Naperville North designers create around client's taste

Students typically come to Allison Eisenbeis' interior design class at Naperville North High School with some degree of hands-on experience in creativity.

Maybe it's an art class they took as a child or a drawing studio they signed up for in high school. Maybe they've experimented with their own bedroom's design or helped choose paint colors for their home.

But a project students are wrapping up this month challenges them to step outside their own personal design experience, their likes and dislikes and style, and into the taste of a client who needs ideas to refresh a room.

"I have to remind them they're designing for someone else," said Eisenbeis, who has taught the interior design class for nine years. "Every client is different, but they're really just doing the room for them with the style that they want."

The real-world project starts with yearly outreach by Eisenbeis to the Naperville Unit District 203 community, seeking people in need of interior design services who are willing to accept ideas from novices. The ideas come free and the clients get to keep the student-created plans for their home's spaces.

This year's call for clients got so many responses that Eisenbeis had to put many on a waiting list. She accepted eight rooms for her class of roughly 23 students and assigned two or three teens to work on each space, so clients could receive a variety of suggestions.

The teens' task began with conducting a meeting with the client to determine the client's goals for the room, be it a living room, family room or bedroom. Students then were told to gauge the client's style, taste and color preferences; set a new room layout using computer-aided design software; and identify furniture, lighting and decor to fill the room.

The project concludes with students constructing a poster detailing the plan and presenting it to the client.

Aside from the lesson of designing to someone else's taste, Eisenbeis hopes her students gain communication skills they can use in any career they choose.

"They know how to present things professionally," she said. "I think that's a big thing."

Senior interior design student Abigail Przybyla hopes to pursue art or fashion ("my two favorite things," she says) in college. So the design project was a chance for perfection, for identifying the exact lamps, shelves, colors and bedding to create a calming guest room for a client, who happens to be her former fashion design teacher.

"She wanted us to design her a nice guest room," Przybyla said, a space where relatives arriving late after long travels can "come into the room and feel relaxed."

One of Przybyla's favorite picks for the room is a salt lamp, a calming device that provides the right amount of soft light without adding any jarring brightness. She's adding the accent piece to a room she's otherwise designing in shades of gray and ashy wood with a few pops of color.

Lessons on color are one of the main take-aways senior interior design students Lisa Patel has gained from her artistic endeavors at Naperville North, including four drawing classes and an advanced placement studio.

"We've learned different elements of design and how to convey that into a room," Patel said.

Warm colors, she explains, give a bright and energetic feel, while cool shades convey calm. Likewise, she says, diagonal lines create excitement, vertical lines add length and horizontal lines add width to any room.

Luckily, Patel said the client for whom she was assigned to design a new living room has preferences much like hers, favoring a "minimalistic" style with "modern, clean lines."

"I'm excited to share my ideas," she said the week before presenting her design to the client, a woman looking to refresh her living room to match a recently renovated bathroom. "I hope they like them."