About HomeFabVibes
Welcome to the Blog Built From My Own Living Room
The Home That Started It All
I am an interior designer, and the first home I ever designed from scratch was my own.
I had spent years designing beautiful rooms for other people — pulling together palettes, sourcing furniture, planning layouts, walking clients through decisions about pieces that would live in their homes for the next decade. I was good at it. I loved it. But there is a very particular kind of quiet that settles over a designer when she finally turns the same eye on her own four walls.
The first time I stood in the middle of my own empty living room, with my own budget and my own indecision, I understood something I had been quietly missing for years. Designing a home you actually live in is different from designing a room someone else will live in.
You second-guess yourself. You fall in love with pieces that do not fit the plan. You buy the wrong rug twice. You realize, somewhere between the third paint sample and the fourth sofa return, that the woman standing in the middle of the room does not want a showpiece. She wants a home.
That is the home I built. And that is the home HomeFabVibes was built from.
Why I Write About Home the Way I Do
Most home decor content on the internet is written to sell you something. I am not going to pretend otherwise. Sponsored posts get written for the sponsor. Roundups get written for the affiliate commissions. Magazine spreads get styled for the camera, not for the life that has to be lived inside them.
The homes we all actually live in are messier than that.
They have kids’ toys in the corner. They have rented walls we cannot drill into. They have builder-grade cabinets we cannot afford to replace. They have couches we picked out three apartments ago that still, technically, work. They have Sunday mornings and Tuesday evenings and the specific kind of tiredness that makes you look around and wonder why your home does not feel the way you thought it would.
I spent years in interior design learning the rules. I spent the last several years, in my own home, learning which ones actually matter and which ones you can quietly break. HomeFabVibes is where I share both.
Who I Write For
I write for the woman who wants her home to feel like her home, and who has been quietly figuring out what that even means.
You might be:
- Someone in your first apartment who does not want to throw money at furniture that will not survive the next move
- A new homeowner staring at beige walls and builder-grade finishes, unsure where to begin
- A renter with a landlord who says no to paint, drilling, and most forms of personality
- A mom trying to build a living room that is beautiful and also somehow child-proof
- Someone who has technically decorated their home and still does not love it, and cannot figure out why
- A DIYer with far more Pinterest boards than free weekends
- A reader who has strong taste and is tired of home decor content that pretends only million-dollar homes matter
Whichever of these you are, you belong here. I write the guides I wish someone had written for me — not as a designer, but as a woman standing in her own living room, trying to make it feel right.
A Few Things You Should Know About Me
Most About pages tell you the author is passionate about their topic. I am going to skip that and tell you specifics instead.
- I am a trained interior designer. I designed my own home from the studs up, which is where a real chunk of the content on this blog comes from.
- I keep a running list on my phone of every piece of furniture and decor I have ever bought — where it came from, what I paid, and whether I would buy it again. I refer to it more than my calendar.
- I have a rule I break constantly: nothing enters the house until I know where it will live. I break it about twice a month.
- I believe candles at dusk are not optional. I light one in the main room every evening, regardless of season or company.
- I redo the same three shelves in my living room roughly once a season. Not because they need it. Because I like the exercise of starting over with the same pieces.
- I own the same set of small ceramic vases I bought years ago. They are always the first thing I unpack in every new room I style.
- I do most of my writing early in the morning, before the rest of the house is awake, with coffee and the specific kind of quiet you only get before the day starts.
- I have been quietly collecting home decor ideas, sources, sketches, and mood boards for years. HomeFabVibes is what happens when a designer’s private notebooks finally get a public home.
How This Blog Earns the Right to Be Read
I take what we publish here personally, because most of the readers on this site are trying to make decisions that will live in their homes for years. I am not interested in being one more voice that gets things wrong.
Here is what I promise you.
Every piece of content on HomeFabVibes is written or reviewed by me as Founding Editor and lead designer before it publishes. Every guide is edited a second time for accuracy, clarity, and honesty before it goes live. When an article is more than a year old, we go back and rewrite whatever has aged out of relevance, because sources go out of business, paint colors get discontinued, and the “best budget find of 2024” is often not the best budget find today.
Any time you see a product link on this site that earns us a small commission, it is clearly marked at the top of the article. Any post that has been sponsored is labeled the same way. You will never have to wonder.
If we recommend something, someone on this team has used it, tested it, or lived with it in a real home — usually mine. We do not link to things we have only seen in press photos.
That is the standard I hold this site to. If we ever fall short of it, I want to hear from you directly.
One Last Thing
If you have read this far, you are the kind of reader who takes About pages seriously. I respect that. I do the same thing when I find a new blog, because the About page is where you find out whether the writer is real and whether the writer respects the reader.
So I will close with what I most want you to know.
Your home does not have to look like anyone else’s to be worth loving. The rooms in the magazines are stages. The homes on Pinterest are corners, framed carefully, in the two minutes of the day the light was right. The home you have, on the ordinary evening you are standing in it, is the real thing.
I want to help you make it feel like yours — the way I made mine feel like mine.
Come find me at [email protected] if you want to say so.
— Emma Carter
Interior Designer & Founder, HomeFabVibes