Raised in Southern California by an American father and French mother, Jessica Helgerson spent countless childhood summers visiting family in France. But it never felt like home—until now. Recently, the designer opened a small office in Paris and started splitting time between there and her base in Portland, Oregon, where she has been running her eponymous (and now AD100) firm since 2000. “It has been a really beautiful chapter for me, because my entire life, I have never really been at home in France—I’m always visiting my grandma or my aunt or my cousin; I’m always a guest,” she tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “This has given me a real raison d’être. I’m there because I work there. We have an apartment there now, and we have projects there now.”

Helgerson found her calling after seeing a flyer at the Santa Barbara Public Library for a UCSB presentation on the university’s interior design program. Something clicked, and she fell in love with the profession. She completed the program and worked for an architecture firm, but soon went off on her own. “I was looking around Santa Barbara, and it’s a small town, and I didn’t see anyone doing the kind of work I wanted to do,” she says. “I didn’t see the firm that I wanted to be with, and so I kind of felt like I didn’t have another choice.”

Since starting her firm, Helgerson has always had her community and environment top of mind. “As I have grown in my career, I have also grown in my awareness of systemic injustices,” she says. “I’ve continued to grow the firm and grow my awareness of a lot of the problems that capitalism has created, and I reconcile the two by trying to create a very livable workplace, [as well as] giving back to the community as much as possible and using my social media platform as somewhere to talk about things that I think we could look at and work on.” She also founded The One Percent Project, an initiative in which design firms and other home industry businesses add a 1 percent charge to all their invoices (presented to clients as an optional donation), then donate those funds to the Oregon Community Foundation, where they are dispersed to nationwide nonprofits that serve homeless people. “We have done quite a bit of good, and we’ve had some really generous clients who have not only done 1 percent but added on a whole bunch,” she says. “We’ve done little bits of good. I just see the need growing exponentially, and our contribution does a little something.”

Crucial insight: A core value of Helgerson’s firm involves letting the home’s bones guide them. “The architecture of the house dictates the way the interior architecture should be,” she says. “For all of those permanent decisions, we’re kind of listening to the house more than the client. And if the client is like, ‘I want to open up the space,’ and they’ve just bought an old Victorian—yes, we can widen the openings, but I’m not going to knock out all the walls on the first floor. I think that the green approach that I had at the very start of my career has translated, after all these years, to: Just don’t screw the house up. Do a job that the house wants, and then all of the decorating can reflect the clients and their color sense and the art that they love.” Clients seek her out for this spirit rather than for a signature look. “[With some designers] you know you’re going to get a [for example] John Smith house. You’re coming to him for that, because it’s always going to be white with big black things in it, or whatever,” she says. “That’s not us at all. Our portfolio is so diverse because we’re always in starting over, listening and responding mode.”

Key quote: “I think that working with humans is difficult, and sometimes people are angry or entitled or hard to please. Sometimes people do imperfect work and projects are hard to manage. At this point, I care a lot about our projects, but I also don’t suffer personally from all of it. I think [when] I began, I clung more fiercely. [Now] I have a lighter hold on it all. If I was clinging fiercely to every single aspect of the whole office, I would be a nightmare of a boss. I trust that the employees are, if they’re working from home, they’re working. I trust that the contractors are doing their job. I trust that the project managers at our office are managing the projects.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and John Rosselli & Associates. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including another rate cut from the Fed, Pantone’s controversial pick for Color of the Year, and what matters more for designers—their portfolio or their personality? Later, Michael Phillips, the president of Jamestown, joins the show to discuss the future of design centers.

This episode is sponsored by Joon Loloi and Programa. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.