Before she even considered entering the design industry, Erica McLain’s professional path contained enough experience for a few lifetimes. Her résumé tells the story of a career journey that took her through Stanford, the Olympics, and tech companies like Facebook and Google—but from the very beginning, one characteristic has remained constant.
“Was I always a creative? Undoubtedly, absolutely,” McLain tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of Trade Tales. “I was the outcast little weirdo that made no sense to anyone, but I was moving to my own beat.”
Born and raised in Ohio, her early artistic exploits seemed to span every medium—from music to visual arts—even as her career interests skewed toward medicine and human biology. As if her talents in arts and sciences weren’t enough, she also excelled in track-and-field, securing a scholarship to Stanford, as well as several national triple jump titles and a spot on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team.
Shortly after graduation and the Games, however, a devastating injury sidelined McLain’s athletic career, sending her into treatment by leading doctors and wellness practitioners, and transforming her outlook on health in the process. In time, she forged a completely new path—through business school, then the tech world—before settling down to start a family in Dallas. There, all of her areas of expertise culminated in a new focus: transforming spaces through design, with a particular focus on environmental psychology, via the 2023 launch of her own firm, Living Luxury Lab.
“I wanted to help people live better in their own worlds and in their own ways, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that if I couldn’t understand them and learn who they were,” she says.
Elsewhere in the episode, the designer shares the “design potential report” she prepares for prospective clients, her firm’s unique B2B offering, and the software she is developing to analyze a home’s impact on clients.
Crucial insight: One of the biggest takeaways from McLain’s journey into the world of neuroaesthetics was the gap between the research-backed scientific knowledge of the impact of design on a space’s occupants and the strategies available to apply those insights. “I was like, ‘What can I do to help shepherd this industry and create space for designers who truly want to make a measurable health impact in their design practice, and also be seen for the clinical rigor that design holds, with the right knowledge and tools and application of the principles?’” she says. In pursuit of that goal, she’s enlisting the help of a scientific advisory board to create tools and surveys designed to help designers assess their clients, design plans and physical spaces to maximize well-being.
Key quote: “I no longer tell people [when] they’re like, ‘What do you do?’ [that] I’m an interior designer. I’ve learned that I’m more of a ‘neurodesigner,’ and that is actually a field and a term and a thing. It also opens the field for me to say, ‘I do interior design, but through a lens of neurological impacts and the neuroscience of design and material selection, and the effect that it measurably has on people’s health.’”
This episode was sponsored by Vanguard Furniture and Kohler. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
