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Length: ~2hrs, 17 lessons

My rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

My one-liner takeaway: The choices you make designing a room help tell a story about the space, the intended use, the history, and its inhabitants.

I started the course with an appreciation for how good design can enhance the pleasure of a meal or even the reading of a book (see the hardcover copy of 1Q84). I hoped to understand the basics of designing my apartment space to maximize my enjoyment with the minimal amount of effort and dollars. I wanted to 80/20-rule the learnings from the course.

Kelly’s course is maybe 10% applicable to people like me, while the rest focuses on how to be a professional interior designer. I found a lot of it un-relatable as all of her clients have multi-million dollar spaces and likely gush at the idea of having bizarre art furniture for the sole purpose of showing off to other rich friends how their one-of-a-kind light fixture was designed by so-and-so. Despite my disappointment, I found the class enjoyable. Kelly does a great job articulating her process in a short period of time and goes out into the field to explain why and how a certain choice works and what effect it has on the viewer. She’s spot on and sometimes it feels like she’s reading my mind. If I was an aspiring interior designer, I’d get a lot of inspiration in the lessons ranging from the use of color, patterns, light, the legacy of a space, and gathering ideas from other art forms. For the layman like me, understanding what the heck she means by “the colors in the room should have a dialogue” and creating a singular focal point with a hierarchy of statements was oddly practical and enlightening. I left feeling that the course could have been twice as long and there’s a lucrative opportunity for someone (or Kelly) to teach an ‘interior design for the common person.’

If you’d like to hear it directly from Kelly, check out her course here. As of now there are over 100 instructors to learn from, with more being added every week!

This review is part of a larger series, where I try learning from every single course within the catalog. Find my full list here.