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Paula Kinney has been drawing other people's kitchens since 2002.
Love Your Nest Interiors is her studio, based in Solon and working across Greater Cleveland and Akron. She designs and specifies. Your contractor builds. That has been the arrangement from the beginning and it is the reason the drawings are as careful as they are.
How she got here
Before all of it
She studied biology. There was no HGTV then, and interior design was not the popular thing it has since become. The route in was a house, not a course: right before she got married her husband bought an investment property, they fixed it up, and then they bought another one. He renovated. She did the interiors.
2002
Friends had started calling for help, and then one of them bought a three and a half thousand square foot house and hired her to design the entire thing. The referrals that followed turned it into a business rather than a favour.
The recession
When the economy turned she went back to school for a teaching certificate, and learned quickly that she did not have the passion the job needs. Her own children's teachers had it. She did not, and she said so.
Back to kitchens
She returned to designing kitchens at Northeast Factory Direct, learning the trade floor and the products at the same time, and then opened her own design studio under the name Love Your Nest.
2017
The Plain Dealer profiled her for its Fashion Flash column: interior designer specialising in kitchens, owner of Love Your Nest Kitchen Design Studio, Solon.
How she works
Full service design, and a clear line about what that means.
Paula offers full service design: selecting paint colours, flooring and countertops, and planning and renovating an entire space. She does not swing a hammer, and she does not pretend to. Deciding what goes where, at what dimension, in what finish, is a discipline of its own, and it is the part that is nearly impossible to fix once the trades have gone home.
She also writes for people doing it themselves. There is a guide to designing and planning a kitchen remodel, and a printable Kitchen Renovation Planner for keeping plans, contracts and order information in one binder rather than in six places.
Where she works
Solon, and everywhere the drawing can reach.
In home consultations run across Greater Cleveland and Akron. Online design has no geography: the Delaware home office she planned as a surprise Christmas gift was designed entirely from Ohio, and the client's own account is that the remote process was seamless.
The way in is the same either way. A fifteen minute discovery call, no charge, about the room that is bothering you.