their home isn’t enough. You have the wrong sofa. You have the worst floors. Your cabinets are outdated, you don’t have enough money, and you are living within a terribly ancient aesthetic. You may as well stop inviting people over because you didn’t pay a luxury designer to procure your pieces from an exclusive catalog and, girl, it shows.
I believed it, too. I hated my homes for years.
I had been married in my twenties to a woman named Sarah, and together we owned the kind of home young people are supposed to be excited about making their own. It was great, but I always struggled to feel it was finished correctly. After we decided to divorce in 2019, I sold our house and moved into a brand-new apartment of only about 700 square feet. It was a first-floor walk-out with high-end finishes, an attached garage, and enough storage that I felt impossibly sophisticated, and I furnished it almost exactly like the model apartment. I was proud when people told me it looked like one. The pandemic arrived right as I moved in. When my constant work travel stopped, I was suddenly spending nearly all of my time inside a showroom I had accidentally built for myself. I was anxious there. I rarely wanted to be home and I blamed it on living alone for the first time in my life. The space looked right, but it never felt like mine. My brother-in-law once stopped by while I was away and texted that, with the Christmas decorations up, the place looked like Pottery Barn. It was a wonderful compliment. It was also, I eventually realized, part of the problem. The apartment was beautiful, but almost nothing in it told you who lived there.
I also hated my career.
Directly out of high school, I attended college and eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. Following my brother into a field against his recommendation, I built a successful career in the banking industry and eventually earned an MBA.
I hated my job.
I lived for the weekend.
I dreaded Mondays.
Work was becoming harder in ways that had very little to do with the actual work. I was caught between difficult personalities, constant pressure, and the feeling that someone else’s behavior could hijack my day before I had even opened my laptop.
Still, I met my husband, Kirk, and we built a life together while I was struggling inside a reality that I couldn’t believe I had created for myself. At my lowest point and during a particularly challenging period at work, there was a day when I sat in our garage with my car running and, somewhat absent mindedly, began closing the garage door. I still have trouble deciding exactly what I intended in that moment; I only know I had gotten dangerously close to a place I never wanted to visit again. Titan, our dog, wandered into the garage through his dog door and interrupted me. I had to get him back inside. Sometimes I think about how ordinary that interruption was, and how grateful I am for it. I didn’t even tell Kirk what had happened for nearly a year afterward, but I did make an excuse to trade my beloved Volkswagen Tiguan in for a newer, electric model that very weekend. It just made me feel safer at the time.
Eventually our home became the only place I really wanted to be. Slowly, I built a space I genuinely loved to spend time in.
By then, home was no longer just where I kept my things. It was the place where my nervous system finally seemed to unclench. I wasn’t proud of it though- our home didn’t look like the pages of a magazine. It wasn’t a “designer spread” and it certainly didn’t look like the rooms posted by the fleet of design influencers my home state of Utah produces into the world with great abundance.
The decision to leave banking came into focus the day after Thanksgiving 2025, while Kirk and I were visiting family. I had spent part of Black Friday remotely interviewing a candidate because another employee at the bank, someone who had regularly made the job more stressful than it had to be, had gone above my head, inserted herself into a hiring process and created yet another problem I became responsible for containing. I had anxiety about it all day on Thanksgiving and then missed a family activity the next morning during the interview. I didn’t have a choice.
Afterward, Kirk and I climbed into our rental 4Runner to go find coffee. I remember trying to talk cheerfully about the candidate, she was genuinely lovely, and then breaking down. I could not keep giving work that much influence over my life. I had savings, the beginnings of another plan, a partner who supports me endlessly, and a home that had quietly taught me what safety felt like. I decided, in that dirty Toyota somewhere outside of Boise, Idaho, I was going to leave.
Then, after nearly fifteen years, at a point where I could no longer take it, I ran from my career, and founded an independent decorating practice, Reclamation Home. I gave my employer an extended notice and felt peace for the first time in years. Around this time, I also realized what made my home feel special. I started noticing similar characteristics in homes I admired: They were collected rather than manufactured, and they didn’t have to look like a design magazine spread to feel like home.
My philosophy was simple: don’t erase the people who live there in pursuit of a beautiful home. Go ahead: do the weird thing, mix styles, keep the heirloom.
Important subtext- this is not an anti-shopping book. Please, buy the beautiful sofa, remodel your kitchen if you have the means, and replace that terrible boob light in the guest bedroom (your in-laws will thank you).
Do what you can to make your home yours but do it with intention.
