Starting Over Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Career

A reflection on rebuilding, resilience, and designing a life on your own terms.

There is a version of my life where I stayed comfortable in uncertainty, where I let the fear of starting over quietly win. I am grateful every day that I did not let that happen.

When my marriage ended, I was a mother of three with a resume that most people would have dismissed outright for a career in interior design. My background was in acting, free diving, and spear fishing. Not exactly the path to a Park City design studio. But what I had, underneath all of it, was a deep love of creating spaces that feel true to the people who live in them. And I had no choice but to trust that.

Creativity was never just a hobby for me. It was the throughline of everything I had ever done well.

I enrolled in an Architectural Interior Design program through Berkeley Extension and took an internship with an established designer at the same time. I was learning the formal language of the industry while also getting my hands into real projects. Being a single mother made every decision feel higher stakes, but it also made me focused in a way I had never been before.

None of this happened without people who believed in me first. Three women, in particular, changed the direction of my life. Pamela Quigley pointed me toward formal education. Stephanie Hunt expanded my vision of what was even possible. Hope Chappelle brought me in as a design assistant when I was still very new and gave me the real-world grounding that shaped everything I built afterward. I do not take that kind of generosity lightly.

Building MFI from the ground up was not a smooth road. There were client payment issues, project mistakes, and financial moments that genuinely frightened me. But every one of those hard lessons helped me build the systems, the communication standards, and the business practices that define how we work today. The difficult experiences were not detours. They were the actual building blocks.

I do not design from trends. I design from intuition, real experience, and a genuine understanding of how people actually live.

What I know now, that I could not have known at the start, is that rebuilding your life gives you a lens that very few designers have. I see homes as anchors. Places where people land, reconnect, and grow. That perspective shapes every project we take on at MFI, and it is what our clients feel when they walk through a space we have designed for them.

If there is anything I want someone to take from this, it is simply this: the chapter that breaks you open is often the one that builds the most lasting foundation.

Featured in Voyage Utah — This post was inspired by a recent feature on our story in Voyage Utah's Local Stories series. Read the full interview here.