Tiffany White on Following the Idea That Wakes You Up at 3 AM

About This Episode

For the very first episode of But What If It Works?, I sat down with Tiffany White, Design Principal and Creative Director of MidCity Design Group. We recorded in New Orleans, where she grew up, and we were both in town for the NKBA Women to Women event. The firm is named for the Mid-City neighborhood just up Canal Street. Tiffany walks me through her path there. She worked in marketing on a casino riverboat until Hurricane Katrina took her job and flooded her house almost to the ceiling. Grad school followed, then more than ten years auditing federal contractors for non-discrimination compliance. All the while she was quietly staging family properties until a realtor asked who they’d hired.

From there, things moved quickly and then all at once. Staging became a business. Then the work got boring as listings were made bland enough for everyone to like, and a lunch in Dallas with a table of interior designers changed her course. Today, from Houston, Tiffany leads MidCity Design Group with what she calls a “luxe-low” aesthetic: modernly curated yet approachable spaces. The firm offers turn-key interior design, renovations, new construction, and healthcare design, and Tiffany has also designed sets for fashion designers at New York Fashion Week. She talks about building a home with hallways wide enough for her grandmother’s wheelchair, and how her years of careful audit work shaped the way she now reviews architectural plans.

We also get into her work with athletes, celebrities, and first-generation clients. Some of them dream too small, like the client who never thought of a sauna big enough for two. Others dream too big, like the young athlete who wanted a lazy river. She designs for the day a 35-year-old athlete retires, explains why she won’t pitch a client’s home to a magazine, and tells me about the night she woke up at three in the morning and started Googling attorneys to form an LLC. Her advice to anyone with a dream that keeps them up at night: follow it, because “you will have your best life if you’re just doing what you want to do.”

“It’s a luxury if you can live your life the way you want to live it in your space.”

Tiffany White

What You’ll Hear

• Growing up in Mid-City among the above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans
• Losing her job and her home to Hurricane Katrina
• A decade auditing federal contractors, and how it trained her eye
• Turning family staging projects into a business
• The Dallas lunch that sparked a design career
• Designing for athletes, celebrities, and first-generation dreams
• Why her definition of luxury is about how you live, not what you buy