Meet the Makers – Carmen Hansberry from Carmen Hansberry Design

Carmen Hansberry is a Perth-based interior designer who has recently been crowned HIA WA Residential Interior Designer of the Year.

This latest accolade is now added to the long list of awards Carmen has won throughout her stellar independent career. Carmen has created a reputation for design excellence among both her industry peers and her long list of happy clients and is known for her keen attention to detail and stunning balance of form and function.

Carmen says her creative streak was evident from very early in her life. “All my school work was about style and presentation,” she laughs. “I had the most beautiful handwriting and all my work was set out just so – everything had to look just right”. While the more typical school subjects of Maths and English were not her forte, Carmen took out straight As for Art, even winning an art competition in her later school years.

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So, a career in Interior Design seemed a natural progression. Carmen undertook a three-year course at TAFE and admits, even for her, it was a shock to the system. “I genuinely thought it was all going to be about colours and pictures,” she explains. “But it was so much more technical than that and the dropout rate was huge”. Carmen says she feels lucky that hand drawing was still being taught when she studied as CAD was just starting to emerge. She is grateful she can still do both with equal skill.

Following her graduation, Carmen worked in a number of design houses, starting with drawing up kitchen plans for other designers and then moving into doing her own design work. This presented the opportunity to enter industry awards via the company she worked with at the time. That year she took out every kitchen renovation category in the HIA WA Kitchen & Bathroom Awards, an event Carmen says felt surreal. “I was on an all-time high,” she says. “But it gave me the opportunity to throw myself into work and it was an invaluable asset when I decided to go out on my own”.

Having previously won the HIA WA Bathroom Design of the Year and HIA WA Kitchen Design of the Year, adding the HIA WA Residential Interior Design of the Year award feels like a great way to complete the hattrick. “What it represents is huge,” she explains. “And to be able to do it under my own business name is such an amazing feeling”.

Today Carmen works mainly by referrals and is so proud of the body of work she has amassed. Most of her work is in renovations but she also collaborates on new builds and developments if the project is a good fit.

“I realised quite a while ago that I’m an empath,” she says. “So, when I first meet a new client I really just let them talk. I want to listen closely to what they are saying but also what they aren’t saying; I like to be really detailed with my brief so I have a true understanding of what they want and how I can bring my special creativity to their project”.

And she has a tip she has learned from her years of meeting and assessing new clients – “People tend to dress the way their interior style is, so I can learn a lot about a client just by what they are wearing,” she says.

Carmen starts most projects with basic spatial planning and she likes to be very precise with the mathematical calculations so the “base” of the project is solid. Then it’s a matter of starting on the placement of fittings and fixtures and adding in the special touches that make the project the client’s own. “At the end of the day it’s not my space, it’s theirs” Carmen says. “So, it’s not about me pushing my style onto my clients although most people know what to expect from my designs – it’s always a bit quirky and a bit crazy”.

When asked what advice she would give to a young designer starting in the industry Carmen is convinced that you need to have a real passion for what you do. “It’s an incredibly technical industry so you need to be prepared for that,” she explains. “It’s not all about pretty colours and decorations. And you need to have broad shoulders because you will be critiqued and you can’t let that slow you down”.

As a fee-for-service designer, she wishes that more members of the industry would charge for design services. “There is value in good design and we need to somehow convey the importance of good design,” she says passionately. “This is an item that is going to be in your home for 20-odd years and, if it’s not designed properly, you will definitely suffer for it”.

Carmen will shortly be embarking on what she describes as “the mother of all projects” which started in design back in 2021. She is hoping construction will start in 2024 but it is a whole home renovation so there has been extensive work in finessing the design and making sure it’s right. The home is significantly aged so no original house plans existed meaning they all had to be created from scratch.

For more information visit linktr.ee/carmenhansberrydesign