It may have started with a Brooklyn brownstone, but KV Harper’s design dream has grown New Orleans roots. Wherever she’s designing, Harper’s approach blends a reverence for history with the realties of modern living.
Harper’s professional path traversed management consulting, advertising, creative writing, strategy, and set design, but it was the 2013 foray into renovating her Brooklyn brownstone that caught the eye of local media – and sparked her interest in a design career. In 2017, Harper bought a home in New Orleans and started KEX Design + Build, whose staff now includes an architect, intern, and two junior designers working across geographies – on projects ranging from the Carrollton neighborhood to Atlanta, upstate New York, and London.
A hallmark of Harper’s work is reconciling preservation with practicality – something personally relevant as she begins renovating her family’s recently purchased home in Algiers Point. As she explained, “I believe something if was a double, it should in some ways try to preserve being a double. If something was built in 1909 and it still has some of those historical details, we want to try to keep as much as possible. It’s a fine balance because houses were not made for modern life; there wasn’t very much privacy. So, it’s balancing having it be comfortable for a family today – but in an old home and still respecting those pieces.”
Another common theme in KEX projects is comfort with color and pattern. “Especially living in New Orleans,” noted Harper, “if you’re going to have a colorful home, this is the place to do it.” Vibrant palettes inspired by the Caribbean and Mexico infuse warm yellow kitchen accents or eye-catching shower tiles, interwoven with reclaimed materials and vintage accents.
Harper has also embraced the absence of design dogma in New Orleans – a welcome contrast to constraints she has encountered in other markets. “If you want a fuchsia house, why can’t you have it? … There aren’t any rules to design here that you have in other places… For New Orleans, that pressure doesn’t exist. We don’t need to have a certain aesthetic that everybody expects when you walk in.”
