Anne McDonald was born into the design world.

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“My dad is a builder, but really an artist,” she explains. “He loved art history and architecture and the idea of building something beautiful, so he dragged me around job sites my entire childhood. I worked a lot of odd jobs for his company, too, which gave me such an interesting lens into residential design. He would bring me to museums and we'd open the encyclopedia at dinner and talk about different artists.”

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This creative upbringing led Anne to pursue a career in construction design for her father for nearly a decade before she started to feel burnt out and ultimately decided to focus on raising her family. “I canceled my subscriptions to all my shelter magazines and wanted nothing to do with it,” she remembers. “For three years, I set a very clear boundary of no design.”

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That's until a friend asked for help with a renovation in 2017. She had never tried the decorating side of the business before, so she dipped her toe, suggesting materials and furniture on a freelance basis. The next time, she was approached for a more hands-on project and the finished product was published in a local magazine magazine. “From there, things really started to ramp up quickly,” she says.

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Today, Anne combines her construction experience and her newfound love of decorating in her full-service interior design firm, with work featured in publications like Elle Decor. “It’s been a really exciting fast track,” she explains. “Now that I'm doing it, I love furniture, but I really needed it to be from my perspective: not fussy, always comfortable and approachable.” Here, Anne shares the secrets behind her flourishing career, from her go-to design reference books to the colors she’s loving right now.

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If my design style was a fashion icon, it would be

I really love Tom Ford. There's something classic and clean about his approach to fashion. There's still a level of ornamentation, but it's always done in a really edited way. I wouldn't say that my designs are totally parallel by any means, but I always think about how I can scale a room back just a hair so that the visual weight is in the right area or the line is really clear.

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The design era that inspires me most

Lately, I've been really into the 1970s. In every project, I have at least three or four pieces from the seventies, specifically Italian. Leather is a tricky thing to pull off, at least for me, and it can feel really heavy. But it has this underlying sexiness in the 1970s, whether it's in a cool braided tapestry or a beautiful chair from Mario Bellini. It's the perfect balance of overscaled masculinity and nuanced femininity.

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The colors I’m loving right now

I've been exploring reds more. After the early two thousands, when everyone had a cranberry red dining room, it's taken a couple decades for me to come back around. But now, I find that it can be so arresting in such a good way, whether it's a color with more blush or blue undertones. And as long as it’s balanced well, it can pack the perfect punch.

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My go-to design book to reference

Jacques Grange: Interiors is one book that I'm really loving right now. It's a little older, with a “more is more” approach to houses from all over the world. It's very over the top, but I think it helps me understand a very different point of view. Jacques Grange has worked in incredible homes from different eras. You can see how things either have dated themselves or really stood the test of time. It's totally different from the algorithm or any of the current books.

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A Tale of Interiors by Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward is another. I'm studying the way that the Pierce & Ward ladies can layer. It's also “more is more,” but they do it in a way that feels so comfortable, intuitive, and personal. I love to study their rooms and all of the knick-knacks and try to figure out how they pulled it off without making it look like a mess. It's so brilliant.

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My go-to finishing touches in a room

Art and its placement are super important. I like thinking about how to mix it up. When there's an obvious wall over a sofa, how can you create a little bit of tension or asymmetry with placing the art? I've put a pair of paintings in a corner before, one on one wall, one on the perpendicular wall. They're almost facing each other. And as long as there's a piece of furniture anchoring that, it's really cool. People get sidetracked by a blank wall. They put three pieces of art in the middle and it looks too static. I like to create asymmetry and tension so that it feels a little funky. Like there's something stirring in it.

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The one thing that should always be made custom

A sofa. The makeup of it will be so much better when it’s custom. The frame, the cushion fill, all of those things that 99% of the world doesn't really pay attention to is the difference between a sofa that is going to end up in a landfill in five years and a sofa that's going to be reupholstered in 20 years for another 20 years.

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Formal dining room or eat-in kitchen

It's important to think about both. I love designing dining rooms. They're one of my favorite spaces to design because they can be jewel boxes. They can feel special and a little more elevated, but then making them feel like somewhere that the family wants to have pizza on a Tuesday night is the challenge. How do you bridge that gap?

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Everyone gathers in the kitchen. I'm a cook, so having a spot for people to crash or do homework or have a glass of wine with informality is super important. I love trying to incorporate an upholstered chair or a comfortable seat of some kind in a kitchen. It needs to be more than just a banquette. Who doesn't want to hang out with a glass of wine and watch somebody cook? It sounds like heaven to me.

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The most underrated material I love to use

Carrara marble gets a bad rap sometimes because it's just a stalwart. It's like, been there, done that. It's been around for so long. There’s seemingly an endless mine of it on the earth, but it's gorgeous. It's not for every kitchen or every bathroom, but I think that it's just classic.

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What makes a room feel cozy every time

Lighting. It doesn't matter what is happening with the furniture and how lovely it is or how perfect the dimensions are or the fabrics or even the architecture. If the lighting sucks, it sucks, period. No one wants to be in a poorly lit space, and you might not even really know why, but you walk in and it just sort of turns your stomach.

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Last thing I bought for my home

A coffee table for our dining room, which I bought in Round Top, Texas when I was down there sourcing vintage. It's an 18th-century French butcher's table. You'd think that a butcher's table is really tall, but this particular kind is always short. It's coffee table height because they would literally slaughter huge animals on it. I didn't know this until I got it. There was a big stain on one end, which was hundreds of years old, but I could tell there was a dark mark. And I was like, what's this about? And he was like, I'm sure this is where the blood from the pig would spill.

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The hotel that represents ultimate luxury to me

I just stayed at Sunset Tower a few days ago and that place blew me away. It's a fun one. Quiet luxury is such a buzzword right now and I really like places that feel like that. Harmony Hotel in Nosara, Costa Rica is like that. I love The Standard in Miami Beach a lot. These are places that aren't slapping you across the face with luxury. It's subtle and they're not super big, but everything they do is done super well.

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What’s next

We have four photo shoots in the next month. We're shooting with Tim Lenz and Laure Joliet, both of which I'm just really excited about. Those projects are super diverse and I'm really excited to just see them myself and share them with the world. And then we’re just continuing to expand our portfolio and taking on some new exciting client work.

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Want personalized design advice from Anne McDonald? Book a consultation.

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