About Karalina.

I grew up in a family that cared a lot about design. My dad has a master's in architecture, and his drawings hung all over our family office (I once asked Santa for a floorplan stenciling kit so I could draft my own). My mom loved our family home, a historic bungalow, and she worked really hard to keep it true to the period it was built in, pouring over architecture and bungalow design books constantly. That sense of respecting a home's bones and its period stuck with me, and it's a lot of how I approach my own house now.

In 2025, Jacob and I hired a builder to put up our house, but we didn't have the budget for an architect on top of that, so the design ended up on me. Our builder was great at his job, but design just wasn't in his scope of work, and we ended up moving into a house that was, lovingly, a bunch of empty white boxes. We've been slowly DIY'ing them into the classical home I always pictured ever since, starting with our mudroom, where I installed tile, wallpaper, and everything in between, and where I learned I could do more than I thought I could.

I'm fully self-taught when it comes to design. I don't have a degree or an apprenticeship behind me, just a deep love for classical architecture, a stack of design and millwork books I read for fun, and a willingness to figure things out the hard way when I have to. I was also born without a right hand, so a lot of what I do is one-handed and a lot of it is rigged up to make it work. Jacob handles the heavy lifting, and the rest I figure out and adapt as I go. That's just who I am.