In Ask an Influencer, Business of Home explores the creator economy. This week, we spoke with interior architect Alyssa Anselmo.
From a young age, Alyssa Anselmo has had a sensitivity to certain rooms and buildings, picking up on how lighting, colors and furnishings could transform her experience of a space. She didn’t always find inspiration in her hometown, the industrial city of Edmonton in Canada’s Alberta province—it was on her family’s travels to Italy, her mother’s birthplace, where Anselmo’s connection with architecture and interiors truly came to life.
“I told my parents, ‘I don’t care where, but I’m moving to Europe as soon as I’m done with school. I’m going to work all the jobs I can, and I’m going to save all the money I can, then I’m going to leave,’” she says.
At 19, Anselmo followed through on her promise and relocated to Italy for a three-year architecture program in Florence. The experience—of the coursework, but most of all, the city itself—was enough to confirm that she’d pursued the right career path. After graduation, she moved to New York and began working for a major firm that specialized in office spaces.
While that job was a positive introduction to the design world, it wasn’t all that she’d hoped for creatively. As she began to consider her next steps, she got a call from her mother, who was searching for guidance while planning to open a new holistic childcare center in Edmonton. “She said, ‘I really want to take this new space, but I don’t know if I can hire someone that would understand my vision—but I feel like you get it,’” says Anselmo. “I was like, ‘Say no more. I will take this over.’”
On July 9, strategist Ericka Saurit, in part two of her Social Storytelling series, dives deeper into the visual side of self-promotion, dissecting how your Instagram feed, stories and content work together to deliver a cohesive, scroll-stopping message about your unique design brand. Click here to learn more and remember, workshops are free for BOH Insiders
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The project, which saw Anselmo handle everything from architecture to interior design, led the budding interior architect to tackle a second childcare center, coinciding with the launch of her firm, Studio Anva. It was on that project, which featured a giant cloud-like installation hanging from the ceiling in a central room, that she decided to begin sharing videos of her work on TikTok. After netting 14 million views on a single clip, she decided to keep the content coming—a process that has culminated in her current 257,100 followers on TikTok and 701,000 on Instagram.
Ahead, the Milan-based interior architect shares how she communicates her creative process on social media, adopting a slow approach to design and content—and providing resources to benefit the next generation of design professionals.
Capturing (and Sharing) Creative Flow
One of the key reasons Anselmo began creating content (and why she believes it took off on social media) was to lay bare the step-by-step process of turning a design concept into reality. At the beginning, however, she found that documenting and communicating her methods didn’t quite come naturally.
“When you’re so deep in the creative process, it can feel very unnatural to stop and explain what you’re doing, rather than just do it,” she says. “That’s something I’ve had to study a lot.”
In her early content, she broke down the design process into bite-size pieces: a walkthrough of the project’s moodboard, a deep dive into her material choices, and a step-by-step look at how she troubleshoots common issues—such as sourcing new custom countertops after pandemic shortages forced her to reselect.
Simply putting herself out there was also a learning curve for Anselmo, albeit one she was intent on overcoming in order to reach broader audiences. “Coming from someone who is pretty introverted, I’m one of the last people typically that would have done all of this on social media,” she says. “That was something that I had to learn to let go of, and [focus on wanting] to actually connect with people that would feel the same way if the roles were reversed.”
Slow and Steady
Much of traditional social media design content relies on the drama of before-and-afters—but for many homeowners, and a growing contingent of design professionals, that doesn’t reflect the reality of curating a personal space, which is both effort- and time-intensive. “The biggest thing for me that I haven’t seen online, or maybe not [through] my algorithm, is an appreciation for slow design,” says Anselmo.
For that reason, she started a content series depicting the gradual design of her own apartment, with each video often focusing on a small detail: purchasing a lamp or installing a new sound system. Anselmo’s content schedule takes a similarly slow pace, which allows her to put more consideration into each creative decision.
“[When I was just] starting to post content, I thought, ‘Wait, these people are posting two or three times a day—that will never be me,’” she says. “I wish it was, but I think creatively, it drains you a lot. … People that are recording albums, for example, that’s why they disappear for a year or two and go record their album, and then they go on tour. I feel like the creative process is not meant to be seen and watched at every angle, at every step of the way. It feels a little unnatural.”
Spread the Word
Beyond providing straightforward design project content, Anselmo’s approach has leveraged her knowledge to share sides of the industry to which a general audience might not have access. Topics range from explorations of esoteric design styles to firsthand findings from Milan Design Week, plus lesser-known resources, such as a dictionary of color combinations.
She’s been able to monetize some of that expertise through brand partnerships with architectural modeling software companies, for example, in which she can appeal to fellow architects, designers and design enthusiasts; or via a document compiling her top 150 furniture companies to source from, available for purchase. In other clips (or even direct messages with aspiring designers), she’s happy to give away some of her insider tips for free, providing followers with the content and advice she wished she had as an early career designer.
“I think that’s the biggest thing for me and everything I do in life,” says Anselmo. “I want to be able to make my younger self proud, to be happy to look back and be like, ‘Oh, my God, we did it. We did all the things we wanted to do.’”
