Ep. 486: Alton Laday & Olivia Westbrooks

How to Decorate

Alton LaDay and Olivia Westbrooks join the How to Decorate podcast to discuss Alton's new book, In the House: Celebrating America's Leading Black Interior Designers,

Key takeaways

• Alton LaDay conceived In the House during the 2020 lockdown to highlight positive success stories following the George Floyd reckoning.
• Olivia Westbrooks discovered her passion for interior design by watching Christopher Lowell on the Discovery Channel in the 1990s, which directly led her to enroll at LSU's design program.

Main topics

• Black representation in interior design
• Career transitions and unconventional entry points into design

Notable quotes

"Black designers are not a monolith. There is not a Black aesthetic, right?"

Conclusion

The episode underscores how intentional documentation and visibility can reshape industry

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:01) Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home. I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn, and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head up the creative team. We're your hosts. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. Speaker 2 (0:22) Plus, we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at ballarddesigns.net. Now, on with the show. Speaker 5 (0:33) Our guest today spent years as a marketing director inside the design industry before writing his first book, In the House, celebrating America's leading Black interior designers, which profiles 33 of America's most talented designers. The book traces the largely unrecorded history of Black designers in America and follows the contemporary designers who are expanding. the language of design today. Along with Alton Lede, we're welcoming back to the show interior designer Olivia Westbrooks. You may know her from the Hallmark Channel's renovation show, Home is Where the Heart Is. We also did a house tour of one of her client homes on our house tour series on YouTube, and she's been on the podcast before. She started her firm in 2021 and has been recognized by House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, and Lux Magazine. Alton and Olivia, welcome to the show. Hi, welcome. Speaker 4 (1:20) I feel like I'm a Ballard extension at this point. Speaker 5 (1:24) Absolutely. Yes. Perfect. Speaker 4 (1:26) Happy to Speaker 5 (1:27) have you back, of course. Speaker 4 (1:29) Happy to be back. Speaker 5 (1:30) Okay. The book is beautiful, fascinating. It's full of heart. Thank you. Speaker 1 (1:39) I Speaker 5 (1:40) want you to start, Alton, by just telling. our listeners about, you know, kind of the background, what made you want to write this book? You've been working in the design industry, of course, for many years. Sure. You know, nothing like this really existed. So what was sort of the nugget? Speaker 1 (1:57) Well, you know, the idea came to me during lockdown because obviously I had time. And when we encountered so many issues with the reckoning, which began with the Floyd's death and murder in Houston, you know, I thought it would be really positive and wonderful. to bring all of our success stories into a book and present it to everyone. Speaker 5 (2:33) You know, there's a huge array of designers in the book from all over the country, different styles, different ages, different backgrounds. And I was curious how you, you know, how did you pick, how did you narrow down the list? Like, where did you even start? Speaker 1 (2:51) Well, you know, fortunately, I have a group. of editors that I work with, and some of them are close friends. And I actually did an unscientific survey with them and asked for nominations. So from that, you know, I hit the internet. I started doing my research. There is a lot of research with this book. And I spoke to a lot of people, did a lot of viewing of Instagram. And I came up with the designers that we chose. Speaker 5 (3:25) Okay, you mentioned the research, and I would love for you to give everybody. Liz, is this where you were going? Speaker 2 (3:31) It's totally where I was going. I want to know more about the research that you've, that you, when it dug into. Because there's such an underrepresentation in interior design world of Black representation. So tell me what. Research you found and what you found the most intriguing, helpful, all of it. Speaker 1 (3:54) Yeah. Sure, sure. You know, I have been a marketing director, but that was about, ooh. Speaker 1 (4:07) 30 years ago, I have owned for the last 22 years, my own public relations firm, Alton Lede Media. So, you know, during the course of the 22 years of ALM, I've worked with design centers, designers, design businesses, design showrooms. And so I actually had a great deal of reach into the design industry, not just in, I live in California now, I'm in San Diego, but, you know, all over the country, really, editors and people that I have performed business with over the 22 years that helped me with the research and identifying the designers. There was one qualification I wanted everyone to be. Speaker 1 (5:05) and in some way, photographed in a national shelter magazine. The work was very important, but so was the personality of the designer. Because I think, as you know, I really wanted to approach this from the standpoint of tell us about you, because I really wanted to know how they found design. you know, what makes you love design. what makes you a creative? You know, I wanted to know them. Of course, I wanted to know, you know, their education, you know, where they're working in design. We did talk about projects a bit, but I really wanted to focus it on the individual. And it was very successful. And I enjoyed it a good deal. I Speaker 2 (6:02) think that's one of the things that's so great and fascinating about this book is that everyone has such a different entry point to the design world, whether it's something they grew up knowing that they wanted to do or whether it's something that they found as, you know, a second career after, you know, doing something in the mainstream corporate world. Speaker 2 (6:28) And I think in that way, too, it also becomes such a celebration of of design and finding your path into design. So are there any projects or designers' stories that really stick with you? Speaker 1 (6:47) Well, you know, I look at it as a whole so many times, you know, because I was asked to do this by Manitoba Guyton and really enjoyed it. Speaker 1 (7:03) I have to say, you know, the experience was wonderful. I really enjoyed every interview and getting to know so many of the designers, in some cases, very well. And, you know, many of them have become good friends of mine. But Tiffany Brooks in Chicago, you may recognize her from HGTV. She won Design Star years ago. I think it was in 08. And she's had three or four shows on the network over the years. She has diabetes. And she was diagnosed when she was six. And, you know, going into the interviews, I did lots of research so I knew who I was talking to. And I knew that she had a kidney transplant. because that was mentioned in the bio. But I had no idea that she was diagnosed at six. I had no idea that she also had a pancreas. Speaker 1 (8:15) given to her and uh i didn't know that she had passed it on to her only child um aiden i believe it is and um you know tiffany is just you know Speaker 1 (8:32) she's a force of nature and um you know if if anyone can beat this or live with it is what she's doing uh it's going to be her uh it was amazing very heartfelt very um She was so open and so willing to participate in this and support the effort. So, you know, they were all great, but I think Tiffany's was especially special. Speaker 5 (9:07) I had to laugh because, Liz, you mentioned that. Speaker 5 (9:11) So many people came to it from unusual backgrounds, from, you know, financial, like working in corporate for years. Olivia, you're one of the few, I think, that actually had an undergraduate degree. And many people went back and did, you know, post-grad programs and whatnot. But you actually were one of the few, I think, that did an undergraduate degree. So tell us about how you... How did you find into your design at a young age and what kind of catapulted you into that from, you know, a relatively young age compared to some of the other designers in the book? Speaker 4 (9:50) Yeah. So anytime I'm asked that question, I always say I feel like design found me. It wasn't something that I knew was an option or that it existed. And I feel that to be true for a lot of us Black designers that are mentioned in the book. We just didn't know that this career was available to us when we were younger. You know, and I feel that part of that is our parents, they want the best for their kids and they want us to be successful and not struggle. And so. A career in the arts is typically not the way your parents steer you, right? Because they don't want you to be a starving artist. You know, go be a doctor and go be an attorney. But I've always been a creative person. It's just who I am. I've always drawn and painted and crafted something as early as I can remember. And so one day after school, I happened to flip to the Discovery Channel and there was Christopher Lowell on TV. Speaker 4 (10:47) Right, right, exactly. That's just how long ago this was. This is 1990-something, okay? The 1900s. It Speaker 1 (10:54) was the Speaker 4 (10:55) 1900s. And he was just doing magical things on the screen. He had a paintbrush, and he had some fabric, and he was throwing it over a four-poster bed. And I learned what a faux finish was by watching that. And I said, this is so cool. You know, I was always the kid that was rearranging my parents' furniture. So it brought everything that I loved together all in one, all in one thing. And I said, hmm, I wonder, like, could I do this? And my mom was the type of woman that if you told her you wanted to do something, she's researching how to get it done. She put me in. At the time, the Art Institute of Houston had a weekend intensive for high schoolers to come and learn about the interior design program. Somehow she found out this existed. I think this was pre-internet maybe, or right at the beginning of the internet, because this is the 90s, right? We had just gotten one of those big boxy computers in our house. So I don't know how this woman found this program, but she found it and she put me in it. And the spark just grew from there. So I was fortunate to be able to come across that and then found out that LSU had a design program, enrolled in LSU, auditioned for the program, got in, and the rest is history. Speaker 5 (12:12) It seems like the other, I also loved, you know, another Atlanta designer, Erica Ward, talked about how Speaker 5 (12:20) Many people felt like their, initially maybe their background would make it too challenging, or not too challenging, but like it would be, they were behind their peers, right? Because they had had this previous. Speaker 5 (12:33) career. And Erica talked about how her background in, I believe it was accounting, gave her actually this great sort of other side of the coin where she, it really was a strength, ended up being a strength. And there were a couple of people that kind of talked about that, how maybe their background as an attorney or in corporate, in business, ended up really making their firm more successful because it gave them sort of this additional layer of entrepreneurship.