(From left) Daye’s father, cousin, and neighbor with the family dog, Ratnah, in 1973. 
Daye’s childhood home on a spring day, in 1984. 
Daye with her cat, Annie, and maternal grandmother, Evelyn MacDonald, in 1981. 
Daye’s cousin and childhood dog, Ratnah, in 1973.
Loren Daye is the founder of the New York–based interior design firm LOVEISENOUGH.
“I was born in 1974 and grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, which is a very flat, gray, small university town. It’s very corn-centric, with lots of fields and train tracks with no gates, where you had to look both ways to cross them. We lived on a dead-end road, at 519 Knollwood Drive, in a modest, three-bedroom ranch house. It was a really big deal when my parents bought it.
My father was a scholar of Buddhist studies—he wrote articles and books about comparative religion, and taught on the Semester at Sea program. He was so driven by his curiosity and a ravenous desire to understand the world better. He gave me a good basis of aesthetics as it relates to a citizen-of-the-world way of moving, metabolizing, and collecting, of having these varied levels of identity and then bringing that with you everywhere.
So I traveled a lot as a child, and we’d bring back things that were meaningful to us. I lived in India when I was a baby, and then I lived on a ship for eight or nine months, when I was 5. Those aspects of travel made me very sensitive to my environment.
The Ohio house was a sort of an oasis, a pocket of identity inside a town that we kept going back to after our travels. I’d always ask my parents, ‘Wait, why are we here again?’ It’s a lovely town, but I had no kinship with it. And so the house became this respite of identity, which is one of the big things I think about in design: there’s not enough of it.
My strongest memories of the house are sensory. Texturally, it was really powerful—we had a huge sofa in silk velvet, and there were two or three other velvet or mohair things in the house. There was a lot of music—random seventies instrumental, like Chuck Mangione—and pop jazz. There was the smell of curry, which my dad made a lot of.
The house was part of a tradition of mid-century American architecture where the bedrooms are all on one side—a wing for sleeping. In my parents’ bedroom was a long hallway, where they had a pass-through with sinks and a big counter. That pass-through was lined with closets, so it was highly functional. It felt like a secret, and quite deluxe. The whole idea of them having their own little private zone felt very pragmatic, but really special.
Jasper, the family cat, on Daye’s parents’ sofa in their family room, in 1982. 
Daye, age 3, during the blizzard of 1978.
Nowadays we have so many as-built spaces—or built-to-a-specific-purpose kind of spaces—which is [problematic]. When my Ohio home was built, scale was considered differently in terms of the number of objects and the proportions of objects in it. You didn’t have as many toys, for instance. You had to use your imagination as a guide to play, as opposed to having a prescriptive way of interacting with things.
It’s the same with houses: [Flexible] spaces lend themselves to more experimentation. And I do think there’s something about the scale of intimacy. In smaller spaces, like my house, you interact with people so differently. There was a different set of tastes back then, but the modesty of that era felt expansive. You didn’t need a lot in it. You just needed, like, one sofa. I don’t remember having a lot of side tables. Now I think about side tables all day long: Like, where are you going to put your drink?
The house’s scale taught me many lessons. And remembering what that scale is, especially within American culture and taste today, is very helpful. Because you realize what you did a lot with at an earlier time, and there’s value to that. Much like when you go to other countries and things are differently scaled, and you suddenly think, Oh, I guess I don’t need an office that’s 450 square feet. I can do a lot in 175.
It also taught me to really think about how people live. When I work with clients, I need to understand them as humans. Do they cook, or not? How do they use the ingredients in their homes? It sounds so specific, but it really is a huge part of how people interact with their domestic spaces.
The biggest lesson I see in my own practice is that so much of space serves its inhabitants best when it is about identity, and not a dog whistle to an idea of affluence or aspiration. There’s this desire to create this universal aspect or the ‘new aesthetic’: I see it in architecture and in architects, in these eave-less residential projects that have beautifully integrated, like, gutter systems, and it’s just so pristine. It looks like a 3D model, but they’ve created it, and the feat of engineering to do that and create that simple box that feels like paper is so impressive and so arresting. But there is no idiosyncrasy in it.
Idiosyncrasy is tough because many of the spaces that we’re given, unless we embed a lot of time and energy in them, are pretty blank in this era, at least in this country. But idiosyncrasy gives you something to hold on to. It just fits more squarely into your aesthetic or your references. I wish there was more of that in domestic space. Sometimes we create expressions where that can happen. That’s one reason that Vitsœ shelving is so amazing: because the shelving just goes away, and it allows for the inhabitants to express themselves.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: Courtesy Loren Daye)