Meet the Team: Corina’s Journey to Interior Design
We’re going deep into the archives today my friends! My path to interior design wasn’t linear although I was one of those kids that rearranged their rooms when the mood would strike. Looking back I think this was more of a procrastination tactic or a way to organize my thoughts more than being interested in interior design specifically. A clean and organized room meant that I had fewer distractions, and the unconscious hope was that my brain would feel the dopamine of a completed task and be prepared to study. If my mom was still with us, she would tell you that my room was rarely organized, and I always had clothes on the floor and books everywhere. So, I guess that tells you how I felt about studying.
Corina’s North Star Runners - cool, right?
The quantity of clothing on the floor might also have been foreshadowing my interest in fashion. I stubbornly knew what I wanted to wear from a very young age. In elementary school there was nothing my mom could threaten to convince me to wear my winter boots and ski pants after a fresh snow when my North Star runners were waaaay cooler and being cool was much more important than being warm. As I got older, I used clothing to fit in, or maybe it was more of a way to blend in, to mask my awkward self. I spent hours babysitting every weekend so that I could buy the brand names my mom refused to buy for me, like Benetton and Esprit.
After high school I really had no clue what I wanted to be. I spent the summer working at a camp, met a boy, moved to Edmonton, declined a marriage proposal, and worked at a clothing store in West Edmonton Mall. A few months later the recession hit and I moved back home, broke and still not sure what to do. I continued to work in retail and then as a nanny while taking night courses at the University of Manitoba with the hope that I’d figure it out. I learned that there was a clothing and textiles degree and thought a fashion design career would be a natural extension of my obsession for clothes. After a couple of years, I realized that it wasn’t for me. I loved the fashion courses but there were too many required courses in areas that I wasn’t interested in because the department was part of the Human Ecology faculty. I wanted to design textiles and clothes not study nutrition and family studies. So with 5 part-time years of studying various courses from Calculus to Pattern Making, I left university feeling no further ahead than when I entered.
Dropping out of university solidified my belief that I wasn’t really cut out for school and I went back to retail. I found that I enjoyed visual merchandising and had an eye for putting things together in a pleasing way. I worked my way up into management which led to an opportunity to work as a production manager at a handmade paper company. There were parts of the job that I really enjoyed – designing a prototype binder to sell our paper invitations to the wedding market, scheduling and organizing production, and helping to plan the workflow and floor plan at a new location when the company moved.
What I’ve come to realize about myself is that I like to be comfortable, and I like things a certain way until I don’t. When I’m no longer being challenged, I need change. I need to be uncomfortable to grow. A few of my friends were going back to school to get their master’s in education so discussions about school and what that would be like as a mature student were happening around me. I started to think about where I was in my life and what I wanted. I was just out of a long-term relationship, living in an apartment in the village with roommates, just about to turn 30 and I felt ready to make a big life change. I applied to the Faculty of Architecture on the last day of enrolment to start classes in the fall.
Corina’s 1st year of design school
To say I was challenged would be an understatement. I wouldn’t have made it through the first year without making fast friends with some of my studio mates. There were many late nights in studio with snack runs to University Centre to fill up on caffeine and candy. I was also incredibly fortunate to have Professor Marcella Eaton as my studio crit in the second semester. She had a reputation as being a tough professor, but underneath that tough facade she also cared deeply for her students. When I was struggling with a paper she offered to read my draft, when I was stuck and frustrated with my studio project, she gave me permission to get weird, to experiment and gave me inspirational books to read. She helped me let go of my inhibitions and my natural tendency to follow the rules. I excelled and I was excited to be in school for the first time in my life.
Second year was brutal. I didn’t like my studio crits. I had to move home for financial reasons. My pals from first year were scattered throughout the studio and unlike the year before most students didn’t stay in the studio after hours. I spent many hours alone in studio because once I went home, I was exhausted and just wanted to crawl into bed. I’m not sure what made me stick it out, but I finished the year and somehow managed to stay on the Dean’s Honour List.
Third year is when I had to choose which stream I would enter, Landscape, Architecture, City Planning or Interior Design. It was an easy decision, and I honestly don’t remember considering anything else. I was back with most of my buds from first year and I was happy again. Our projects started out as very conceptual but as the year went on, we were designing “real” spaces for a particular end user. One project that stands out to me is designing a dormitory for kids in Uganda. We were prompted to react to a video that showed current living conditions for kids in a village. I’m a highly sensitive soul and social justice is important to me, but I said my reaction was apathy. I think I was the only one that didn’t say I had an emotional reaction of sadness. Of course it’s sad but most people don’t put their emotions into action. My thesis was that if there was no action behind the feeling of being sad, then ultimately, you’re apathetic. It felt inauthentic to me because I knew, no one in our studio group (including me) would think about those kids in Uganda that evening if we didn’t have related project work to do.
Corina’s art installation, ‘Life Sucks’ at J.A. Russell (U of M Faculty of Architecture) “Do you move on with your life affected only because once in a while you think…gee…that really sucks for those people.”
The first phase of the project was to take your response and create an art installation on campus. My installation was about apathy vs compassion and how we’re initially very aware of the issues or cause and then over time interest and attention wanes. I described this phenomena with fishing line wrapped around the railing at the entrance of our studio building. It was wrapped densely at first and then as you walk by the string becomes less and less visible. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this – I feel that I may have gone off on a tangent…perhaps this project stuck with me because it emphasizes that my brain works differently than most.
Corina + Tamara with their winning project
A highlight from my final year was the opportunity to design and build a project using straw board for a student competition that was open to students in North America. I love to bounce ideas off others and talk through my thought processes, so I paired up with my studio-mate, Tamara Nyysola, to design a bed with integrated shelves. During the design process we explored the design principles of the golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence to determine the proportions and scale. We won first place in the competition (please try to ignore the bedding - we were students and borrowing from parents!) and were awarded a trip to Chicago’s Neocon conference, a fancy dinner with some executive types and a plaque made of straw board. We had someone request to buy the bed from us after our student night but neither of us were willing to part with it. It was a lot of work, and we actually hadn’t had time to put a finish coat on so it still smelled like straw. I ended up using it for several years (unfinished) before moving into my first house where the bedroom was too small to accommodate it. It wasn’t that the bed was that large but assembling it required slotting each piece into each other.
After graduation and the trip to Chicago I continued working at Home Depot which was my part-time job while in university. I moved from the paint desk into the kitchen design department full-time. At the time they had comprehensive training that included sales training, design software training, training on guidelines adhered to by members of the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA) and product knowledge sessions. The position also offered a higher salary than a design internship and by that point my partner and I had a mortgage and a car to pay for, so I stuck around for a couple of years until I moved to a kitchen cabinet dealer and construction company.
I worked in kitchen design for three more years before leaving to travel around the world with my partner. We sold our home and most of our belongings, left our cats with my parents and followed the summer weather around the globe. It had been about a decade since my last big life challenge so I was feeling restless and looking for adventure. Some of my favourite memories of the trip are design related, naturally. We visited the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht which I’d written two papers on during my studies, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye which is a must see for modernist fans and Sagrada Familia, Casa Mila/La Pedrera and Parc Güell by Gaudi in Barcelona which are mind blowing and cool to see. My travel and life partner was up for anything and was more than willing to take these design detours with me.
Corina’s jewellery line: jake + cleo
Upon returning to Canada, I wasn’t quite ready for the 9-5 grind so I explored various business ideas before landing on silver jewellery that I designed and crafted with a friend. We sold our pieces locally and across Canada while I built up my solo design practice and reconnected with the interior design industry. I started to miss the camaraderie of working with other designers and I returned to working as lead designer for a renovation company until I was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. After a year or so of treatment and recovery I returned to my job, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I loved designing kitchens, but I wasn’t provided any growth opportunities and company was moving in a direction that didn’t fit with my goals as a designer. It seems relevant to note that another decade had past since my last life upheaval and although cancer was quite the bump in the road, I was once again searching for a challenge.
In 2019, I left my salaried position to pick up my solo practice again. I had taken a business plan course with the Manitoba Women’s Enterprise Centre and brushed up on my CAD skills in the months before leaving my job. My first official client was a classmate from the business course and it felt serendipitous. My client list was growing and my referrals were gaining momentum when the pandemic hit. A couple of projects continued but most of my client leads disappeared as people worried about the future of the economy and renovation projects were put on hold.
As a distraction tactic from the unknowns in the world, I signed up for a few online courses that a local design firm was offering and that’s where I met Rachel. We chatted in Instagram DM’s for a few weeks and then met in person. We held similar values around the client experience and the importance of continuing our design education and as a bonus we both loved mid-century modern bungalows.
Corina: Bungalow Style
I believe that everyone should have access to good design and live in homes that provide a sense of place. Working one on one with clients, listening to them speak about how they live, seeing the items they’ve collected over time and getting a sense of their values is important to my design process and provides the inspiration for my design work.
And that’s the very long story about how I became an interior designer. If you made it this far, you are either related to me, a close friend or you really like biographies! However you landed on this journal entry, thanks for being here and taking an interest in my winding route to becoming an interior designer and founding partner of Bungalow Interior Design.