74 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {home & design} touch, museum kind of art.” Art to live in. When personalizing a wall or nook, she considers the whole composition—materials, textures and lines—and how her clients will interact with it. Anticipating responses takes more than an artistic eye, it requires designerclient connection. To develop it, Melinda walks though each home with clients, asking fairly intimate questions. What side of the bed do you sleep on? Are you bumping elbows in the bathroom as you get ready? What do you trip on or have to step around? Discovering day-to-day inconveniences lends vision to increasing the functionality of each room. In a recent Los Altos Hills project, Melinda’s clients wanted a handy place for their mother to make her morning tea without traversing A dad-crafted, red-roofed dollhouse started it all. Interior designer Melinda Mandell says she had just as much fun arranging a tiny blue teapot in that mini kitchen as she does now when accessorizing the quartzite counter in a renovated ranch home. Melinda’s prescient parents, seeing her affinity for colors, shapes and furnishings, urged her toward interior design. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Seattle Pacific University and four years working under a Pasadena principal designer, she returned to the Peninsula to launch Melinda Mandell Interior Design in 2011. She’s been flourishing ever since. Fusing the creative and the technical, Melinda renders designs unique to each client’s personality. “I think of the spaces that we create as works of art,” she says, but “not the stand-back, don’tPHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF BESS FRIDAY / PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF THOMAS KUOH
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