Shelly Rosenberg
Our podcast is hosted on Anchor
But you can listen in most places such as: Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Radio Republic.
Seasoned interior designer and expert thinker on sustainable living, Shelly brings 20 years of experience to the interior design community and continues to contribute to the national conversation on sustainable, adaptive design and its impact on human health and well-being. She has built her career in design on the premise of “living well”, an ideology that for Shelly, goes far beyond creating beautiful spaces.
“Interior design can upgrade safety, boost mood, improve relationships and increase the value of our largest investment, our home or business, and how we think, feel and behave within the space.”
-Shelly Rosenberg
Shelly has mastered the multifaceted approach required for achieving sustainable living and believes a sustainable environment should be available to all, regardless of the unique needs various individuals may require. Although her designs are always stunning, her priority is less on creating physical beauty, and more on helping others improve their overall quality of life. She does this by composing supportive and adaptive environments that help foster mental, emotional and physical well-being, as well as environments that accelerate growth, awareness and human progress.
As a mother of three children, each with learning differences and special needs, her ability to identify and honor everyone’s unique design requirements has grown exponentially. Shelly has dedicated her profession to creating and designing adaptive spaces catered towards the differently abled and has a keen ability to listen to needs first and design accordingly.
From creating and designing spaces to offering product recommendations and instructional courses, Shelly’s work is shaped and formed by the unique needs of those she is serving in the moment. Her work focuses on providing adaptive design that translates across various populations, as she has a heart for both the provision of services to the differently abled and the accessibility of these services for those who may not have the means to hire a full-service design firm. Shelly meets her constituents where they are and provides a creative and innovative solution for helping all in need of adaptive, sustainable design.
Machine Transcription provided by Happyscribe
Shelly Rosenberg.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe
Hi everybody. I'm Gustavo, the host of the Enabled Disabled podcast. It is my great pleasure and honor to have Shelly Rosenberg on the show today. Shelly is an award winning interior designer. She is also the founder of a company called Acorn Oak where she works as interior designer and helps demystify design for people who have children with disabilities or special needs. And she is also a phenomenal advocate for universal design. So we're going to dive into the Shelly's story. She's got a very powerful story and explore why we should be thinking about design differently. Quick description of myself. I am in my living room. I have some blinds and drapes in the background. I am wearing a blue Polo shirt. I am a middle aged Latin American male with Brown hair combed to the front. Shelly, awesome.
You forgot to say handsome. I'm Shelly Rosenberg. I'm so glad to be here with you. Yes, I would absolutely say I am middle aged in a black sweater and I'm in front of a beautiful mural in my daughter's room of some gorgeous cherry blossoms in a blue sky.
Beautiful. So I would like to get started. I like to talk about childhood. I'm wondering when you were growing up, was there something that you remember that drew you towards interior design or was it something that you discovered later on in your life?
There absolutely is a connection from my childhood. My mom and dad divorced when I was quite young and she bounced around quite a bit being a single mom with two kids. And I remember there were times where we were really struggling monetarily and lived in some pretty dire apartments, some gloomy environments. And my mother was very artistic. I remember she cut up some bedding from my I had a canopy bed at one point, and at one point she cut up the bedding, the canopy from the bed and made beautiful curtains for our kitchen. And she was always painting things herself. And she loved to have the furniture just so if she couldn't afford real art, she would go and pick up things from an antique mall and decorate our place. And I just always remember having a home that felt like someone they cared about it and about me. I have actually told her that recently. I said I look back in my childhood, we always had pretty places, even if they weren't extraordinary by any means. You always really made them sweet and special. And I have great memories of that. Yeah. I think that early on I started to realize that no matter how bad it was, if you could create an environment that made you feel a little bit better, a little bit special, it just gave you the sense that we could make it.
Things were going to be fascinating.
I noticed that you said the way the home felt, so it felt special. It felt like home. It felt like somebody cared about this environment. And when I speak with most designers or I hear listen to designers speak in front of clients, they usually don't use the word feeling. It's usually about something else that they're pitching. So that's fascinating that you did you make that connection in your practice, or was that something that came later?
I'm consciously making it more of a connection now that you bring that up. But as we're going to speak later about my niche, Acorn and Oak, it really is based on looking at interior design through our senses, and that is how we feel and experience our world. Site is one of those five senses. And I think most people expect interior designers to talk about what your rooms look like visually or maybe how they function as far as furniture layout or traffic flow or something like that. But there's so much more as to the way our environment affects us. And yes, I think that over the years, as I've invited people into my various homes that I've designed for myself, I'll have friends say to me, I love being in your home. I don't know what it is, but I just want to stay here. I just want to curl up on this couch and spend more time with you. I really love how I feel in your space. And so there's a rabbit hole that we could go down about how to create spaces that feel a certain way. And I think looking at our senses and how we experience the world over and above, just seeing for pleasure is a big part of that.
Was any of this taught in design school? What was the main focus when you were no.
I don't remember anything being taught in design school that wasn't pretty concrete. Here are the colors, the primary colors. Here are the secondary. Here are the tertiary things like that. Every once in a while, you hear something about Feng Shui or some ancient art of energetic design. And when I was going through design school, I remember thinking, oh, I don't really like Feng Shui principles, because typically the way Americans design spaces, for example, in America, it's very common to put a swimming pool behind your home in sunshue. You want a water feature to be out in the front of your home, not in the back. So I never thought much about that. But over the years, through my own experiences and then in serving clients, I had one couple tell me, you have redone our master bedroom, and it looks beautiful, and the kids toys are out of it. And we actually feel like we have a real space that looks chic and sophisticated and is adult. But they were blushing a little bit. They were like, our relationship truly has improved because of the way we feel in this space and the way we connect on a completely different level, that we have this sanctuary that's all of our own.
And I remember thinking wow. Somehow I'm doing this magic, and I don't know that it's me. I think it is a system that anybody can adopt. I think it just takes a little bit of a mind shift to think about what other things that make you feel certain ways and how to emulate that and recreate that within your living space.
But that shift in the mindset is huge because it reflects on everything that you do, all the questions, all the time that you spend getting to know the clients. It's not just about learning budget, like you said, what colors you like, what colors you don't. You're really diving deeper into what are the things that move people emotionally? What are the things that bring them more wellness or bring them whatever it is that they're looking for in their space?
That's right. And after watching the short film that you sent me, you'll have to remind me of the name of it so that your listeners can go find this.
So it's not released yet, but it will be released. I don't think it has an official title, but it's part of the announcement. It's part of the Unfixed Media series from Kimberly Wyer.
Yes. And I got a sneak peek of this and I got to watch it, and my mind was blown because I kept thinking of all these new questions to put on my questionnaire now about how you feel in your body. Forget the space for a minute. Do you have headaches often? Are you sensitive to bright light? Do you need more light than the average person? Do you feel depressed if your home is dark? Like all these different questions to ask, they have nothing to do with what color or texture you love, really figuring out who we are as people and how we're operating and what challenges we might be living with on a daily basis. And then starting from that place, making sure that your home is a real sanctuary that works for you. And then at the end, like the icing on the cake, then we decorate. And I think this is going to it might confront some other colleagues and interior designers when I start spreading this concept. But ultimately, I think we're also much better off if we can shift that mindset a little bit to yes, aesthetics are super important. In fact, I'm not sure who adds to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but they have added aesthetics to that pyramid now so they can prove scientifically that aesthetics are very important to our health and well being.
But again, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's just so much more.
There is. And I think going back to my College days, I used to study a lot of philosophy and aesthetics, and they spoke about aesthetics and the aesthetics of art. It wasn't just a visual thing, so it did encompass all of the senses, not necessarily with just one piece. But in general, when you speak about an aesthetics, we can broaden that to mean more than just a visual sense.
Absolutely.
Yeah. But you're right. Most people think of aesthetics as visual.
I think commercial interiors are a little bit ahead of us on this. There are some really neat case studies on big campuses like Google or Nike or Amazon, where they are incorporating all kinds of sensory integrated design concepts within their campuses. Flowing water through the main lobbies, lots of green and real plants, more natural light, even if they have to pop in skylights to get more of that natural light. So people really are flowing with the circadian rhythm of natural daylight instead of working under lights. That confuse the system so that you're not sleeping well when you do have an opportunity to rest. And even since the olfactory powers are incredibly important, and I think it's been considered a little bit of a marketing ploy to have a certain signature sent in a store or a facility. But there's such good research behind it that if you really did it in a smart way, that's just another really interesting way that designers can come into play to have nappods and certain scents that are in the air that invigorate but also calm. It's just a really fun topic. But yeah, immersive spaces have been ahead of us in that realm.
They usually are. I took a class on universal design from University of Buffalo a little several months ago, and one of the big topics was wayfinding, and it doesn't really apply as much to house unless you live in a state home. But it's interesting that they use scent and they use the running waterfalls to help people who are blind or have low vision to remember where they are. So if you know that the lobby has running water, when you start to hear it again, you have a better sense of where you're heading and you can do the same thing with smell. It's pretty interesting.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I love the way finding aspect. That's something fairly new to me, too. I've not worked with someone with low vision, although interior designers right now are really focused in on aging in place and these certifications for working with the boomers who are now aging and also have discretionary income in which to hire a designer to help them stay at home longer. Not many people want to go into an assisted home facility. Assisted living facility. But yeah, there's so much that you can do with the way finding, including even textures of the flooring. So when you have carpeting and then you feel tile under your feet, you know that maybe you've left a specific room and you're in a hallway. I think that's really fascinating.
Absolutely. I would like to I'm curious to know. I have a sense of it. What brought you to starting Acorn and Oak and what kind of helped shift your mindset going through this design process where you are so open to experiencing and learning about all these new design strategies.
It truly started with my kids. My oldest now is 23. I also have a 20 year old. And the girls had various learning differences that seemed to get more pronounced over time, obviously, because it took a while for us to figure out what was going on with these kids. And then once they stopped masking and really were okay with acknowledging, yes, I need help in all of these areas, just so many symptoms started coming to light that needed some kind of had to address them in some way. And both girls really, I'd say what I classify now as a highly sensitive person, which I think I am as well. And I know there's a big spectrum. A lot of us have strong preferences, but some people really have sensitivities that just you could hardly live with them. They really become challenging. So anyway, as we were working with ADHD depression, I found out my middle is on the spectrum. She's autistic, and she really had a ton of sensitivities with temperature, with lighting, certain textures. Her bedding had to be a certain way. And so over time and just raising my girls and trying to be a great mom, I realized that I was consistently changing the environment, not just in their rooms, but all over the house to make sure that they felt supported and that their mood stayed lifted because who wants kids that are melting down by the end of the day?
Really, it starts where you have this problem. You have two girls who come home from school, they're completely wiped out. And so they're already way oversensitive because they've been trying to manage busy school day, and they get home and they're physically and mentally in pain. And, like, how am I going to help my kids? And so that's when I started to realize that some people just need more functioning in their house. Then I had another child late in life. He's nine now, and he has down syndrome. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to have a neurotypical child, but that's okay. I know how I helped the girls, and Ronan is going to teach me all of these new things. And boy has he. He's a completely different kid with all kinds of different needs. But really, I think the shift took place when I started meeting all the other moms in what I consider the special needs or disability community. And every kid I met, even if they also had down syndrome, had completely different set of needs and challenges and abilities and gifts. And in talking with all these people, they're just so real.
They're so deep, and they're honed because we're dealing with really important life decisions. And if you haven't been through some of that, you may not realize I started to feel like my traditional interior design business and in my life with this disabilities community and my own kids just there was a disconnect there. And I thought, Maybe I need to leave interiors, which seemed at the time in my mind a little bit superficial and changed my life's work. Maybe I need to do something with the disability community. And then my girlfriends were like, Shelley, Hello. Like, you can do interior design for us. We need so much help. We need baby proofing much longer. We need all these different things. And then I started meeting friends with kids in wheelchairs, and they're like, Are you kidding me? Babysit for one day and try to navigate the world with a child in a wheelchair, and you'll know exactly how you can help us. And so I did. I just started looking into it and I thought, this is it. These are my people, and this is who I want to work with. And these are the kids that I want to empower.
And it just started from there. And I thought, okay, I'm going to start a new business in Niche where I start to learn how best to help these families. And even if I can only help 10% or 20%, if I can make things better by helping them amend their environment, to support themselves and these kids to have a little bit better lives than God, that would really make me super happy. So that's how that stuff is really enjoying it. And that's how I got to meet you.
Absolutely. That's a great story. Let's say, for example, with Ronan. Right. How did you start? Ronan is your son. So how did you start to learn and change and adapt? What were some of the. The things, key things that you found important to help him function better or to just feel more comfortable in the home that you can first thing that I can think of is he's physically highly functioning and he's strong.
And he also is delayed in his abstract thinking and his cognitive abilities. So here's this big, strong kid that doesn't understand danger or consequences. I call it baby proofing. There's got to be a more sophisticated word, but that's how I started. He was an infant so much longer than typical infants are. He walked years later, he talks years later. Everything was delayed. The babyhood, the toddlerhood, the time where kids, you really have to be on them and you can't look away for a minute that's just stretched into years and it's really exhausting. So you get into hyperdrive of how can I best make my environment or his environment as safe as possible so that I can take a breath and turn my back for a second? And he feels empowered to explore his environment, but without me saying, like, constantly stopping him and pulling him back, that's very aggravating to all kids when they're trying to explore the world. And we're worried that they're going to hurt themselves. And so we're constantly saying no. And it started that way also he had a lot of fears that other kids didn't. For example, trying to potty train him was difficult cognitively and physically.
He has a very short stature. He's terrified of getting up on toilets because his feet didn't touch the ground. He felt very unsafe. And even the typical potty stools, they're on top of a tile floor a lot of times, and they're rocking or moving a little bit. And he just really struggled. He refused to use a regular toilet, even though he was much too physically big for the little training potty. I went to a store and got a toilet that was the old fashioned lower height. You can even find kids size toilets now and then. Also, Color has this amazing toilet seat that goes on top of another toilet seat that's a lot smaller. He felt more protected. They're just little things that over the years, I've realized that could help all kids, neurotypical or not, reach independence and autonomy faster. But we have to really meet them where they are. Instead of trying to train a child to always reach so far to use what adults use. Wouldn't it be great if we could meet them where they are? I also think that, you know, this is my philosophy. I'm not a medical professional, but I feel like I had a lot less meltdowns and tantrums because I did meet him where he is and adapted his environment.
So he felt really acknowledged seen. Everybody wants to feel seen. Yeah, those are the main things that kind of got me started.
I'm going to pivot just a little bit because I think this is important for people who don't have any friends or family or know anyone who has down syndrome. Talk to me a little bit about what they're missing out on and what they don't understand and what they could expose themselves to and get in front of that would help them see things in a different way.
I love this pivot. I love this pivot so much because when you're passionate about something, you just want to share it with everyone. And so the very first time I was able to speak about this, it was a nice surprise to me because it didn't go the way I thought. I was invited to speak with a bunch of interior designers about how to niche. So we're all after. Theoretically, we're all after the same 1% people that can hire a designer and spend all this money and do these fabulous homes, and we're all after that same group. What if interior designers just started to niche? Then you make yourself an expert, then you can narrow in on a particular target market, and then you can charge more, et cetera. The whole point was for me to talk about how I used a life experience to niche and how that niche is. I'm actually more successful as a niche designer than I ever was as a general designer. I told the story. And it happens to be about my kids. And similar to what I told you. And at the end, people's hands were all up. Everybody wanted to comment.
Every single person in that room wanted to tell me a story of somebody they loved in their family that had a stroke in midlife, that had a skiing accident and had a traumatic brain injury. Every single person I feel like, knows or loves someone, even if it's a grandparent or a great grandparent who's naturally declining with age, that is struggling or has struggled, and they have some kind of a story or a moment where they could see that their home or the person that they love, who was struggling, their home was not working for them. Everybody was fascinated about this. Nobody wanted to talk about niche or business. It really struck a chord in people's hearts. And that's when I thought, okay, people need to understand that we all have issues. Like you said on I think, another one of your podcasts, you talk about invisible illnesses, too. I'm so excited that people are talking about mental health now. There are so many different things that people struggle with in silence, and I don't want them to anymore. And I do think environment can play a big role in that as well. I love showing people that, yeah, you know what?
You really do connect with this idea of universal design. And even though it's hard to look at, sometimes, all of us are going to deal with disabilities. Honestly, my reading glasses, my eyes are going we're laughing earlier about reading glasses. And that is a very small but significant disability. If I do not have those reading glasses, I cannot follow recipes. I cannot read my medication bottles. I need this. This is really not something that's only a small percentage of the world. We are the largest minority in the world, people that have disabilities, and all of us are human, and we're all going to experience things. So when you deliver it in that way, people are like, oh, yeah, you're right. This is something that I think is worth thinking about. Even if it's never their niche or fortunately, if nothing significant ever happens to you or your family, the chances are just that somebody that you love or support will.
There's also my takeaway from that, too, is that there's nothing we fear, what we don't know. And so if we can just face it even for just a little bit or just see it in a different light, look at it from a different angle and share experiences, then it's not something that we have to run away from. It's not about confronting our mortality. It's just about confronting life as we age and as we go through our lives, things are going to change. And the more we can be aware of what's happening, the better we can make our lives in the places that we spend the most time at absolutely couldn't set it better myself, honestly.
I did a show house recently, a national showhouse, and I decided that if I was going to really do this investment, because it is a significant investment in time and money to do a show house. If I were going to do this, I was going to go out on a limb and do a suite, a bedroom, and a bathroom for Amuse, who is a real little girl in my life named Virginia. And she lives with Rhett syndrome. And so she's in a wheelchair, and she's nonverbal. She speaks with an augmentative device called a Toby. It's like a retinal device that reads her eyes. And so then we'll speak specific words for her. And so I decided I was going to design this room with this little girl in mind. And my whole mission was to show people that talking about disability or this little girl is not a sad thing. Let's flip it on its head. Let's talk about the narrative of how much we can empower this incredible kid who's not cognitively delayed. She's beautifully smart and ambitious. Let's show the world how much we can empower her, how she can turn on her own lighting, her own music, her shower, adjust the temperature, how she can have physical autonomy in the bathroom with a bidet system.
There were so many cool things that I got to put into this room. And instead of saying, oh, this poor girl, she has such a rough life, and it must be so hard for her parents. No, we really focused on look at this incredible human being and all the gifts, how much she's teaching us, and all the inspiration that we can glean from her. And it was such an amazing experience. I think we had 12,000 people come through that show house and every single person that stepped into her room, and I was able to explain what we did. They were blown away. They felt empowered. I'm telling you, no one left there feeling sad for her. There was no pity. And I believe that it depends on how we frame this, but we need to continually educate people that there are so many gifts, if I may, I think my kids show me magic sometimes there's beauty, and this is being human. This is the human condition. There's no perfection. And if there were, life would be boring and so one dimensional. This is where it's at. This is where the beauty of life really is.
And yeah, I think that we definitely need to fight that perception that this is some scary, morbid, sad, depressing topic that we all have to get through or talk about. I don't think that's true at all.
Which is interesting, because when you think of the Ada and you think of how people respond to it, and I remember doing I probably shouldn't be making this confession, but I will. When we built our showroom out in 2007 for my business, Pure Audio Video. I remember the contractor was we were learning, this is the first showroom we'd ever built. Now, we were fairly new to the business, and just the Ada was framed in such a way that it was an obstacle. It was a pain in the rear end, and it just cost more money. And we were like, okay, how do we navigate this? And we ended up we're going to redesign our office soon, but we ended up not making it as accessible, as friendly, as open as it could have been because I didn't have the knowledge at the time to fight it, to go against it, or to at least exercise creativity in those spaces. It was just, let's do the bare minimum, and then we'll be fine, and then we can build the space out.
That's so frustrating. I do think that most people, and not maliciously, they don't even know these Ada laws feel like another hoop to jump. And depending on what kind of building it is, people have more tolerance for it than others. If it's a public library, people are like, okay, yeah, this is the general public. There are going to be more people, possibly in wheelchairs, coming to read at the library. But if it's, I don't know, a Skydiving, something for fun or some recreational type of place, I think people why would we need that? Let's just put it around the back. But they have no concept of how that might make someone feel. And again, they're not even stopping to think about that. People are not bad because they think Ada is just another hoop to jump through. I just think they haven't had the experience or been taught what the other perspective is. And it does seem more expensive on the front end sometimes. But that's why I'm really interested in finding a company or people that can start stats together on how long it takes for this to pay for itself or how it can actually increase your profits long term.
Because the disability community talks to each other and says, hey, this particular coffee shop is so easy and so accessible. And I feel really at home here. If you're traveling or if you're a family with a disability, come here. And I do think that it gets a bad rap. And that's another thing. It's just educating people that are in charge of city planning and development and building. That's why not just interior designers, but architects also have to really start to be educated on why this is so important.
Absolutely. And it's that small shift in mentality to say, forget the loss for a second. We're going to build something that exceeds it because we want to include more people with more abilities and honor that diversity. And that's the real goal. But that's like where the meat is, right? The more diversity we can bring in, the more opportunities we're going to have. And then the cycle starts to become something virtuous, like you said, where people say the disability community locally starts to say, go to the coffee shop, go to that hotel, go to that restaurant. And there are plenty of people in those communities that are spending money, that are going out to eat, that are doing all those things that everybody else is doing. There's that stereotype. And yes, there's a lot of work to be done where people with disabilities are, generally speaking, there's a higher degree of unemployment that we're paid less. Those are all true. But if we don't start somewhere.
It'S never going to improve for the people that are money motivated or are motivated to attract clients with more money. We'll just go back to the boomers for now. Maybe we start there with a person like that. It's like, okay, look, there are this many senior citizens in your community and in your neighborhood, and they have the discretionary income to come in here. If you could really let them know that even if they have a Walker and they're a little bit embarrassed or a scooter or whatever they need, that they can easily come to your restaurant, put that as part of your marketing, get these people in here. They've got money to spend in your restaurant. I think sometimes, like I said, you have to meet people where they are. You'd like to think everybody wants to learn about this because it's the right thing to do. But sometimes you have to come at it a little bit different ways, maybe from business and everybody's motivated in different ways, and that's okay. Yeah. Gustavo, you are a little bit fuzzy. For some reason. You're not in focus as much as you were before. So I just want to make sure that when people are watching this recording, they can see you.
I think that's a great point that we need to meet people where they are and be flexible enough to incorporate different approaches, because like you said, it's not just about the right thing to do. There are a number of benefits that we're not actualizing in the world yet. That really should be the show home that you did, where you said you had all these 12,000 people come in. Can you talk a little bit about was there any what was the follow up impact or what have you done since then to build the momentum that you got from that?
I did not have a massive impact as far as typical people calling and wanting to be clients necessarily for me, I received a massive amount of validation that this work was important. Out of those 12,000 people, I might have met ten or 15 women that said, oh, I work in the special Ed Department at my school, or I'm a physical therapist, or I'm an occupational therapist. This is fantastic. I never thought about this. Several architects and builders came through. They were intrigued, hey, take my card. We should talk about this. Like I said, everybody was really moved. And most people were actually surprised that smart home technology could be used in association with disability. Again, just like with interior design on its own. I think people think of smart home technology as a luxury, good, as something that you're going to seek out so that you can have fantastic WiFi for your movies or for your gaming. But there's so much more to it than that. And I think it's just about getting the word out. There's a lot going on in the world right now, and some of these things take a while to trickle down into household knowledge.
And so I think part of that is just keep talking about it, keep showing up where the average person is so that they can see. I think most people now in America have adopted an Alexa or a series. And again, that's a good place to start to talk to people about this. I know that my son, he's been in speech therapy since he was born. So for nine years, he's been trying to learn to articulate his words. And it was a grand moment when Siri could understand what he was trying to get her to do. He was like, yes, cause, you know, he'll get on the iPhone and say, call. So. And for so many years, she's just, I'm sorry, I didn't get that. And it's just so frustrating. Yeah, the show house was very validating in that way. And then also what I loved was the press interest. So many Editors. We had two full press days where Editors from all over the country came through. Most of them were on an iPad. So there's like an assistant with an iPad showing the editor your room. And so while they're looking at your room, you're behind the assistant saying, here's what I did, and here's why so many Editors were like, okay, this is a whole new realm in their world of talking about design over and above aesthetics.
They were really excited and they wanted to know more. And I got a lot of great press, even for some of the really top shelter publications like Architectural Digest. The editor, Amy Ashley, she didn't say anything to me directly, but I heard her say, hey, team, take note. This is interesting. Every little seed that I'm planting like this. Now, Amy Ashley, who got this incredible sexy publication, Architectural Digest, maybe this is on her radar. Now. Is she going to publish someone like me? Probably not. But maybe she's out there now searching for really high end design that's mind blowing that also has smart home technology, or possibly a celebrity that has someone in their family that's struggling with a disability or someone like Michael J. Fox, who is struggling with Parkinson's. We're out here, and this needs to be discussed. And so that was my favorite part, is really just opening minds to wait a minute. This is cool because what else are you saying about the other rooms in the show? Home? Wow. This is really dramatic. Wow. This is theatrical. Everything was beautiful and well done. But does it have a message? Is it improving or empowering a life?
Possibly. But I just thought that was an exciting validation, for sure.
That's super exciting. And you might get published. We're early adopters in this space. So the fact that people in a really well known, super popular mainstream magazine are starting to take note means that something is happening right there's some wheels turning in the background that maybe we don't see, that maybe in a year, maybe in two years, maybe in six months, something's going to start to break through.
I hope so. I even see that in the fashion industry, in industries that are typically looked upon as frivolous, possibly, or luxury or just not super serious with technology comes better research. And scientists are now finding the parts of fashion or interiors or art that really do have massive impact on who we are as human beings on this planet. And that's really exciting, especially coming from a person that always felt like kind of an artsy, artsy type person. And I grew up thinking artsy people don't really make that much money. And we're not really taken very seriously because it's art, it's music. It's less important than Stem or all these things. But as I've gotten older, I'm realizing this is just as important, and we need it all. It's two sides of one wonderful coin. Yeah. I think it's really important for all of us in sort of the artsy side of things really start talking about why this is important, too. We need it all.
Absolutely. Working with and learning about the science and the engineering a little bit just to see what's out there. So when you are doing a project with an interior designer, let's say it's a home built, there's so much out there that it's impossible for any one person to know. I love it when an interior designer brings on specialists, like a lighting designer, for example, because an interior designer may know a lot about lighting, that's fair. But a lighting designer, somebody that's all they do every day, is going to bring something unique to that project that you will not do. And so it's about knowing when to step out of the way and bring somebody in who could add so much value to a project that wouldn't be there without that team.
Oh, absolutely. And I've seen that happen. A lot of interior designers now have become brands. Everybody wants to be an influencer or a brand. So interior design firms used to be called a name, but now they're your name. And more interior designers than ever want to show their work. And it used to be that we did the work and then we styled the work and we might get a photographer, a professional photographer. But now people are much more serious about it. And I hire specialists all the time to come in and help me tweak things and make them even better than they would have before. Because you don't know what you don't know. And that's what I've decided to do is start to reach out to my colleagues and offer myself as a consultant to come in and help them. Because let's be real. When you are an interior designer, you may only have a handful of clients in your whole career that actually have really specific special needs. And you might feel stumped. But that's okay because there are hundreds of thousands of interior designers out there. And if each one of them calls on me to come in and help them work out some challenges, then I feel that this mission, number one, gets scaled faster because more designers are opening their minds to getting this special help.
And then once they've learned it for me, then got it for the next person, possibly. And so there's only so many people I could teach. There's only so many families I can work with. But if I can talk to interior designers and architects and builders about this, I'm hoping that this idea of why universal design is important to begin with starts to happen. Just more fluidly.
Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit more? Just dive in a little bit more detail into some of the other things that you're doing with Acorn and Oak. I know that there are some products there. Why did you develop talk a little bit about what you're selling product wise and why you develop them. What's the benefit?
There are really two products that I'd focus on. One is a mattress. There's a lot of new books out on sleep and why sleep is important. And a big part of your sleeping is your foundation and what's on your bed. And with Ronan, I mentioned this before. His potty training was delayed. And a lot of kids that I've come to know and really love may always deal with incontinence. That may not be something that they'll ever be able to control. And I just realized that we needed help. I'm thinking at the time, moms need help with this daily task of changing sheets when your child is having an accident every night. And so every morning you're having to strip the bed, and it just takes its toll. It's a lot of time and energy and laundry and it's not good for the planet, etc. My husband grew up with a good friend who owns a betting company, and she has lots of different things that she manufactures. And I went to her and I said, I want to create a mattress pad that's organic and it's not crinkly and noisy and plasticy. And she said, I've got this mattress pad that I've been a prototype that I've been working on for hotels that sort of absorbs like a diaper.
So it keeps the mattress dry, but it doesn't let anything spill onto the floor or get onto the rest of the sheets and all this. So we started talking about what that would look like. And she calls this mattress pad the Lily pad. And I said, okay, I want to take your Lily pad. And I want to change its size and its shape so that we can use it on a daily basis without having to change the bed. So, for example, I do lots of different sizes and shapes of the Lily pad, but one of them is long and thin and a long, thin rectangle. So you have the bed made. You'd lay that on that pad on top of the bottom sheet. So the person sleeping would lay straight on top of this organic noiseless breathable pad. And so in the morning, when there's been an accident, you just take the pad out, throw it in the wash, and put the second one on. And so it comes in three packs. And that way for caregivers that are having to change linens a lot. Hopefully, this cuts down on the work. Also, it helps kids that are struggling with this be less embarrassed.
Say Ronan wants to go and spend the night over to friends, but he's embarrassed that he's still in a pull up or he's scared that he's going to have an accident in his sleeping bag over at a friend's house. These small little pads can just snuggle down in his sleeping bag and you'd never know. Or in a nap. What do you call it? Like the nap mats. At school, they can even line car seats or wheelchairs just in case there is some kind of an accident in the car and a seat. So just trying to think of something that was practical and would help people feel empowered and also lessen the burden a little bit on carrot. And then the other thing that I really wanted to do was a weighted blanket. I'm very sensitive to plastic smell. I personally just I can smell, like, really small smells. Like my family is like, how do you smell these things? I don't know. I just do. Plastic pellets in the weighted blankets really bothered me. And so, again, I had Rebecca with down, et cetera, help me come up with an organic weighted blanket that's full of glass, sand.
So there's no plastics. It's hybrid. Allergenic all the fabrics, and the batting is all clean, non toxic. And again, it was about sizing to me because kids in a wheelchair out in the world, kids with autism, you can't lug a 20 or 30 pound weighted blanket from your bed to the classroom. So I wanted to make these really small weighted blankets that I call, like, lap pads. My smallest is a 22 X 22. It can sit on the lap of someone in a wheelchair. And again, it's nontoxic and easily washable. But really what it does is this weight helps your body feel pressure, like a warm hug. And so it releases dopamine and serotonin, and it helps your autonomic nervous system have a sense of relaxation or letting down. And I was thinking about the seniors that sit in a nursing home all day and they're not touched very much how much a nice way to blanket on their lap could bring comfort to someone and have it small enough that it's not going to get caught in their wheels of their chair. So those are the two main products. I have lots of different sizes and lots of different weights.
And they are a little bit more expensive because they're made out of really quality ingredients that are going to last you a long time and not off gas. Yeah. Thank you for asking, because I'm very excited about those two things and they've been a little bit slow going, but I need to make time to let more people know about them. But yeah, they're exciting. And I think they're going to bring comfort to a lot of people.
Absolutely. It's great to see how thought out and what your frame of mind is as you are thinking it through. It's really enlightening. I also think that the weighted blankets could be useful for traveling. So like when you're on a plane, if you're feeling anxiety or there's a lot of people that don't like to travel, having a weighted blanket with you could be really beneficial.
Yes. The small ones, the 22 X 22, you can get in five, seven or £10. And typically you want about 10% of your body weight. So if you're an adult that has massive anxiety when you travel or just out in public, probably ten pound would be perfect for you. I also sell some really soft flannel like covers that are waterproof, they're made of bamboo. But if you don't want to buy the cover, you can just easily machine wash.
Outstanding. What is next on your Horizons for any up and coming projects that you can talk about?
Yes. As more people in the community have found out that I'm specializing this, I've had a few nonprofits reach out and say, hey, we're doing a project with someone in a wheelchair. Or for example, there's a fantastic group called Dwell with Dignity, which I mean, their name says it all. They started out working with single families that were rehabbing from homelessness. And when they got that first apartment, it was usually a small white depressing box. And so this group comes in and decorates it and really adds dignity and beauty to this new life that these families are starting. And it's incredible how just having a space that you can call your own and that you're proud of stimulates social activities. They now have a place to invite people in their community gets stronger. And so anyway, Dwell With Dignity is working with a few schools. There's one particular high school that is a choice school in the district, and a good percentage of the school kids come from the low income families. This age group is very sensitive, and there have been a lot of suicides at this high school or several. And so the kids got together with the faculty and decided they needed an area in that high school where if they were struggling, they could go to just check out or to connect with another student and have some quiet time or just some community time.
They asked me if I would come in and work on like a century corner for these kids with some cool lights, with maybe some headphones, maybe a swing, just an area where they can recalibrate and reconnect. I find those kinds of projects fascinating. I've had a little bit of trouble working with individual families right now because of Cobid. And most of the kids that I'm connection with are medically fragile. And so because of COVID, things had really slowed down with my residential projects. So having these commercial projects come my way has really been exciting. And just to see how a space that I might create can serve not just one family, but maybe hundreds of families feels really good.
I bet it does. I'm happy to hear that. And it's also you're doing the variety of projects are just going to make you even better at tackling that many more obstacles and making sure that those kids I'm looking back where we started, where you were talking about your mother and how she made your home feel special or all the homes you were living, that she took the time to care, to make it beautiful, but to make it feel like home, you're bringing something similar in a different way to all of these other families, like you're carrying on that tradition, which is beautiful.
Thank you. Yeah. I really do think that I think that unfortunately, a lot of these kids have parents that are working multiple jobs and they just don't have the opportunity or the bandwidth right now to create a safe space for that child so the school can become that. And there's a special place in the school that becomes even more of a place where they can just, like I said, either disconnect in a healthy way or reconnect and feel like they matter. That's what this life is about. And every time I see something like this become successful and see how happy people are and how it does change lives, it just makes me want to continue. I may be one of the few doing this as an interior designer, but by no means I'm a real expert. Every single person that I meet has a different challenge. I just am really good at learning on the job, and I'm learning how to better vet each person that I meet and find out faster and faster how best I can help them. Because like I said, I could meet, even if I just did this only for kids with downs.
Every kid is so different with down syndrome, there's no way I could really ever know the full gamut of what one person would need. That's what makes it interesting, too, though, is because each person is going to have something a little bit different. I'm going to continue to bring my experience, but then gosh. They're always teaching me so many more lessons.
But that's the I think the muscle that you're really exercising is empathy and letting that guide and frame all of the creativity and going after different sources of information and experts, et cetera. But it's really your empathy to be able to put yourself in somebody else's situation and mindset and see what they're going through and then solve it.
Yes. Thank you so much for having me, because it's so much fun to talk with you. And I know we're going to have many more conversations in the future because like I said, this is such a rabbit hole. When I look at sensory design, I think I may have a book in my future. I feel like I'd have a chapter for every single sense that we have and how we can mend our environment with that sense in particular in mind. And there's a lot of things that we can do that are inexpensive and not complicated. It's just like you said earlier, it's a matter of mind shift. And then there are also options that do require more investment. But just to know that you can start somewhere and let that build and that we can ask for help, I think there are people that don't realize, too, that there are a lot of companies and grants, Medicare and other ways that through occupational therapist or physical therapist, sometimes these remodels can be funded. And I'm still learning about that as well. But there is help out there if you need it.
Absolutely. So if there are architects or designers, builders or just people who would like to reach out, connect with you, hire you, how do they get in touch?
I've got a website. It's just acornandoak.com, and all my information is there. And even if they're not sure, it's something that they really want to explore, but they just want to say, I love what you're doing and I'd love to support you in some way. Let me know if you ever need an elevation drawn or if I can ever offer my services in any way. I think that would just be great. Not everybody is going to be moved by the same things, and that's okay. But I know when I meet somebody that's super passionate about a topic and super lovely, sometimes I'm just like, just let me know what I could do to help you. I'm great with marketing or this or that. And so as a community, I just think if anybody's interested in helping at all.
I'd be super grateful I really appreciate the time I'm looking forward to all of your future books and hopefully some TV shows and whatever it is you do, I'm looking forward to it because I think you're really an impressive human being and I'm Super happy we connected and thank you so much for taking the time to do events.
I am too I am very thankful for this new friendship and I look forward to talking to you again really soon.