Real rooms, better instincts.
How to Decorate brings Ballard Designs voices together with designers, architects, and style-minded guests for detailed conversations about making homes work. The appeal is in the specifics: tile, trim, scale, color, antiques, kitchen traffic, and the small calls that change a room.
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How to Decorate is an interiors podcast with a lived-in sense of curiosity. The conversations are polished enough for design obsessives, but loose enough to feel like people comparing notes across a kitchen island. Caroline, Taryn, and Liz bring different angles from the Ballard Designs world, and their best episodes let those perspectives bounce around a guest’s process. The show likes a real room. It is interested in how a 14-by-14 kitchen handles traffic, where a coffee bar belongs, why one hallway can turn into a room of doors, and how an island changes the social life of a space. It also has a strong appetite for material judgment. Stone, mortar, trim, sconces, pendants, upholstery, antiques, art, and wood tones are treated as evidence, not decoration for decoration’s sake. Guest conversations often begin with biography, then settle into useful design thinking. Timothy S. Adams talks about classical lines, craftsmanship, and why construction administration can protect the final result. Laura Keeler Pierce’s episode leans into fearless color, especially the way a coral note can rescue a coastal palette from predictable blue and green. Stephen Rodell brings a historic-interiors lens shaped by country houses, art, antiques, and rooms that feel collected over time. Studio Wellington’s renovation conversation stays in the middle of the process, before the hard parts have softened into a tidy after story. The Carson Kressley mini-series broadens the feed with playful guest-led conversations, including Pat Altschul on scale, timeless furniture, English country comfort, and mixing precious pieces with ordinary ones. Bobby Flay’s episode turns travel, city taste, comfort, and risk into design material. Kim Lapine’s story adds a more contemporary note, with renovation experience feeding a casual but elevated point of view. Across episodes, the show avoids treating taste as a single correct answer. It is more interested in fit. A room needs proportion. A color needs a friend. A beautiful piece still has to be comfortable. That practical warmth is the reason the show lands: it makes design feel specific, personal, and possible without sanding off the complications.
Made for: For home decorators, renovation planners, design lovers, and anyone who wants rooms to feel layered, functional, and personal. It especially suits listeners who enjoy practical detail more than abstract design theory.
What sets it apart: The show pairs accessible host banter with unusually concrete design talk, staying close to layouts, materials, scale, color, and lived-in tradeoffs. It feels less like a showroom pitch and more like a working conversation about what makes a home actually come together.
We want to teach you how to decorate! We'll help you unleash your inner decorator with interviews from interior designers, sharing the trials and triumphs from our own homes, and answering your burning decorating questions. Brought to you from the Ballard Designs team.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Professional design thinking becomes practical through close discussion of scale, color, materials, room flow, and the compromises of real homes.
How to Decorate makes rooms legible as a series of choices rather than a finished look. Caroline, Taryn, and Liz bring their perspectives from marketing, product design, and creative work to conversations with designers and architects, then connect professional practice to…
A kitchen gets divided into traffic and hangout zones, and your own floor plan starts asking questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Laura Keeler Purse makes fearless color feel livable by giving every shade a companion.
How to Decorate lands on a strong subject: heritage design that still works for contemporary living. Laura Keeler Purse, founder of New England-based Keeler & Co., talks through color with a clear, confident eye.
Timothy S. Adams makes architectural tradition feel practical, careful, and consequential.
How to Decorate frames tradition as something active rather than ornamental. Timothy S. Adams, an award-winning Atlanta architect, brings that idea through classical lines, detailed craftsmanship, and the houses gathered in Tradition Made New.
A relaxed host catch-up turns into a useful kitchen-planning talk about traffic, work zones, and everyday gathering.
How to Decorate returns to Caroline, Taryn, and Liz after a long gap between host catch-ups, then finds its center in a kitchen-planning conversation.
Scale, comfort, and a pug collection make the case for livable chic.
Carson Kressley's fourth mini-series installment makes its case for rooms with staying power: spaces built on scale, comfort, classic layouts, antiques, family paintings, and a little eccentricity.
A relaxed design conversation where comfort, bold accents, and the risks of buying abroad all have a place.
Carson Kressley's week-three How to Decorate conversation brings Bobby Flay into the overlap between style and daily use. Flay talks about choosing furniture for comfort and function, then letting a few riskier accents sharpen a room without making every corner perform.
Kim Lapine shows how architectural details can shape a room before the furniture arrives.
Kim Lapine's design story moves with an unusually busy pace: seven houses renovated in seven years, then the launch of Kim Lapine Interiors in 2020.
A loose home-design conversation finds visual change in Zoom backdrops and history in a stubborn backyard fence.
Home decorating starts under pressure here, with construction outside the building, Atlanta's water out for days, and a Zoom background suddenly changing how a room reads.
Two product designers talk Figma workflows, button sizing, and AI design tools weekly.
Stockholm hosts James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom interview UX and accessibility experts.
Four design-business owners, including Design Cuts' Tom Ross, talk pricing, agencies, and creative burnout.
Monocle's design team tours museums, furniture studios, and landmark houses each week.
Home is where the trials start.
Kim starts with seven houses, then gets into the bones of a room: arches, fireplaces, stone, lighting, and ceiling changes.
Ballard Designs hosts interview interior designer Brian Patrick Flynn about his work on HGTV Dream Home, his approach to decorating, and current design trends.
Stephanie Mahaney discusses her background in interior design and shares tips for decorating with a coastal aesthetic.
Color needs a friend.
Tim Adams keeps tradition useful.
Trials and triumphs are overdue.
Steven Rodel discusses his passion for historic English country house interiors and his career in design.
Hosts from Ballard Designs interview Studio Wellington founders about the realities of home renovation, sharing insights from their own projects.
Scale changes everything.
Bobby starts with the buying gamble: vetted vendors, rugs in Morocco that never arrived, and the very real worry that a chandelier may not show up either.
West Coast designer Kim Lapin discusses her journey from modeling and acting to renovating seven houses in seven years and launching her interior design firm.
Miles Redd discusses his collaboration with Ballard Designs on timeless design and upcoming collections.
San Francisco interior designer Palmer Weiss discusses her approach to using color and pattern in traditional interiors with a modern twist.