BoomerGirl Diary

Laura Tiffany strides into the room, pauses to assess the furnishings and then orders seven baby panda bears to be stuffed into a plastic bag.

The pandas are cute with their roundly-sewn faces and their soft faux-fur ears, but for the past years these toys have been living an unloved, dust-collecting life, taking up space in a room that a young girl has long outgrown and nobody else has been able to use. That's Tiffany's job: to give the room a new life and make a tough call about the pandas, an obscure, but ultimately important, service of a professional "redesigner."

A new profession

Most Americans are at least somewhat familiar with redesigners thanks to popular cable-based television programs where a gadfly host and a funky-looking designer combine spatial-visions to miraculously transform a run-down, shag-carpet 1970s love den into an upscale, sophisticated living room using just a hammer, an artsy disposition and an IKEA-like lamp fixture.

Redesigners are those people who can scan your room, identify its best and worst features, and come up with ideas that you never would have dreamed. Redesigners not only rearrange items but also take what you already have and make it better by "editing" (their term for chucking out things that should have gone long ago) and "shopping the house" (the phrase they use for scouring the basements, garages and attics for untapped treasures).

A good redesigner should rearrange, edit and shop so that "not only does the room look better, it is being used better," says Marcia Smart, a California-based redesigner and the executive director of I.R.I.S. (Interior Redesign Industry Specialists), a leading trade organization for redesign professionals.

Clients can bring in a redesigner to improve a house at any time, but redesigners are most often brought in after important life changes: a family moves, a mature couple merges two households, an older couple decides to downsize or, as in the case with Laura Tiffany and the panda room, a college-age child leaves an empty nest at home.

From empty nest to Jayhawk fest

Tiffany's latest redesign project began when entrepreneur Valarie Grant decided she needed help solving her empty nest problem.

Grant, a Pilates instructor and president of a national advertising firm, Creative Promotions, had a room in her house, the panda's place, that had been half-bedroom and half "collect-all" ever since her daughter left for college two years ago.

"We weren't really using the room, and it wasn't usable for guests either," Grant explains.

Grant hired Tiffany to bring the room back into daily use. Together, they planned to set it aside as an exercise room with a Jayhawk theme, a tribute to KU, Grant's alma mater and her daughter's school as well.

Tiffany begins the project with some heavy editing: pandas, books, papers, boxes, they all go.

She then slides a bed across the room. The bed had been sitting perpendicular to the entrance, effectively partitioning the room into two areas, but after Tiffany places it flat against the wall and removes its headboard, the bed becomes an extended couch that seems to draw you into the room and across a newly-opened expansive space.

She's then moves on to secondary furniture. Tiffany resets a vanity and a cabinet at an angle across the corner, which balances the presence of the bed across the room and leaves you looking at the middle. Here she positions an exercise mat and steps, which literally become the "centerpieces" of this exercise room.

Some red curtain hangings are added and three small display mantels are placed across the wide, open space behind the bed-turned-couch.

Now it's time for the Jayhawk touch. Tiffany arranges Jayhawk figurines, a Jayhawk origami and a Jayhawk toy football across the mantles. She hangs a Jayhawk cycling cap on the wall to join a Jayhawk basketball poster, and she shops the house entryway for a short, stone-post with a Jayhawk design.

All of this takes just over an hour and requires little sweat-labor, but the overall feel and effect is striking.

The only task left now is the "revealing," the word some redesigners use when they show the clients the results for the first time. For television redesign shows, this is the magic moment, the instant when the cameras go in for the close-up and capture the few freeze-framed seconds when the client's face is filled with dazzled disbelief.

And Grant doesn't disappoint. She walks into the room and steps back with a gobsmacked expression to proclaim "Oh, that's awesome, I love it,"just like on television.

Changing work, working with change

Tiffany says that Grant's reaction and similar "Oh my gosh!" remarks from clients has been one of the greatest rewards in trading her former professions of teaching elementary math and selling real estate for one that has her sliding around heavy dressers and braving dust bunnies.

"I love what I am doing, it is just the ideal job for me. I like change. I like things to be different all the time. It is fun to see people's reaction. I feel like I am doing something to help other people and having fun while I am doing it," says Tiffany.

From watching Tiffany work, it also seems that redesign gives her another strong satisfaction; it answers her artistic callings in a way that Euclidian geometry likely never did. Tiffany has been a life-long quilter, someone who has always thought visually, an artist who was, perhaps, putting this calling on hold as she raised children and graded papers.

That artistic background is a common theme for many redesigners. Smart says she has noticed that a typical successful designer is someone who has some type of creative background and wants to "bring out left-brain abilities" that might not have been used in former vocations.

But Smart notes something else common to redesigners: they work well with change. Smart says many designers are like Tiffany, people embarking on "a second-life career" who have embraced change in their own lives and can literally bring change into client homes.

Redesigning redesign

It seems fitting that a profession so centered on making changes has itself evolved considerably in a relatively short period.

When redesign emerged about 15 years ago, it was mostly touted as a thrifty approach to decorating. That don't-spend-a-dime aspect of redesign is still one of its selling points. Increasingly, however, redesigners are working with wealthier or middle-class clients who can afford new items but choose to work with existing furnishings. These clients already have what they want, but don't have it how they want.

"A lot of people do really like what they have and don't really want to get rid of it but are just tired of how it looks," says Tiffany.

For these clients, redesign is not about designing on the cheap but about making their favorite things more chic.

Standout bugs, crisper homes

Mike Silverman is one these new types of clients. A computer expert with Netopia in Lawrence, he has a comfortable three-bedroom bungalow with his partner. Together, they have a lot of nice "stuff" such as a sharp-looking and beloved leather couch, several religious artifacts, decorative plates from around the world and even some artistic "computer bugs," roach-like sculptures with flashy microchips set into their ceramic chitin. Many of these are one-of-a-kind creations and all of them have sentimental value. Silverman and his partner definitely did not want to replace any of these things, but they had a problem with them.

"We [were] happy with what we [had], it was just how it was organized. We thought it could be better. It wasn't that it was unlivable or anything, but things weren't laid out in the perfect way," says Silverman.

So they brought in Laura Tiffany, who learned about each object in the house and how the owners used their rooms. She then began her redesign work by angling that favorite couch and a small table to set up a focal point in the central living room. With these eye-drawing items arranged, she edited out unused furniture to open space for showing the more unusual knick-knacks and treasured artifacts, including those computer bugs.

"Before they were just stacked on a speaker in a corner and now they are clustered around a lamp on a table," says Silverman. "They look really nice there."

Several weeks after the redesign, Silverman says his house not only looks better but is simply a better place to live.

"It made everything look less cluttered and more elegant. It feels crisper."

Solving the redesign puzzle

One analogy for redesign work is to compare it with those slider puzzle games for kids. You know, the square, flat ones that fit into your palm and where you slide around tiles, arranging them in different orders so that, finally, they are lined up, down and across just right to form a picture that you couldn't see clearly before.

As Tiffany works on a project, she will move items around in different locations, lining them up with one another and testing how they look just as if she is solving a puzzle of her own but with couches, lamps and statues instead of puzzle tiles. And then, at some moment, the room starts to take shape: the puzzle seems solved.

Silverman and Grant praise Tiffany for doing exactly that, finding the "right" arrangement that they couldn't see themselves.

"Anyone can throw furniture around the room and put a bunch of things on shelves, but she has that little bit of extra skill or vision that can really put things together nicely," says Silverman.

And two weeks after the pandas were removed, Grant still praises her redesign.

"I love my room, it is totally different [and] I am using it more," says Grant.

Silverman and Grant have kept the arrangements fairly much as Tiffany had left them. For them, all the pieces are now in all the right places.

But don't expect that tile-puzzle analogy to hold in a home or room if it belongs to a redesigner. The flip side of a redesigner's penchant for change and ability to see the hidden solution in a client's room is that the same redesigner is quite unlikely to see or want a permanent "redesign solution" at home.

Things at home are constantly in flux.

"I move my stuff around a lot," says Tiffany, "and I'll go shopping and think I want to redo my entire house."

"That's our joke," laughs Smart, "it's our blessing and our curse, we're constantly redesigning."