ABOUT KARA
I'm Kara. Founder, creative director, lifelong editor of just about everything, and the woman behind this little corner of the internet. I've spent the better part of my life making things beautiful. Somewhere along the way, I realized the same principles I use in design apply remarkably well to life - know what you're trying to create, edit ruthlessly, and make what remains ridiculously good.
I'm interested in one that feels like you. A home that tells your story instead of following someone else's shopping list. A closet filled with things you actually want to wear. Traditions your family will remember. Work you're proud to put your name on. Good food, beautiful details, people you love around the table—and enough margin to actually notice any of it.
For years, we've been sold the idea that creating a beautiful life means adding more to it. More things. More trends. More routines. More recommendations. More things we're apparently supposed to be doing before 8 a.m. I think the opposite is true. The best things are usually the result of a really good edit. Knowing what deserves your attention. What doesn't. What you genuinely love versus what you've simply seen enough times to think you're supposed to love.
That's what I mean by a well-designed life. Not perfect. Not minimalist. And certainly not beige for the sake of being beige. Intentional. Personal. Beautifully yours.
The Well-Designed Life
I’m Not Interested In A Life That Just Looks Good.
I’ve always been an editor, long before I had language for any of this.
I was rearranging rooms, obsessing over typography, pulling apart magazines, changing my mind about paint colors, building businesses, photographing ordinary moments and noticing the tiny details that made something feel right.
Today, I make my living doing much of the same. I'm the founder and creative director of A Design Haus, where I help founders build brands through strategy, identity and web design. My work requires me to look at a hundred possible directions and figure out which one actually belongs.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that's exactly how I want to approach everything else, too. Home. Style. Wellness. Work. Family. Traditions. Life. Not by collecting every good idea.
By getting better at recognizing the right ones.
A LITTLE MORE PERSONAL
Wife to The Bearded Gent for twenty
two years. Mother of five incredible humans. Lover of old houses, good denim, and taking the long way home.
I’m a homebody with high standards, a chronic skeptic of anything new, and increasingly convinced I was born about three decades too late. I love the smell of rain, music playing somewhere in the house, and a table full of people I love.
I’m wildly particular, embarrassingly sentimental, and have been known to get a little crotchety about technology, unnecessary “improvements,” and perfectly good things being replaced for absolutely no reason.
I’ve built businesses, raised babies, started over, changed my mind, gotten things very right and other things spectacularly wrong. Somewhere in all of that, I stopped believing a beautiful life was something you eventually arrived at. You build it as you go. In what you choose. What you keep. What you let go of. And what you decide matters enough to do really well.
Life around here is full, imperfect, occasionally very loud, and very much still being designed. Which is kind of the point
Stay awhile. We have a lot to talk about.
Homes. Style. Good food. Getting older. Building things. Making things beautiful. And a few things that really shouldn’t warrant such strong opinions, but here we are.