Corporate Life: CB2

Working at CB2 has been a shift in scale, pace, and perspective—a natural evolution from years spent building spaces one room, one detail, one client at a time. It sits at the intersection of design and sales, but in practice, it’s something more layered: part creative direction, part strategy, part psychology, and part navigation of a very real corporate ecosystem.

Before stepping into this world, I spent eight years working independently as a freelance designer and stager across New York City’s boroughs. That experience shaped everything. From compact Brooklyn apartments that demanded precision and restraint, to sprawling Upper West Side pre-war layouts that required balance and respect for architecture, to fast-turn staging projects where every hour mattered—I learned how to make decisions quickly and design with intention under constraint.

Staging, in particular, taught me discipline. You’re not designing for permanence—you’re designing for impact. The goal is to create an emotional response in seconds. A buyer walks in and either feels something or they don’t. There’s no long explanation, no backstory, no easing into it. It trained me to understand flow, visual hierarchy, and how furniture placement alone can shift perception of space, value, and possibility.

Freelancing also meant living inside a wide spectrum of environments. No two projects were ever the same. One week I was styling a therapy office meant to feel calm, grounding, and non-clinical. The next, I was working on a motor club space where masculinity, texture, and durability needed to coexist with refinement. I’ve staged beach houses where light did most of the design work, and children’s bedrooms where imagination mattered more than rules. I’ve shaped office spaces that needed to feel productive but not sterile, and massive living rooms where scale became its own design language.

That range taught me adaptability more than any formal training ever could.

Moving into a role that blends sales and design within a corporate structure has expanded that foundation in unexpected ways. At CB2, design is no longer just about what I put into a space—it’s also about how I guide clients through decision-making, how I structure conversations, and how I translate aesthetic vision into actionable purchasing paths.

Sales, in this context, is not separate from design. It is design in motion.

There’s a rhythm to it: understanding a client’s intent, decoding what they say versus what they actually need, and then building a cohesive solution that feels both aspirational and attainable. The challenge is no longer just spatial—it’s relational. You’re navigating timelines, budgets, expectations, logistics, inventory, and taste—all while maintaining a clear creative direction.

And then there’s the corporate layer. The systems. The processes. The structure behind everything that, as a freelancer, I never had to think about at this level. Learning how to operate within that framework has been its own education. It requires precision, patience, and a different kind of creativity—the kind that exists within boundaries rather than outside of them.

What I’ve found is that this structure doesn’t limit design; it sharpens it.

Working across CB2’s range of clients has also expanded the scale of what “design” means in my day-to-day. One moment I’m curating a compact urban living space where every inch matters. The next, I’m designing expansive living rooms where zoning becomes essential to making a large footprint feel intimate. I’m building dining spaces that need to transition from daily use to entertaining, and balancing function with visual impact in equal measure.

The breadth is what keeps it interesting.

What ties all of these environments together—whether it’s a corporate office, a therapy practice, a beach house, or a family home—is intention. Every space is asking a question. How should it feel? How should it function? What story should it tell when someone enters it?

My role has become about answering those questions in real time, through both design and conversation.

And underneath all of it is a constant evolution—from independent creative to hybrid designer-sales consultant, from intuitive styling to structured execution, from purely visual thinking to a more holistic understanding of how spaces are actually built, sold, and lived in.

It’s not a departure from my past work. It’s an expansion of it.

If anything, it’s the same language—just spoken in a larger room.