Elyse Santoro, Interior Designer: The Training and the Turning Point Behind Design Alchemy

Being recognized by Influential Women this year sent me back through thirty years of work, and it raised a question I am asked often but rarely answer at length: what actually qualifies Elyse Santoro, interior designer, to work the way I do?

Credentials are not the interesting part of this work. They are, however, the part you are entitled to check before hiring anybody and anyone searching for a luxury interior designer Sarasota homeowners already trust deserves a straight answer.

So here is the honest version.

The training behind it

Three qualifications sit underneath everything I do, and they took years each.

• A BFA in Interior Design. The foundation, proportion, materials, lighting, space planning, construction. None of the rest works without it.
• Certification in Feng Shui. Not a weekend course. A formal training in how energy moves through a building and how placement affects the people inside it.
• Intentional Creativity Coach and Teacher certification. The methodology developed by Shiloh Sophia McCloud and taught through MUSEA, which is where my painting practice and my design practice meet.

People are usually surprised by the third. As an interior design speaker I am asked about it more than the other two combined. More to the point, It is also the reason I can sit with a client who cannot yet describe what she wants and help her find it, rather than handing her a mood board and asking her to choose.

What changed in 2009

A designer’s biography usually runs in a straight line. Mine does not.

In 2009 a series of personal and professional challenges arrived more or less at once, and the life I had built stopped fitting. What followed was several years of rebuilding and of exploring self-mastery and spiritual alignment far more seriously than I ever had before.

Out of that period came Designed to Rise and Thrive, my signature program, and a much clearer sense of what I was actually for.

Before 2009 I designed beautiful rooms. Afterward I understood that the environment had been participating in my own unraveling and in my own recovery, and that nobody had ever said so out loud. That is the work I have done since.

The services this turned into

Everything I offer now came out of that reorientation.

• Space Lifts a focused reset of a room or a home, without a full project.
• Feng Shui consultations, in person across the Gulf Coast and remotely elsewhere.
• Holistic interior design and full-service luxury interiors.
• E-design, for clients outside Florida.
• VIP Days, for people who want to move quickly.
• Intentional Creativity art sessions and commissioned energy paintings.

My proprietary approach to Energy Design blends classical Feng Shui principles with the Art of Placement. Put plainly: where a thing sits changes what it does to you, and that is as true of a sofa as it is of a painting.

Where the work has been seen

For anyone checking, this is the verifiable part.

My work has been featured in Chic Miami and Florida Design Magazine, and I have been a featured designer at the Home & Design Show several years running. The Influential Women recognition is the most recent.

Speaking is part of the practice too. Elyse Santoro, interior designer, turns up at clubs, associations, women’s organizations and design events across Florida and I teach. Soul Styled for Success is my certification program for design professionals who want to bring soul-aligned design and intentional creativity into their own practices.

What I would want you to take from this

Two things, and the second matters more than the first.

The qualifications are real, and you should ask any designer for theirs. A great many people in this field hold none, and the word consultant is not regulated.

But credentials are not why the work works. The reason it works is that I ask a different question at the start, not what do you want this room to look like, but how do you want your life to feel, and who are you becoming?

Everything above is simply what allows me to answer that question properly once it has been asked.

What I was told, and what I tell others

The best career advice I ever received was to be seen, to collaborate, and to build real relationships. It sounds like networking advice. It is closer to a description of how a creative life actually sustains itself.

My own hardest moment professionally was relocating to Sarasota and rebuilding a network from nothing. Hard at the time; it widened the practice considerably in the end.

To young women entering design, I say the same three things: get involved in your community, find a mentor, and build relationships that are not transactions. Mine came from Richard Worholik, who sharpened my eye and told me to keep going.

Common questions

If you have been looking for a designer and wanted to know who you would actually be working with, that is the short version. Book a discovery call and we can talk about your home.

Elevate Your Space. Awaken Your Soul.