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Ivy Designer Spotlight: Heather Ault of Del Sur Designs – San Diego, CA

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How did you get where you are today?

It was a long and winding road that lead me to starting a design firm. Growing up, my dad was a contractor, so I was always around construction sites and developed an appreciation for the process of building a home. Our family lived through two home builds on top of my dad’s work, and as kids, we were encouraged to participate in the process. I once laid roof tiles!

When I was older, my high school offered a “housing and interior design” elective class my senior year and I signed up. We learned how to draw floor and landscape plans (the old fashioned way without CAD). I absolutely loved it! I entered college planning to go into teaching, but would always say “But what I really love is interior design”. Finally, someone said, “So, why aren’t you majoring in it?” I was convinced to make that scary leap, switched majors to the college art department, and eventually received my Bachelors in Interior Design from SDSU.

I didn’t immediately start in the field, however. I married young at 22 (we celebrate 20 years this month), and we had three kids. I was fortunate to be able to stay home with my kids while they were little. Just to stay busy and have a creative outlet, I painted interior murals, taught art classes part-time, and would help friends with their home design projects.

It was one of these friends (who paid me in wine), that posted on social media about me and their home which I helped them rebuild after a flood. Suddenly, requests for interior design services started coming in from around our community. Honestly, I hadn’t planned to start Del Sur Designs before that. It was a pleasant surprise that it all unfolded that way!

I sat down for pow-wows with my husband and a few close friends to figure out a business plan, website, logo, etc. I also called on a good friend with an established large design firm and asked her to mentor me. This was the best business decision I’ve made thus far. I would not be here today if it weren’t for the advice of these people. Three years later, DSD is strong and growing!

Del Sur Designs is on a mission to provide clients with beautiful, functional, and unique designs. How do you get to know a client’s lifestyle and needs? 

The first step to better understanding our clients is simply getting to know them. We have a very detailed questionnaire that they fill out with questions such as ‘how often do you entertain?’, ‘what’s your least favorite color?’, ‘ what are your favorite decor and furniture stores/magazines?’, ‘is accessible, or green design a priority?’, and ‘list hobbies and interests’. We want to know where our clients have come from and what design/decor style they are comfortable living in. Sometimes we work with pieces they already own to incorporate them into a larger design. It’s our job to then take these tastes and preferences and apply good design principles to create a beautiful and functional living space. We, as designers, aren’t the people living in the space once finished, so it’s important to make sure it’s an environment that the client will enjoy for years to come. That’s how you get referrals.

Who are your favorite local San Diego vendors and people of the trade?
We exist in an age where many of our furniture and decor vendors aren’t in our town or even our state at all, but there are a few places we love. When looking for fabrics and wall coverings, you really want to feel and touch and there’s just no way to keep sample books of all your vendors. So, we head to Morena Boulevard’s design strip to look at lines like Pindler, Kravet, Thibault, Clarke & Clarke, etc. The Designer’s Resource Collection is a great place to get started if you’re new to the trade. To review the bigger pieces our vendors carry, we try to get to market to do “sit and feel” tests. Periodically, we’ll have reps go over these details with us at our office so we can get to know the quality of the product.

What’s the design scene like in San Diego? Can you name some of your favorite local shops for furniture, lighting, home decor, etc.?
For retail, there are places like Greathouse, Pirch, Lamps Plus, Ferguson K&B, and Cedros Street. There are also some fun places to shop for antiques in San Diego. There’s Architectural Salvage of San Diego, Squash Blossom Trading in Ramona, and the Ocean Beach Antiques Mall.

The Miramar Road area is where we head for plumbing hardware, slabs, tile, flooring, and other building materials. Prosource is a great trade vendor that we look to often when working on flooring or a kitchen/bath remodel. San Diego Hardware is a great retail shop for tons of door and cabinet hardware.

How does designing make you feel? 
That is a complicated question; it depends on which day you ask me! There’s a ton about my job that I find rewarding, but it’s not all fun and games.

We have clients and friends say, “You have the best job, picking out cool stuff all day, spending other people’s money”. Yes, some of our work involves searching for products, but that’s just the beginning.

It’s the follow through that puts a space together, and that involves a lot of planning, budgeting, organization, coordination with others, etc. – that’s hard work. The reward is the feeling of accomplishment when it’s all done. It feels amazing to see a finished project come together!

What’s your business mantra?
Do good work, and the rest will follow. Take inspiration from everything and everyone around you; sometimes the best idea comes from a lowly place. Be straightforward and realistic; everyone will thank you in the end and you will be proud of your work product. I think most designers are perfectionists in some capacity, so it’s how you harness that instinct to provide an amazingly detailed, finished product with lots of moving parts – but also temper that with practicality when it’s necessary. Put your heart into it, but don’t get overly attached to an idea, this is a business.

How do you personalize a client’s space if they are not sure what their “style” is?
We listen to them. If we find out about their regular family scrabble matches, they’ll need a big coffee table with storage underneath. If they’re empty nesters, maybe they just stop for a drink and change before heading out every Saturday and Sunday. These details help us understand if we can put in more fragile pieces or formal seating versus comfortable lounge sectionals in performance fabrics.We look at clients’ current furniture and ask why it appealed to them when they bought it, go through catalogs, have them create Houzz or Pinterest boards, and other exercises like that.

Do you think it’s important to attend market? If so, what are your market strategies? 
Yes, if you can swing it. Obviously it’s expensive to travel to these, but I think it’s important to see new furniture lines from your vendor network and to scout for new companies that are entering the market. It’s also a valuable time to network and cultivate relationships which will help your business moving forward.

How much time do you allocate to social media, email/newsletter marketing and content marketing?
Not nearly enough I’ve been told! We try to push posts out to our Instagram or Facebook feed once a week or every other week. Personally, I’m not a fan of social media and I feel weird about sharing frequently on a public platform. Why would anyone care about what I ate for lunch? So, getting back to business, I’m struggling to find out how often I need to share to keep our name out there without clogging people’s feed. I need to push myself out of my comfort zone and work on this.

Why did you join Ivy?
We needed a more comprehensive accounting/presentation program than what we had with QuickBooks alone. When we were looking into various programs, we found Ivy.

We joined Ivy because we saw the value in a young, cloud-based company that was eager to listen and grow along with us and the industry at large. I feel that I’ve forged real relationships with the Ivy team, as well as other designers who use the software. The 24/7 real time tech support is awesome which was a huge help to get us started. We love that there’s a real-time response for recommended changes and additions to the program.

Bottom line, Ivy is always trying to better itself, and so are we. Ivy continues to fine-tune and evolve, serving as one of the key successes to my business.

What have you learned from the Ivy Designer Network (the private FB Group)?
More than I could ever express right here. Seriously, I know that this network was a secondary thought to the software originally, but MAN OH MAN! Ivy hit gold with this idea! This has been such a great resource to find things when I’m stuck, ask technical questions if I’m unfamiliar, and generally feel like I’m not alone as I read through the daily posts.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Reisa, Gilli, Lee, and Alex at Las Vegas Market and couldn’t wait to talk to them about the power of the Ivy Designer Network in particular. This group gives all of us individual small businesses the opportunity to pool our knowledge resources so that we can have the kind of support you only find at large corporations.

When a designer doesn’t know how to approach a particular situation with a client or vendor, they can ask about it on this forum and receive the advice of several others that have been there and understand. A discussion ensues and the designer walks away with much more information and confidence than they had going in.

Also, I think there is a huge amount of untapped power in our ability as a group to promote (or black-ball if necessary) a vendor or product. There was a point last week when someone was sharing a poor experience with a particular company, and tons of people wrote in to confirm their similar frustrations with the same vendor. Obviously, the 1,000+ rest of us who read this took note.

Conversely, an Ivy Designer asked if someone could recommend a company for a mirror she was trying to find. I suggested one of my preferred vendors. Not only did she set up an account, but so did about 15 other people at the same time, just because they were following the post. To this day, that company doesn’t even know why they had that uptick in interest.

When I told Ivy Co-Founder, Lee, she said “You should have told your rep it was from you!” The thing is, it wasn’t just me, it was Ivy. At some point, us “Ivies” could harness the bargaining power of a large company if vendors become aware that we’re communicating like this. I think this is huge!

How does Ivy help streamline your day-to-day workflow as an interior designer?
That’s easy. Before, we had to surf through emails and Dropbox files to pull up a project’s information. This was the case for both ourselves and our clients. Now, we have a centralized location for all of our proposals and documentation. Our clients love their dashboard, which we’ve created password protected links for on our website, which also serves to drive traffic to our website. Total win!

I’ve also stopped stressing over every little proposal that goes out. Now I know we have systems in place so my employees and I can create beautiful proposals with the mark-ups and shipping calculated, high resolution pictures, and to top it all off, easy online approvals and payments.

What’s an Ivy feature you can’t live without?

If I have to pick one, I guess it’s the Ivy Clipper. This makes it almost too easy to put products into our database! I find myself clipping products into my product library incase I want to remember for the future. This way, if we’re working on a new project and I search for “chairs” within my product library, I can find all of the awesome pieces I clipped when I was dreaming!

I also love that the proposals have the electronic approval button. This has revolutionized our initial contract process. We are now able to receive online approvals on contracts when we send them as assets to a proposal. Everything is archived and approvals are uncontested. Since we started with Ivy, I’ve stopped receiving emails asking me to resend things, or having clients debate on whether or not they’d given an approval. This may be my favorite part!

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Are you an interior designer searching for an interior design software for your business?

 

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Interiors Photographer Spotlight: Helynn Ospina Photography

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Helynn – how did you get where you are today?

It’s been a windy road. While I currently live in Santa Cruz, I’m originally from Colombia and have lived here since I was about two years of age. My younger years were spent on the East Coast but I attended college in San Diego where I earned my BA in biology. After about nine years in the San Diego area, the desire for a new adventure began calling my name and I migrated to San Francisco. San Francisco was so different than anywhere else I had lived and it was that inspiration that reignited my dream of art school again. While still working in biotech, I started taking some evening classes at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and loved it so much! A few months in I made the leap and left my cushy corporate gig and started attending classes full-time for a couple of years until I earned a Masters of Fine Arts in photography. It was during this time that I began shooting interiors as part of environmental portraits for my thesis.

My first interior design client came about because a friend of a friend needed professional photos for their design portfolio and asked me to help out. After graduating, I was a bit burnt out, and my career path wasn’t clear, so I began working at a retouching studio in the city. I didn’t pick up a camera for a while after graduating. Slowly, I started to shoot and build a portfolio that felt authentic and I began to really envision photography as my career path. I continued to work part-time at the retouching studio in San Francisco while also shooting and building my client base until a few years ago when I felt ready to go solo. Although I’m no longer living in San Francisco, most of my clients continue to be in the Bay Area.

You specialize in photographing interiors, architecture and travel. What is it that you love about capturing interiors?

Interiors have always fascinated me – not necessarily in the design sense, but more as a place where our lives unfold. Interior spaces are silent witnesses to our lives. This belief really informs my approach to shooting interiors. I strive to create serenity and stillness in each image that is welcoming and has a storytelling quality. Shooting interiors also allows me to engage the analytical (nerdy science type) part of my brain because it requires a lot of attention to detail and problem solving.

“Interior spaces are silent witnesses to our lives. This belief really informs my approach to shooting interiors.”

We were so impressed by your photos of Ivy Designer Rachel Madden’s recent work which was also featured in Rue Magazine. What did you like about working on that project?

Well thank you, I’m very flattered! The best part about that project was her daughter’s room – it features a teepee, unicorn and an adorable whale! How could I not love a room with all of these things? I rarely get to photograph kids’ rooms but they are probably the most fun because of all the great props and colors. When Rachel and I initially met to go over the details of the shoot, she showed me her daughter’s room and said she would probably remove the teepee. I immediately said we must include it! That was my first time working with Rachel so it was great fun for us to collaborate on creating each image.

Who are some other interior designers you admire and enjoy working with?

Dream clients would definitely be Ian Stallings and Reagan Baker. Their use of color and materials is luxurious but also inviting. It’s a feast for the eyes. I love working with all of my clients! I’ve been doing this for a few years now but each time I get hired I still consider it an honor because all of my clients are extremely talented and passionate about what they do. I enjoy working with other creatives who are doing top notch work.

What makes it easy to shoot an interior space? What makes it difficult?

There are a couple of things that immediately come to mind when I think of spaces that are easier to shoot – good light, good lines/architecture and good styling. Really tight spaces are often difficult to shoot because it’s tough to get a good angle and fit myself into the correct spot – it is not uncommon to find me stuffed in a corner next to a toilet bowl or shimmying across the floor to get in and out of tight spaces.

“Good photography is an investment but it’s one that has a great return.”

In your opinion, how important is a good-looking portfolio to the success of an interior design firm’s growth and reputation?

It is extremely important. It is an essential part of branding and marketing. This is where a relationship with a seasoned photographer becomes very important. Having a “go-to” photographer ensures that all your imagery is cohesive and blends easily with your branding. Not all interiors photographers are alike in the way they shoot so it’s important that there is consistency across your images. I cannot emphasize the importance of good imagery enough – I have projects from 4 or 5 years ago that still get picked up by bloggers or Houzz for features. Good photography is an investment but it’s one that has a great return.

If you could make a PSA to all interior designers regarding photographing their portfolio, what would you say?

Just do it! I can promise you that if you find the right photographer you won’t be disappointed. Working with a talented interiors/architecture photographer will change the way you see your work. A photographer, much like any designer, is trained to see possibilities. A designer may not think a space is worth photographing because the lighting is terrible or the room looks small but when you work with a photographer, they help you see things differently. My goal for every project is to have it be a collaboration between myself and the designer – our end goal is to make their designs look amazing no matter what the constraints.

Why is lighting so important when it comes to photographing an interior? What are the ideal times to photograph?

Lighting is important because it helps create mood and tell a story about the space and what the experience of being in that space might be. My blog post “Why I Light” shows a couple of before and afters using just the available light in a room vs. using supplementary lighting. It’s a great example of how light begins to create a story.

The ideal time to photograph really depends on the space and the end goal of the photograph. I love to capture the drama of streaming light in a room because it creates a sense of time and narrative in the image. To that end, I will usually seek out areas of the house that may have harder streaming light or create it with supplementary lighting.

“Having a “go-to” photographer ensures that all your imagery is cohesive and blends easily with your branding.”

How do you typically prep an interior designer for a photoshoot?

As part of my process for each project, I include a walk-through of the space during which we discuss everything including lighting, props, and image usage (portfolio, magazine submission, competition). It’s usually this time that most designers really start to get excited and maybe a little overwhelmed about things. As part of this step, we visit each room and come up with a game plan for each space including any props that we may want for the day of the shoot. As we move through each room, I am also considering what angles to capture and what lighting may be necessary.

What are some tips of best practices you can offer interior designers for making the most out of a photoshoot?

Tip # 1: Bring more accessories than you think you will need. I have never had an occasion where a client brought too many accessories. Often times, something can look great in person, but not so great in a photograph. Things may appear smaller in the photograph, so, if possible, you want to bring similar shapes of varying sizes. The same goes for art – bring various sizes.

Tip # 2: It’s a stressful day and there is often not enough time to capture everything so it’s important to know what is a priority to photograph.

Tip # 3: Don’t obsess about the exact placement of every object in a room. Once you see the image, you can really tune where everything is because you will be able to see how it reads through the camera.

Tip # 4: Bring snacks.

Tip # 5: Have fun!

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Are you an interior designer searching for an interior design software for your business?

 

What we would do to be able to see the inner workings of an interior designer…Well, here’s the next best thing! We asked our community of Ivy Designers to give us a sneak peek into their brains through their desktops; from the meticulously pristine to the organized chaos.

A huge thank you to our lovely Ivy Designers for bravely sharing their beautiful desktops (even if they were a bit messy).

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“Only the current files I’m working on for clients are on the screen. Once I’m done – they get filed. My computer gets back up daily by my tech obsessed husband, so I’m never worried about losing something.” – Ivy Designer K.M.

“Guinness, who is the ‘king of quite a lot’.” – Ivy Designer L.R.L.

“Just a few things I am currently working on but haven’t filed away yet.” – Ivy Designer K.W.

“Mine used to be so cluttered that you couldn’t even see a background. I have since cleaned it up after my 11-year-old son saw it and almost had a heart attack and my husband repeatedly said ‘HOW DO YOU FIND ANYTHING ON THERE?’ This is mine cleaned up, finally.” – Ivy Designer A.C.

“You guys will probably be really annoyed with me. I keep NOTHING on my desktop because I am paranoid about losing it! Everything is in the cloud!” – Ivy Designer S.M.B.

“I keep nothing on my desktop except a link to my business files and some awesome inspiring words. Clutter (even digital) makes me crazy!” – Ivy Designer L.M.

“I actually “cleaned” mine a month ago…” – Ivy Designer R.D.Z.

“Mine’s embarrassing…When the files start doubling up (as pictured) I know it’s time to clean up…In my defense, I rarely see my home screen as I always have several programs up and running at once.” – Ivy Designer B.S.

“I’m a ‘keep nothing on my desktop’ girl – just a pretty background! Everything’s organized in the finder in folders.” – Ivy Designer C.W.

“For the record, I stack all this in one week, click and drag photos, and then delete them once a week or file. I thought I was pretty damn organized until I saw all of these…” – Ivy Designer S.W.

“Just about everything gets filed in Finder or on the iCloud immediately. My desktop pic usually involves my next vacation…” – Ivy Designer J.C.

“Try to keep it nice and clean with a relaxing image.” – Ivy Designer S.S.

“You caught me on a very organized week! Usually my desktop fills up with screen shots, etc. until I can’t handle it anymore and I purge or stash to a folder. These baby blues literally save me/remind me why I’m busting my butt on some days!” – Ivy Designer A.S.

“This is like a peek inside my brain.” – Ivy Designer A.F.

“I’m obsessive about folders, so mine’s pretty boring. Just shortcuts to my Google Drive and some folders for when my husband inevitably saves his work on my laptop.” – Ivy Designer K.H.

“You don’t get much better than this well designed space. It is perfect in every way!”

“Hilarious. Maybe it’s time I clean up… even better that I’m on 3% battery!” – Ivy Designer C.H.

“My janky Windows 10 desktop until my Macbook gets a new hard drive…” – Ivy Designer L.G.

“Ironically, I cleaned my desktop a couple days before – it was a cluttered mess! This feels SO much more life-giving…”- Ivy Designer L.E.

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Are you an interior designer searching for an interior design software for your business?