Fix Her Up: Remodeling the Person and the Home with Maida Korte
In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Debbie Mathews, an interior designer and antiques dealer based in Nashville, Tennessee, to look through a curated selection of her portfolio — from a sunroom in the Belle Meade neighborhood to a working ranch outside Franklin, Tennessee, to a mountain house living room with 30-foot ceilings. What this episode makes visible is something I'm calling the space between the ask and the answer: the ordinary, specific problem a client hands a designer — a room that goes unused, a space that feels too formal, an object nobody wants to see — and the beautiful, considered decisions a designer makes to answer it.
This isn't a portrait of an unusual designer or unusual clients. Debbie's clients are typical: they know a few basics about what they want — a color, a piece of furniture they already love — and rely on her aesthetic judgment for everything else. That's a completely normal client relationship. What makes this episode useful is how clearly you can watch it happen, room after room, with the specific decisions named out loud.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Loosening: what a renovation can take from you besides money and time
Maida Korte describes her professional trademark, before this renovation, as “getting it done” — running a tight ship, pushing until things were finished. An old, unpredictable house made that approach impossible. The real cost of the renovation wasn’t the budget or the timeline; it was her need to control the outcome. Letting go of that control, gradually and reluctantly, is the throughline of her memoir Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me.
Why the compromise mattered as much as the house
Before any renovation began, Maida and her husband had to work out a compromise: he wanted to leave the city entirely for a rural life; she was a lifelong city dweller who told him she’d “cry every day.” They settled on Woodstock, Illinois — a small town near friends, not total isolation — and her husband’s response when she nearly backed out, “That’s okay, babe, we don’t have to,” became a turning point in how much she was willing to give the marriage.
The disasters that came with an old house
The house delivered nearly every renovation worst-case scenario: a bat flying through the kitchen from an attic walk-up (the county later confirmed it was an endangered species), sewer pipes exploding in the front yard, sinkholes forming in the basement, no insulation, and original knob-and-tube wiring. None of it happened on anyone’s schedule, which is part of the point.
How her daughters adjusted differently by age
Maida’s four daughters experienced the move in very different ways. Her two oldest, already headed to college, treated it as a romantic adventure. Her two younger daughters — one a competitive gymnast facing long daily drives to practice — found the transition harder and lonelier. Maida says, in retrospect, she wishes she had brought her daughters into the decision-making process more directly rather than simply managing them through it.
The dining room that fulfilled every dream for the house
The room Maida fell in love with first wasn’t a design showpiece — it was the dining room, anchored by a twelve-foot farm table bought in anticipation of a family that hadn’t grown yet. That table has since hosted dinners, breakfasts, wedding showers, and baby showers for a family that expanded from four daughters to seventeen people.
The artisan’s line that changed what the book was about
Maida hired a specialist to repair the original wood floor inlay — patterned borders original to the house. After twenty minutes on his knees running his hand over the wood, he stood and said, “Well, she’s old, but I think I can fix her up.” Maida says she nearly burst into tears, momentarily certain he was talking about her, not the house. That moment is when she realized her book was never just about renovation — it was a memoir about her own transformation.
Why “basically it’s going to be a nightmare” is good advice, not a warning
Maida’s next book, already contracted for a June 2027 release, is titled Basically It’s Going to Be a Nightmare: Life Lessons in Remodeling — a phrase borrowed from an uncle in her family’s construction business. The book expands into twenty chapters on how clients, designers, contractors, and architects can each do their part of a renovation better, built around the honest premise that no amount of planning eliminates disruption — only honesty about it makes the process bearable.
Maida Korte is a Chicago-area interior designer and the author of Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me. Find more guest interview episodes and full show notes at SlowStyleHome.com/podcast.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Maida’s Book