How my boss, Marianne Cho, moved people through indecision without insulting them. How she corrected proportions with one lamp shift and two inches of sofa movement. How she understood that every room tells the truth eventually, no matter what decorative lie the owner tries first.
Three months in, she noticed me staying late to redo a mood board someone else had rushed badly.
“Did you do this?” she asked the next morning, holding up the revised version.
I braced, thinking I had overstepped.
“Yes.”
She looked at it. Then at me. “Good. Next time tell me before you fix someone else’s mess. But good.”
That was the first professional compliment that ever mattered to me.
Junior year, she began giving me real projects.
Not glamorous ones at first. Entryways. Powder rooms. Tiny Manhattan apartments for people with impossible budgets and larger opinions. But I loved the constraints. I loved solving for function and beauty at once. I loved making a room honest.
Word traveled. One client recommended me to another. Someone asked if I did freelance consults on weekends. I said yes before fully considering what that meant for my already nonexistent free time.