Season 9 of The Interior Collective Podcast is brought to you by Materio. Welcome back to The Interior Collective. I'm your host, Anastasia Casey, and today I'm sitting down with Emily Del Bello, founder of Emily Del Bello Interiors, a New York City-based residential design studio known for interiors that are layered, collected, and deeply personal. Earlier this season, we had a conversation that stayed with me. A designer who made the deliberate choice to leave a major market, to build something intentional in a smaller city, and to grow a studio on her own terms away from the noise. Today we are going in the opposite direction. Emily Del Bello grew up in a small town in Indiana, and she moved to New York City. And New York, as anyone who has tried to build something there knows, does not make it easy. It is a market with an almost intimidating depth of design talent, a client base that arrives at the first meeting already knowing exactly what they love, and a competitive landscape that will expose every gap in your confidence, your process, and your point of view. And she built a studio that thrives inside it. In this episode, we are getting into exactly how she did it. The leap from the Midwest, the early years of figuring out New York, what it actually costs, financially, creatively, personally, to establish yourself in this market, and what it looks like to serve clients who are as design-literate as the city they live in. We will also get into the evolution of her studio beyond client work, including her fabric and lighting collaborations, and what that expansion has meant for the business.If you have ever looked at a major market and wondered whether there is room for you, this conversation is for you.

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