Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home.

I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head of the creative team.

We're your host. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists,

and other talents in the design world. Plus, we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each

episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at balderdesigns.net.

Now on with the show. All right, our guest today is West Coast designer Kim Lipine.

After renovating seven houses and seven years, more on that later, she launched her design

firm Kim Lipine interiors in 2020 and hasn't looked back.

She mixes elevated materials in a casual field to create rooms that are contemporary but

easy to live in.

Kim, welcome to the show.

Right, ladies. Thank you so much.

We got to start with you renovating seven houses in seven years. I don't even know how that's possible. I'm exhausted. Yeah. So it's crazy. Obviously that unlocked a passion for you.

So why don't we start there? Okay, yeah. So there was no, like, there was no intentionality thinking we were going to start renovating homes. That was not the plan. I was modeling full time. I was actually pursuing acting and in the pursuit of acting, they were like, well, you're tall.

Maybe you could get some like print jobs to support your acting classes. It's really expensive.

And just like to make some money in the meantime because it takes a long time to get started

in the acting world.

I was I'm sure everyone would know that or just assume that because, you know, it's very competitive. And so I kind of like got pushed into it because I was like college athlete and they're like, well, you're tall and really broad and not really like model vibes because like I'm not like a size zero. I'm a size sick, but like you can do commercial modeling. And so I was like, okay, whatever I need to do to make money, I'll just do it.

So I started modeling and that lasted a decade and I never got pushed into the acting thing.

I tried, but every time they'd be like, you're so tall, you're so tall. The guys are like 17 inches

shorter than you and it just wasn't working. So during this time, I still had this like love

for construction because my dad's a GC, my brother's a GC, and I loved

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