I've spent about 3 months (taking my time) going through the new client experience with Stephanie Lee Jackson at Practical Sanctuary. Wow. From emotional meltdown at simply doing a video walkthrough of my home and realizing how much I need to handle - to dozens of unconscious changes in my behavior and slowly, but consistently, taking steps to make my environment feel safe, welcoming, and uplifting. I've always felt like I'm one of those gays that missed the style and design gene. I live in a mess like a dude. And it eats away at my nervous system. Amid other trauma therapy, mental health diagnoses, and medication - working with Stephanie gave me some room to breathe, understand my own needs, and start setting gentle boundaries for myself that are slowly turning what's felt like a sinking ship in another direction. I may not have been born with style and flair, but now I can listen to my instinct and heart and translate it into action that creates beautiful spaces for living and working. 500/10 recommend. Read her book. Do a client consultation. Take care of yourself.

Practical Sanctuary is part design partnership and part hands-on master class. If you enjoy learning new skills and want to actively build your dream space under the guidance of a true design expert, this is absolutely the right team. We engaged Practical Sanctuary for a month (on the recommendation of a dear friend) to improve our home’s aesthetics and reduce noise, and the experience exceeded expectations. From the start, they brought a rare blend of expertise in fine arts, color theory, and how the human brain experiences space. After aligning on goals, the team spent a half day in our home to deeply understand how we live in the space. Together, we moved existing furniture, experimented with flow, and explored possibilities in real time. From there, we iterated virtually on design options, and once we landed on a layout we loved, Practical Sanctuary created a clear, prioritized task list and shopping list. Throughout the month, they were consistently available to answer questions, provide guidance, and even shop with us for specific items. They are exceptional facilitators—asking thoughtful questions, mediating decisions, and helping homeowners clarify what truly matters. The final half-day, in-person session curated a key area of our home and tied everything together. Beyond the physical transformation, the biggest surprise was how much this process improved communication between my partner and me. We now share a common language for design decisions and feel far more confident shaping our space. unsolicited advice: choose a month when you have the mental space to reimagine your home—and enjoy the journey. Practical Sanctuary delivers a deeply collaborative, empowering, and truly unique design experience.

Stephanie came to my place nearly two years ago, and it's like she never left. We made some instant changes that really improved my entire living and working space, but she did more than that. We set a plan for future changes that would take time (like painting some rooms), and coached me through that via emails and photos. Best of all, she taught me how to "feel" into the space and know what other changes might be needed over time. She is a GOOD designer with an amazing eye, but she's a GREAT teacher.

Stephanie is the bomb. She tells it like it is and is amazing at what she does. From the moment she came over she have straightforward and direct feedback about ways to enhance our space. She worked with me consistently to get our design exactly to our liking. She was super patient with a variety of changes and helped us select the colors and patterns that created the vibe we were looking for. We love our bedroom now and have taken her suggestions for other parts of our home. And now our home feels like our ...welll...sanctuary! Highly recommend working with Stephanie.

I absolutely recommend Practical Sanctuary for any interior design project that requires the result to provide mental restfulness and the accommodation of an individual's specific needs from a space, as well as being aesthetically appealing. For Steph, it's not just about how a room looks at a glance when you first walk into it, but how it feels to use the room on a regular basis. When the pandemic shutdown started, I found myself needing to create a home office, on very short notice, and with very little space or money to work with. I have issues with chronic pain and working on a laptop in an armchair all day, as I started out doing, was seriously exacerbating the problem. Working entirely remotely - relying on information I shared over email, a Zoom conversation, photos of my bedroom, a sketch of the layout, and measurements of my furniture - Steph quickly came up with an arrangement of furniture which I already owned, and which fits in my room without making it difficult to walk around. She also figured out a way for me to have enough space to lay out a yoga mat without shifting multiple pieces of furniture so that they blocked the door, which is what I had been stuck with at first. I am still using this arrangement about six months later, and anticipate continuing to use it as long as I'm living at my current place. Pretty much all the money I needed to spend in setting up my home office was on a keyboard and mouse (a friend gave me a monitor). Steph also provided a lot of suggestions for other adjustments in my bedroom that would make it a more pleasant place to spend the majority of my time. More than once, she suggested I make a small change that I thought wouldn't matter since I didn't consciously notice that the floor lamp wasn't standing straight or there was visual clutter somewhere - but when I actually took five minutes to fix the floor lamp's base or rearrange a shelf, I did notice an improvement. She also had a lot of helpful ideas about decorating my room, within the confines of my being a renter, some of which I've been able to try out, and some of which I hope to do in the future. Steph notices small things that are contributing to making a space either more or less pleasant to spend time in, and which at least in my case were often easy for me to improve myself once she pointed them out. Throughout the process, Steph was responsive, prompt, friendly, listened carefully to what I needed from the room, was not at all pushy about her ideas and was very receptive to my feedback if something wasn't working. Pretty much any quality you might want in a person who's looking over your bedroom to suggest changes which you really hope will bring your physical pain down to more bearable levels and make the room itself a better place to spend most of your waking hours. And she did all that without being able to stand in the room, and during the stress and uncertainty of the early weeks of the shutdown.