Hi! Thanks for coming my way.
"It's simple, my mandate is to make healthy spaces accessible to everyone."
-Tess Ariane
Tessa Ariane Design was founded in 2015 to help people create physical environments in which they thrive, without relying on mass amounts of space, overwhelming timelines, or huge budgets.
Healthier spaces lead to healthier lives, and when we refocus collectively, we have the power to create healthier societies.
Investing in our well-being should be accessible to all.
Sliding scale pricing available for marginalized peoples.
TAD Story
"My interest in interior design stems from a curiosity about how we live and operate. I am fascinated by, and committed to the influence intelligent design has on our daily lives. I believe in the pursuit of social justice work and community building through the creation of better, healthier, and more deeply affective environments."
-Tess Ariane
What do you think of when you hear the term Interior Design?
For many, myself included once upon a time, the first thing these words evoke might be “elitism”, “superfluous”, and “expensive”; essentially making things pretty for the wealthy.
I am grateful to have learned this is often not the case.
Quality design is both a deeply dynamic art form and a powerful tool in individual and collective well-being. Healthy habits, supported by healthy spaces, lead to healthier people, which lead to healthier communities, and eventually societies at large.
Over time this progressed to helping out those near me in my life. Friends and family would call me when they moved needing help setting up, painting, and selecting their layout. Eventually this turned into friends of friends, and more and more folks asked me why I wasn’t pursuing this professionally.
The seed was planted, and I already knew I wanted to be doing work that really made a difference. I wanted to work with, and for people, which lead me to spending the entirety of my adult life working in non-profits.
Over thirty homes in thirty years
I moved around a lot in the first 30 years of my life, over thirty homes in thirty years, and what kept me going through those moves was the excitement of the new project each time.
It was important to invest in the space to make it feel like a stable home while I was there.
Fast forward a few years, I found my impact limited by the bureaucracy of the work I was
doing. I was ready to invest in my passion and explore other
ways of supporting healthy communities.
I enrolled in my condensed three-year program and laid the
foundation for Tess Ariane Design. Following that, realizing that being
tight on space seems like a universal issue around Vancouver, I also took
a hands on Tiny House building course. It has proved an incredibly helpful
tool to reframe making the most tight spaces!
Good design shapes our habits, our emotional well-being,
and our enjoyment of our homes; arguably the most important
space in our lives. It's an honour to get to be a part of shaping that!
So what do you get when you work with me?
I will invest in understanding you, as an individual with individual habits and needs. I will hear, respect, and find creative solutions to be able to take on the very smallest to very largest projects.
I want to put the power in your hands; help you feel equipped to tackle things on your own, provide roadmaps to guide you, and see what an incredible difference that can make.
A humble and grateful recognition that all of my work takes place on
unceded land of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, Musqueam Peoples.
I pledge to make annual donations to local indigenous organizations, and am open to suggestions!