A Designer’s Global Search for Beauty, Craft & Connection

About This Episode

Meet Casey Brand, an interior designer, traveler, and lifelong seeker of beauty and connection. After 25 years in design and decades of travel, she has learned to see how culture, craft, and community come together to create beauty. In this first episode of Brand on the Run, she starts close to home, with a tour of her former Houston house, a stop for tacos, and a visit to the upholsterer who has quietly made her pieces for close to two decades.

The house is a record of a family’s travels and a family’s history. It flooded in 2017, and the pieces that survived are the ones that mattered most: her grandparents’ china, silver, and chairs, and a hand-carved prohibition bar they brought home from abroad. Around them sit things Casey found along the way: a vase from a market in Marrakesh, a Buddha head from the years she lived in Asia and worked for a designer in Singapore (who told her that if you see it and love it, buy it), a Cuban photograph by an artist she first discovered at The Pearl in Rosemary Beach, a purse by Tonya Hawkes that doubles as a jewelry box, and a hand-painted bag from Homer. Out back, a Bali bed copied from a friend’s in Bali is where she journals with her morning coffee.

Then it’s lunch at the family taco truck Casey has been ordering from for years. One of the family explains how they moved over from Telephone Road in 2015, and how they stocked up on propane to keep feeding the neighborhood through Hurricane Harvey and the freeze, when few places could open.

The last stop is Economy Upholstery, where Fernando Perez has been reupholstering furniture since he started out in San Antonio in 1968. He unveils a pair of chairs for Casey’s studio, finished with 50 buttons and a contrast back, and walks her through the old way of doing things: coil springs, horsehair, cotton, and burlap, all saved, cleaned, and tied back by hand. His shop is full of photographs and stories, and Casey leaves reminded to slow down and ask the people she works with a few more questions.

“I really just want to celebrate the humans that are behind the scenes and don't maybe get the frontal exposure, but they're the ones making all the beauty happen around the world.”

Casey Brand

What You’ll See

• A tour of Casey's former Houston home, rebuilt after the 2017 flood
• Heirlooms from her grandparents, including a hand-carved prohibition bar
• Treasures gathered in Marrakesh, Singapore, Bangkok, and beyond
• A backyard Bali bed and a wall of family travel photos
• Tacos and hurricane stories at a family-run taco truck
• Old-school upholstery with Fernando Perez of Economy Upholstery