Some designers decorate rooms. Teresa Kapala builds feeling.
As Director of Design, she treats interiors the way a landscape architect treats a garden: as an environment first. Witty, elegant, and quietly fierce, she is the person colleagues credit with noticing a shift before it reaches a sales center, and with making a space feel right before anyone can explain why.
From Polish gardens to model homes
Born and raised in Poland, Teresa first trained in landscape architecture. Design and nature pulled at her from childhood, and the discipline never left her.
“The same design principles apply to both disciplines,” she says. “Designing a model home is a continuation of those principles.”
That continuation lives in details most people feel before they can name them: furniture at the right scale, easy circulation, lighting that soothes rather than performs, colors that invite rather than announce. Comfort comes first. She wants people to feel good in a space without quite knowing why.
One lesson from her studies still travels with her. In Roman gardens, warm-colored flowers were planted in the foreground and cool-colored flowers behind them, optically deepening the view. Teresa still designs that way, layering warmth close and calm farther out, so a room feels larger, kinder, and more complete.
Her environmental conscience travels with her, too. Having studied the effect of plants on human health, she makes careful choices in finishes, materials, and fabrics. She completed Wellness Within Your Walls coursework with colleagues and earned certification in healthier interior environments. For Teresa, beauty and well-being are not separate assignments.
How she tells a trend from a fad
Colleagues say Teresa can “see trends easily.” She is more precise than that. She is detail-oriented enough to notice the small difference between something new and something merely typical, and disciplined enough not to confuse the two.
Real trends, she argues, solve a problem. They develop slowly and move in one direction. The lighting “revolution” is one example: LED technology and cordless lamps used inventively, not just newly. Remote work is another. When homes had to function differently, interiors followed people’s behavior. Luxury itself keeps changing, and that change produces lasting shifts.
She quotes Restoration Hardware: “We are living in a time of more—more technology, but less time; more connection, but less connected; more choices, but less clarity.” That tension, she believes, is why people keep returning to crafted, timeless furniture with soul. That current is likely to last.
Fast trends are different. They are spontaneous, fun, and short-lived. Colors of the year are her favorite example. “The more often we use them,” she says, “the faster we get bored with them.”
The Nile, and everything after
After an extreme whitewater trip on the Nile in Uganda, very little on a job site rattles her. She describes the work the way she describes that river. You can be thrown from the raft in rushing water and still, somehow, find yourself in calm, beautiful current.
“It always amazes me how our team is capable of overcoming all the obstacles and delivering an amazing installation in the end and on time.”
That is Teresa’s version of leadership: not theatrics, but faith in the team’s ability to finish well.
Humor she claims not to notice
People describe her as witty. She insists she does not notice her own humor. What she does notice, and love, is the effect of humor in others. It makes a situation lighter, more relaxed, more positive. On a design team, and with a nervous client, that lightness is not decoration. It is part of the environment she is trying to build.
Teresa Kapala keeps choosing comfort over spectacle, health over fashion, craft over noise. She does it with a landscape architect’s eye and a designer’s refusal to settle for rooms that merely look finished. The result is a space that feels inevitable, as if it had always been waiting to be walked into.
