We celebrate unique features
and tricky floor plans.
Thoughtful and thorough, Kathryn Murphy Interiors specializes in personalized design for the Vintage Modern home. We find innovative ways to transform the frustrating to the functional, and create inviting, livable spaces that work simply and beautifully and look simply beautiful.
ABOUT
At Kathryn Murphy Interiors, we delight in transforming how clients see their homes. Turning limitations into possibilities is our secret sauce. We believe in the magic of home and that thoughtful, enduring design comes from understanding how our clients uniquely exist in their space.
With our studio based in the beautiful Oak Park River Forest area - we are experts in restoring old homes. We see leaning Victorians, cozy four squares, and delightful bungalows as our playgrounds. Our bread and butter is designing for today's families living in these old homes (along with new builds that could use some character infusion). We make spaces with less than optimal floorplans flow. We can have frank conversations and provide creative solutions around a complete lack of storage. Let's solve the woes of low ceilings, surprising plumbing and pipes, and nary a thing found that's level or square. We aren’t just up for the challenge, we’re begging for it.
From the Founder
Kathryn Murphy (she/her) is an unapologetic artist with a soft spot for old homes and a fondness for odd, unruly shapes—the architectural equivalent of a well-loved, dog-eared novel. With a background in dance and choreography, she reads space the way others read text: attentive to rhythm, to pauses, to the way light and sound move like sentences unfolding over time. A room, in her hands, becomes less an arrangement of things and more a narrative in motion.
She is not simply designing interiors; she is composing scenes—quiet mornings lit like first chapters, long dinners that linger like good dialogue, the small, unremarkable moments that, in retrospect, carry the most meaning. Home, after all, is where life gathers its stories. Kathryn approaches this with care, creating spaces that are as generous as they are beautiful—places where relationships deepen, community takes root, and people feel themselves written into the fabric of where they live. Inclusivity is not an afterthought; it is part of the structure.
She holds, too, a quiet but steady conviction: there is no single correct way to inhabit a space. Taste need not be defended; personality need not be revised. Part of her role is to offer permission—to follow a strange instinct, to keep the piece that doesn’t quite match, to let a room become something unexpected. If anything, she trusts that the most compelling spaces, like the most compelling stories, resist easy categorization.
Her particular gift is seeing possibility where others might note limitation, as if reading between the lines of a stubborn floor plan. Coupled with years of listening, translating, and finding coherence among many voices, she brings a sensibility that is both collaborative and quietly assured. The result is not simply a well-designed room—or even a home—but a place that feels unmistakably, and sometimes surprisingly, like the people who live within it.
