At Sanford Collective, stewardship starts with listening. Every home begins with its own history, and every interior is designed to add to it, not erase it.

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Our interiors have a quality of having accumulated over time, layered rooms with a lived-in quality, the sense that color and pattern found their way there over years rather than arriving all at once. Spaces feel like they have a history, even when they're newly built. Drawing from the character of Charleston and the Lowcountry, the studio embraces patina, layered materials, and the kind of detail that emerges only with time.

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Emily approaches every project with curiosity, intention, and a strong creative point of view. Not a predetermined aesthetic repeated from job to job, but a vision built from scratch around the architecture, the location, and the people living there. Her work draws on over a decade of experience in fashion, a deep love for old homes, and an instinct for the unexpected combination: the wallpaper pattern that shouldn't work but does, the paint color that makes a room feel like it was always meant to be that way, the material pairing that feels considered rather than safe. Emily brings a particular understanding of scale, proportion, and spatial flow, creating interiors that feel deeply connected to both the home and the family living within it.

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Every project begins with you: your history, your instincts, the way you live, gather, and move through a space. But our role is not simply to reflect what you already know you love. Our job is to push past the obvious, uncover possibilities, and take you somewhere better than you imagined, making it feel inevitable once you're there. The result is a home that feels collected rather than decorated, personal rather than prescribed, and impossible to imagine belonging to anyone else.

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​Whether we’re restoring a historic Charleston residence, designing a sympathetic addition, or furnishing a newly completed home, our role is the same: to understand what gives a home its identity and thoughtfully guide its next chapter.

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Emily lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant with her husband, their two young children, and their dog. Outside of design, she enjoys gardening, antiquing, taking in the beauty of the Lowcountry, and playing Mahjong, pursuits that, much like her interiors, celebrate history, connection, and a sense of place. 

 

Sanford Collective is a member of Architectural Digest's AD PRO Directory, and selected projects have been featured in Homes & Gardens, Domino, In Kind, and Gander

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If you're renovating, adding onto, or furnishing a home somewhere in the Charleston area or beyond, we'd love to hear what you're working on.