Hi! I’m Christy.

Here I am being a Very Important Interviewee. “She lit up a room,” I said. Yes, I’m also a comic.

Nice meeting you - let’s get to work!

Honey & Salt Home is the name for my practice I came up with in grad school - it’s a Carl Sandburg poem my dad and I like about balance. Honey & Salt Home, then, and all the work we do, is about achieving balance: service more than sales, form in harmony with function, and measuring beauty versus a touch of the grotesque.

My ten+ years of high-end design work have taught me that trust - a client’s deference and belief that I can solve their problems, along with communication - my instinct that I must not only hear but know my clients - are the crux of successful design. Even my most traditional clients know that my aesthetic isn’t my priority: my priority is finding out who you are, how you live, and how we can make that better.

How’d I get here, and am I a dilettante (fair question!)? A humanities nut, I spent my twenties working on the Hill, waiting tables, working the night shift at a juvie hall, teaching, and even working for celebrities. In Paris on my own dime, I found myself locked out of a Trade Only showroom on the Rue de Furstenberg, and faster than you can say Jack Quick, I ended up in grad school.

Educated on both the East and West Coasts, I began my formal education at a women’s liberal arts college in Virginia and then finished coursework for my MFA in Interior Architecture & Design after studying at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., and in San Francisco.

Among other things, I learned Revit, construction drawing, color theory, watercolor rendering, architecture, 3D modeling, perspective drawing., and more. These skills, along with my mentorships, internships, and work experience, are the reasons you can trust my eye: I can qualify my opinions and inclinations not just from a quick study of Pinterest, but because I’ve been classically trained (also, I’ve never been sued!). My life’s passion is to cultivate and deliver special rhythms between objects in our homes so that they are assemblages of form and function that not only hum with meaning, but sparkle with beauty.

I’ve worked for a couple high-end design and architecture firms and have been taking projects as a solo designer since 2014, completing projects in Santa Fe, D.C., San Antonio, Birmingham, Chicago, Marfa, Highland Park, and Boston. Post 2020, I’ve focused on work solely in Chicago and its neighboring suburbs.

I left San Franny for Chicago in 2011 when I met my online Scrabble partner, with whom I share a life and family.  I eat donuts on the regs and am ambivalent about almost all of life’s orders - except for beautiful, timeless design, my dear family, our community, and animal welfare. My New Year’s resolution every year is to reduce my carbon footprint - you can do it too. That’s a link!