25+ Years of Decorating Homes | Kim Cowell

Kim Colwell has over 25+ years of experience helping families design the homes of their dreams & decorate their homes to be comfy and cozy. 

In this interview, she gave us all insider tips on designing rooms based on psychology, how to select the right decor and more! 

Want to connect with Kim or hire her, check out her Instagram at @kimcolwelldesign. 

Prefer listening? Check out the podcast with Kim here. 

Q: Tell us a little about your background and how you got into interior design.

So I came through an angle that I didn't anticipate. I didn't set out in my life to be an interior designer, but, it kind of found me and I'm so grateful that it did. 

I grew up with a lot of interesting modalities, all of which touched on transforming space, and my interests as a little girl were always in the arts. So artistically. I got into my first juried art show when I was twelve, and they did not look fondly at that when they discovered how old I was.

Then I danced in a ballet company in high school. So I was always kind of with the arts in some way. But the really interesting drive, I think, that brought me to interior design was almost working under the tutelage of my mom. 

She was kind of like a mentor and she, when I was very, very little, was a sensorimotor, integrative therapist, working with the concept of environmental psychology for her patient's developmental process at a state hospital. 

Then somehow along the way, my mom became a feng shui master. She started working with indigenous women and over a ten-year process, became a shaman. 

So she had like a vantage point towards space that was working with feng shui and the energetic principles and then also the psychological. 

So by the time I got to college, I majored in theater and took a lot of fine art classes, but I was heavily focused on the psychology of the character and set design. 

After college, I made my living as an artist. I created cartoons and did a lot of fine art and illustration projects. 

But then my friends knew I grew up with feng shui and some of these odd psychology, psychological elements, and thought, well, you know, would you help me with my space? 

So I started helping them and then they referred me to their friends and before I knew it, because of my art background, I was changing people's window treatments. 

Then I did a lecture on feng shui where I met my first client who gave me my first real interior design project, it was a $700,000 remodeling project.

It was way over my head and lucky for me, I had a great architect who let me lead the artistic vision, but also schooled me the whole way. 

Q: What is the coolest / most interesting project you’ve worked & what are some lessons you learned about decorating from the experience? 

Well, two come to mind. One was that first $700,000 project I learned so much on it. It was a long time ago, over ten years ago. What was really interesting was it was the project had a heartbreaking start. My client had gone through considerable trauma before attending my Feng Shui lecture where we met. 

She had lost her husband and her son in the same house. Her son was young and going through a long-term illness and finally passed. The passing of her husband and son was maybe a year or more apart. 

But as you can only imagine, the significance of those two people for her was tremendous and when I met her, I think she was kind of grasping at straws. She knew she wanted to remodel. She had that instinct that she needed to make the house her own. 

I can speak openly because she has attended one of my own talks. Later, a couple of years after the project began and after we were finished, she came and talked at a lecture. 

One of the things that she talked about in her own voice was that there was a family dynamic where her husband had taken control of three of the rooms, their main bedroom, the office, and another room. 

So for me, I had to lean into some of the things that I had grown up with and what I had learned and that was, how was I going to impart not just a beautiful design, but a design that would be her, that would empower her, and a design that would help to heal her. 

So how could I create this healing space? Some of what I worked with was the concept of biophilic design. Biophilic design has a wide-ranging arc of how you would view it. 

It could be anything from items like a tree that is literal nature in your space, or a water feature, or it could be the aspects that they do clinical trials on like when you create a cross breeze, how does that make you feel when you hear the sound of water? How does that impact our nervous system? 

So I leaned into biophilia, opening up a lot more sunlight, a lot more airflow, and then psychologically, I built a lot more places to bond and connect, places to go inward and places to connect. 

Q: What are some tips you have for new families looking to decorate their homes? 

1. Flooring & Placement 

Well, the neat thing is a floor plan is free, and getting the right floor plan is the heart of all of it. So let's take a crib just for a second. 

So if I lean into feng shui and psychology at the same time, I see in my practice a lot of cribs are placed in the center of the room, sometimes even under a window and I think most moms would say not under a window because of the draft, because of the security. 

That's an instinct but having it in the middle of the wall like that isn't as secure for a little baby being wedged into a corner, not in the line or the pathway of the door. 

So let's say your bedroom door for the nursery is on the left. Then perhaps, depending on the other architectural features, the best placement for the baby's crib would be on the far right, in that corner, or along the door wall, or in the far, far right. 

So near right or far right because that makes them feel more secure.

2. Get your colors right 

Avoiding dissonant colors should be a big priority. Dissonant colors would be colors that don't flow or blend together. 

So in a nursery, you want to do two things. You want a calming environment, and at the same time, you want to create this inquisitive environment. You want to get the baby to interact with the space. 

That's why mobiles are so important. They need to see that mobile moving, and it gets them looking at it, and it gets their little minds going. 

3. Storage, storage, and more storage 

The next, I would say, is storage, storage, and more storage, no matter how large the house. So one of my projects was for a family of a film producer husband and artist wife. I helped them create creative storage units all over the house. 

They together had five boys, ranging from a little, little baby to, I think, my gosh, 12, 13 was the oldest. So what we did is we, first of all, got a bar cart and we got these beautiful canisters, and we put all of our crafts into these canisters on the bar cart so that when craft night came, boom. 

The bar cart can go inside, outside, and wherever you want to go. But when it's in its stationary position in their dining room, it was just a beautiful dining room with this gorgeous bar cart. 

It just looked like these gorgeous canisters didn't look like a bar. We didn't have whiskey on the bar cart. You know, we had arts and crafts, but it read like beautiful canisters. 

Then we added a large cabinet and it was really made for a bar. So it actually had trays instead of the shelf. So imagine that the tray is the shelving here, but each shelf slides out, and then it would become a giant tray. 

It was maybe 30 inches wide. So a giant tray where the kids could have their projects

One more thing I did for storage that I just love is they had five boys and four of them, excluding the baby, had scooters. So when I was working over there, initially, these scooters were everywhere, all four of them. 

So I made a banquet. A banquette is a bench that could have storage. It doesn't have to. So the storage usually pops up, or sometimes there are doors that come open, but not our bench. Our bench was engineered so we wouldn't have to have a bottom brace, and it opened like a garage door. 

So those boys, let me tell you, looked forward to putting their ride away. At the end of the night, the end of the day. They would love to open their own little individual garages. 

Q: What are some mistakes you see your clients make when decorating their homes? 

A lot of times I see people selecting things that they like without considering how it will relate to the group of other items, both in terms of scale, composition in the room, and the color story, and then just the kind of the vibe and the style of the room. 

Like, I am very eclectic. My favorite part, part of what I do is I take a lot of different nuances in someone's personality and kind of mash it up into one bespoke look that's just for them. 

I may mix a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, it still all has to look good together and it has to relate well. So I like to think of not just how does a piece look, but how the piece looks with the other stuff is almost, it's certainly as important as the piece itself.

So what I see a lot of times is someone will see something and think, oh, that's cool. Yeah, we measured that. It fits. It may fit in there, but it may not relate and it may still look too out of scale or too underscale for the room. 

Q: What are some of your favorite places for buying home decor? 

Oh, my goodness. I literally have a library of a million things. So first, I like you guys (That's us, Mi Mezon!). I think that you're a great source. 

I also really enjoy First Dibs. I think First Dibs is a wonderful outlet that allows you to find makers from all corners of the globe. 

I also enjoy Vintage. I think that there are so many beautiful pieces that we already have on the planet that are really gorgeous, and it's certainly a sustainable way to be. But also they're just, when you open up your mind to the, to the world of makers from every era, it, it just, it's endless and it's exciting because of that.

In Los Angeles. I also really like a store called Lawson and Finning. They're one of my favorite furniture stores. Some of my favorite vendors are in Brooklyn, in New York. But I really do enjoy you guys as a source.