Follow interior designer Johnice Katz’s Instagram account (@johnice.katz), and it’s easy to feel like you know her. As the ‘People’s Decorator,’ Katz has built a business model around her belief that good design should be accessible to anyone. That includes the 24,000-plus online followers seeking her candid perspectives on design (like Katz’s ongoing crusade against painting brick) and much more.
Katz started her professional career in real estate in New Orleans and cut her teeth on personal home renovation projects. Real estate clients kept turning to her for construction and design advice, planting the seeds for a new career. In 2019, Katz and her husband moved to Denver to be near family. There, she went to school for interior design, started her own design business – and had two children. The pandemic, combined with childcare and a husband who traveled for work, sent Katz seeking professional/domestic balance.
Her Instagram account started as “mom-and-household-focused” recommendations and product reviews, but design lessons crept in. “I got so many people just asking for design help that I started doing Zooms by the hour,” said Katz. “People have all kinds of questions, from layout or what type of materials to use to paint colors to picking out pillows.”
Katz and her family returned to New Orleans in early 2022, lured by a historic Greek Revival home in Algiers Point. She documents that home’s restoration online, openly sharing the ups (her son’s blue bedroom) and downs (‘rising damp’). If the thousands of messages in her Instagram inbox are any indication, people appreciate Katz’s frank takes on design – and life. “Every time I show a pile of laundry in my house, people are like, ‘Thank you for normalizing laundry.’… We are all living the same lie.”
Katz’s dream design projects include an adobe Western or “some ancient seaside 900-square-foot home in Nantucket.” Otherwise, she is quite happy with her current role: “I love to help regular people enjoy the spaces they live in and feel like they can live in a beautiful space – and show them how to do that. Because there shouldn’t be gatekeeping to having a comfortable home.”
