There is a particular kind of home you walk into and immediately feel something shift. The pace of your breathing changes. Your shoulders drop. You look around and everything you see seems to say — someone who loves beauty lives here. Someone who chose each thing deliberately. Someone who understood that a home is not a backdrop. It is a statement of who you are.

That feeling is not an accident. It is the result of design that comes from the heart.

What Design with the Heart Actually Means

Design with the Heart is not a decorating style. It is not a color palette or a trend or a set of rules borrowed from a magazine. It is a way of seeing — and more than that, a way of choosing.

It means choosing the linen tablecloth that belonged to your grandmother over the one that simply matches the curtains. It means placing the antique bowl where the afternoon light falls on it rather than where it makes compositional sense. It means asking not what looks beautiful in a photograph but what feels beautiful to live with every single day.

The French have understood this intuitively for centuries. A French home is not designed to impress. It is designed to inhabit. The worn wooden table, the mismatched china, the flowers cut from the garden and placed without fuss in a ceramic jug — none of it is accidental, and all of it is deeply intentional. That quiet confidence in one's own taste, that willingness to choose beauty over trend, is the heart of what I call designing with the heart.

The Five Principles

Over the years of building Merze — and in the nearly forty years before it spent observing how people live and what their spaces say about them — I have come to understand design with the heart through five principles. They are not rules. They are observations. Truths I have seen proven again and again in the homes and lives of women who live beautifully on purpose.

Beauty is not decoration. It is intention made visible.

A beautiful space is never the result of simply adding beautiful things. It is the result of deliberate choices made with care and consistency over time. The woman who designs with the heart does not decorate. She chooses.

Heritage is not nostalgia. It is the wisdom of what endures.

The objects that carry the most meaning are rarely new. They are the pieces that have outlasted trends and remained beautiful through generations — the antique confit pot, the Belgian linen, the Spode china that has been at every important table. Designing with the heart means honoring the wisdom embedded in objects that endure.

Gathering is not entertaining. It is the design of human connection.

A table is never just a table. It is an invitation to slow down, to be present, to connect with the people seated around it. The way a table is set communicates something before a single word is spoken. Designing with the heart understands that the most meaningful design happens at the intersection of beauty and human warmth.

The home is not a backdrop. It is the most personal statement a woman makes.

How we live at home — the objects we choose, the spaces we create, the rituals we practice — reflects who we are more honestly than almost anything else. Designing with the heart treats the home as a living expression of the woman within it.

Design is not a skill. It is a way of seeing.

The most beautifully designed spaces are created by people who have learned to see — to notice the quality of light at four in the afternoon, the way a linen drapes against a wooden table, the difference between a room that is merely arranged and one that breathes. Designing with the heart cultivates that way of seeing in everything it creates and shares.

Where This Philosophy Comes From

I grew up in a family rooted in Breton heritage where beauty was never separate from daily life. My mother gathered flowers because they belonged on the table. She set the table because gathering mattered. She chose objects carefully and kept them for a lifetime. Nothing was disposable. Everything was considered.

When I later traveled to Provence for the first time and walked through the lavender fields and stone villages I felt something I could only describe as recognition. As though I had been there before in some essential way. That feeling never left me and it became the foundation of everything Merze is.

A Provence-inspired tablescape I designed was voted Most Beautiful Table among thirty-six professional designers at the Connecticut Valley Garden Club's annual exhibition. Standing before that table I understood for the first time what I had been working toward — not a style or a service but a philosophy. A way of living that is rooted in beauty, shaped by heritage, and carried out with complete intention every single day.

That is Design with the Heart.

How to Begin

A design study in soft pastels and gathered blues — blush and cream roses on a round wooden side table, dimensional florals, a Persian rug with soft blues, and a leopard print pillow on white linen. Every element chosen with intention. This is what Design with the Heart looks like in practice.

Designing with the heart does not require a renovation or a budget. It requires attention.

Begin with one corner of one room. Look at what is there and ask honestly: Does this belong here because I love it, or because it has simply always been here? Remove what does not belong. Keep what carries meaning. Add one thing — one object, one flower, one piece of linen — that you chose deliberately and that makes you feel something when you look at it.

Then do it again in another corner. And another room. Over time, the whole house begins to shift — not because you have added more, but because everything that remains is there on purpose.

That is designing with the heart. That is living beautifully on purpose.