Why I Am Starting Over at the Beginning
It All Begins Here
A manifesto on apprenticeship, interior design, and the discipline of care
I did not fall in love with interior design in a classroom. I learned it by living—by crossing thresholds in the Middle East, Türkiye, and Iraq, where light behaves differently, where rooms are shaped by climate, ritual, and centuries of inherited wisdom. For almost ten years, I moved through spaces that taught me how profoundly architecture and interiors can hold a person, unsettle a person, or return a person to themselves. In those years, I had the freedom to experiment, to build a sense of taste that was not inherited but discovered. I learned to trust my eye, to listen to the quiet intelligence of materials, to understand that harmony is not decorative—it is physiological.
When I returned home to Barbados, that understanding sharpened into something undeniable: our environments are not neutral. A bedroom can disrupt sleep as surely as stress. A poorly lit workspace can dull cognition. A disordered home can heighten anxiety. Environmental psychology has long argued this; studies show that cluttered or visually chaotic environments increase cortisol levels and impair cognitive processing (Saxbe and Repetti 71). Neuroscientists at Princeton found that disordered spaces compete for neural representation, overloading the amygdala and reducing the brain’s ability to focus (McMains and Kastner 587). Sleep researchers at Harvard Medical School have documented that poor bedroom design—excessive light, noise, or visual disharmony—directly disrupts circadian rhythms and reduces REM sleep (Spencer et al. 3).
What I had felt in my body for years was now supported by evidence: beauty and function are not luxuries; they are conditions for wellbeing.
Interior design research echoes this. Studies on biophilic design show that natural materials, organic forms, and access to greenery reduce stress and improve cognitive performance (Custers et al. 473). Research on color and light demonstrates that certain palettes regulate mood, while others agitate it (Küller et al. 1496). Even the presence of natural views has been shown to accelerate healing and reduce the need for pain medication (Ulrich 420).
This is when I understood that my love for interior design was not about taste. It was about care.
Lived Experience as Pre-Apprenticeship
In Türkiye, I learned that light is a living thing. It moves differently across stone than it does across plaster. It softens wood, sharpens metal, and reveals the emotional temperature of a room. In Iraq, I learned that space is not merely functional—it is cultural. The separation between public and private, the choreography of hospitality, the reverence for thresholds, the way a room can hold silence like a bowl—these were lessons no textbook could have given me.
I lived inside spaces that were not designed for me, yet they shaped me. I learned to read the language of interiors the way one learns a dialect: slowly, through immersion, through mistakes, through the body. I learned that a room can teach you how to behave. That a courtyard can teach you how to breathe. That a home can teach you how to belong.
But lived experience, for all its richness, is not a methodology. It is a pre‑apprenticeship—an embodied curriculum that prepares you for the discipline you have not yet formally entered. It gives you intuition, but intuition without structure is only potential. I knew how to feel space. Now I want to learn how to construct it.
The Return Home: Where Intuition Met Evidence
Barbados is where everything I had sensed abroad became undeniable. The Caribbean is a place of intense sensory information; humidity that clings to the skin, light that shifts from soft to brutal in minutes. Returning home made me see how profoundly our environments shape our internal states.
Environmental psychology confirms this. Research shows that restorative environments—spaces with coherence, natural elements, and visual harmony—reduce stress and improve emotional regulation (Van den Berg and Hartig 115). Nature‑based design, even in small doses, has been shown to reduce rumination and lower activity in the brain’s stress centers (Bratman et al. 8567).
Light, too, is a biological force. Studies show that lack of short‑wavelength daylight disrupts circadian rhythms and contributes to fatigue, mood instability, and poor sleep (Figueiro and Rea 39). Color and light together influence psychological mood across cultures, shaping emotional responses in ways we often underestimate (Küller et al. 1496).
In Barbados, I saw these truths reflected in the lives of people I loved. A friend who could not sleep because her bedroom was visually chaotic. Another friend whose workspace drained her energy because it was poorly lit and acoustically harsh. A neighbor whose home felt heavy and did not reflect her appreciation of flow and calmness. These interior issues were not a reflection of their personal failings but rather aesthetic and space planning.
Why Adjacent Expertise Does Not Exempt You from Apprenticeship
I have spent my life in career fields that orbit design—communications, cultural analysis, teaching, writing, branding. These disciplines sharpen perception. They teach you how to see patterns, how to read people, how to understand the emotional undercurrents of a space or a story. They give you sensitivity, intuition, and a sense of narrative.
But they do not teach you how to draft a floor plan. They do not teach you how to calculate lux levels for lighting. They do not teach you how materials behave under heat, pressure, or time. They do not teach you building codes, sustainability principles, or spatial ergonomics.
I am entering interior design formally because I respect the discipline too much to assume that intuition is enough. I want the rigor, the critique, the technical fluency. I want to be held to a standard that only structured learning can provide. I want to be shaped.
The Meaning of Formal Entry into a Discipline You Have Lived Inside
Interior design is a discipline of care. It shapes how people breathe, sleep, think, heal, and relate. It is not decoration—it is environmental wellbeing. It is the architecture of daily life.
My philosophy of space is simple: Beauty and function are inseparable. Harmony is a health practice. Design is a form of stewardship.
LABASAD is where I am choosing to translate intuition into competence. Where I am choosing to learn the technical language of a field I have long spoken emotionally. Where I am choosing to apprentice myself to a discipline that has already been shaping me… and you for years.
Bibliography
Bratman, Gregory N., et al. “Nature Experience Reduces Rumination and Subgenual Prefrontal Cortex Activation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 112, no. 28, 2015, pp. 8567–8572.
Custers, Maaike H. G., et al. “Selected Aspects of Indoor Environment Influence Self-Reported Mood and Cognitive Performance.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 4, 2010, pp. 473–482.
Figueiro, Mariana G., and Mark S. Rea. “Lack of Short-Wavelength Light During the School Day Delays Dim Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO) in Middle School Students.” Neuro Endocrinology Letters, vol. 31, no. 1, 2010, pp. 92–96.
Küller, Rikard, et al. “The Impact of Light and Colour on Psychological Mood: A Cross-Cultural Study of Indoor Work Environments.” Ergonomics, vol. 49, no. 14, 2006, pp. 1496–1507.
McMains, Stephanie, and Sabine Kastner. “Interactions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex.” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 587–597.
Saxbe, Darby E., and Rena L. Repetti. “No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate with Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, pp. 71–81.
Spencer, Rebecca M. C., et al. “Sleep and Memory Consolidation: The Role of Sleep Architecture.” Harvard Medical School Reports, 2017, pp. 1–5.
Ulrich, Roger S. “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery.” Science, vol. 224, no. 4647, 1984, pp. 420–421.
Van den Berg, Agnes E., and Terry Hartig. “Restorative Qualities of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, no. 2, 2003, pp. 103–115.
