___________________________________________________________________________________________
| . |
__________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
| . |
 | |  | |  | |  |
| receive modaustin.weekly |
| . |
| © 2010 modaustin.net all rights reserved. |
| modaustin.charity- support |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| featured Interior Designer Tracey Overbeck Stead by Lauren Liebowitz |
| Tracey Overbeck Stead is an Austin-based interior designer, has owned her own business since 2000, designing for residential and commercial clients all over the world and especially here in Austin. Tracey answers questions covering her pursuit of interior design, preferences, inspirations, visions and influences...enjoy! |
| What led you to pursue interior design? Has this been something you've wanted to do your whole life, or did it just fall into place? I think it started when I was really young. I would always rearrange all my friends' rooms – that's interior design for a small child. I rearranged my room. I space- planned my neighbors' rooms. I've always had a connection to space and how you inhabit that space. Then, as a surprise when I was 14 and in high school, my mother had this design team come and redo my bedroom. I got there at the tail end as they were still fussing with it, and I was in nirvana – I couldn't soak it up enough. After I graduated, I first pursued an early childhood education degree and was a preschool teacher for years. But I always loved design, so I went back to school when I was 24 or 25 to pursue my professional interior design credentials. |
| Who has been the biggest influence in your life? The most inspiring designer? My mom was my biggest influence. She supported my creativity, and she was also inspirational as a businesswoman and an entrepreneur. Growing up, I watched her start her own business – she changed careers midstream and showed me that it's okay to never stop growing. Just because you reach a certain age doesn't mean you're stuck with one career for the rest of your life. So when I went back into another field that happened to be another passion of mine, that influence came from my mom. And being able to understand, as a woman, that you can take care of yourself – spiritually, emotionally, and financially – seeing that growing up was huge. It gave me the security to jump off the cliff and start my own firm. My mother is a pharmacist – a chemist – a scientist. That is not the side of the brain that I work with. I'm kind of the black sheep of the family – my father's also a pharmacist, my grandfather was a pharmacist, one brother is a doctor and the other works with numbers. I'm out of left field. |
| Growing up, did you have any design inspirations? Phillippe Stark was my first inspiration in the 80s. He was my youngest inspiration. So was the Memphis Design movement. Who inspires you now? My clients inspire me. Bringing their vision and their soul out into their space that they live in is very inspiring. I'm so client-driven, I don't have one specific look – what I do is refine my client's vision and help them achieve it. And locally, I get more inspired by other designers and the people I work with than I do looking at the big guys. I think all the facets of design – fashion design, graphic design, landscape design, product design, industrial design – can intermix. And everybody in the design world has knowledge that can be used in each kind of design. I'm not an expert in graphic design, nor would I ever claim to be, but I'm interested in it and I could be creative in that field. If you appreciate good design, you appreciate good design no matter what. For example, art is part of good interior design. Fabric is part of good interior design. Shape in the form of products and accessories – weaving and textiles in the form of rugs and blankets – upholstery – they're all part of good interior design. And then you get down to graphic design – the letters on the outside on your house. Commercially – the signage within your building. Lighting. There's so many parts of interior design that one thing I always try to stress is that if a project starts from the ground up, have a team. Everybody you hire on the team will be an expert, and I think it really takes a whole team of experts to design a whole project – not just one person. To me, having just one person's vision is limiting and stale. |
| How do you settle on a vision for each project you take on? Do your clients come to you with an idea? Do they give you full freedom? Sometimes they do come to me and say, "I know what I want, but I don't know how to put it all together, so I just need your help making it cohesive. I know I want to use my furniture, but it's not space-planned well." Or, "I know that I really love blue throughout my house, but I don't know what shades of blue." Some clients say, "I just need some overall vision, I just need some hand-holding." Some clients say, "I don't want you to bother me, I just want you to do it," and those are typically the hardest jobs. I have clients that come to me with ideas - "I have this vision of my house, I want it to be minimal-modern or rustic" – a style word from watching television or reading magazines – and then they say, "But I don't know how to achieve it" and they come to me as an expert. And I have people who don't know anything about it, or don't have the time, or don't want to be bothered with it, but they just want to feel good in a space. I like to design my spaces with my client's soul throughout it, so it doesn't look like a Tracey Overstead house, it looks like a Client A house or a Client B house. If my houses look similar, it's because my clients are similar. |
