Korean born and Detroit raised, Young Huh was pushed to follow a conventional path from an early age. “[My parents told me,] ‘No one’s going to hire an Asian woman who’s anything but a doctor or a lawyer,’” she tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. Though she got a law degree from Fordham University in New York and passed the bar exam, she never felt drawn to the career, and spent her free time figuring out another path by, among other things, completing surveys on Cosmo and taking the Myers-Briggs personality test. Then in 2001, Huh met an interior designer at a cocktail party and a light bulb went off: She had found her calling. She enrolled in Parsons School of Design while interning at design businesses, and ultimately launched her eponymous design firm in New York in 2007.
“It was extremely intimidating, because back in those days, I didn’t see any Asian designers, and people were like, ‘Who are you? Are you a designer? Prove it,’” says Huh. “It was a very generally WASPy business. It was a good thing that I grew up with a lot of WASPy people. I knew how to navigate that. But it was not necessarily a welcoming space.” Nearly 20 years later, she has a spot on the AD100 and has projects across the country. “There are definitely people who become overnight stars. I’m sure I am not one of them. It was just a very slow step-by-step build,” she says. “The word I come to most is patience.”
Huh had spent over a decade working as a designer before the 2019 Kips Bay Decorator Show House catapulted her career to the next level. She stresses the importance of showhouses and why every designer should consider doing them, for both the exposure and the creative freedom. “You get a chance to express yourself in design, in a way that you can’t with a client,” she says. “Those projects, and my own home, are places where I can really stretch my design wings and do something that’s entirely imaginative. I don’t have a client to please. I don’t even necessarily have the practical considerations. That’s why people should do showhouses—not only to support the important charities, but this is your time to stretch your design wings and really go for it.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Huh discusses her upcoming book, A Mood, A Thought, A Feeling; her work helping to launch the Asian American Pacific Islander Design Alliance; and why AI will never replace creativity.
Crucial insight: As Huh grew her firm, she realized there were some things that she couldn’t do herself and needed to outsource. First, the business side of things was never her forte. “As a designer and business owner, it’s really hard to do it all. There are a few designers who are amazing businesspeople and amazing influencers, and I am not one of those people,” she says. She ended up bringing on consultant Brett Williams as business director to handle the back end while she took on creative. Same for social media—Huh hired a social media consultant to manage her accounts, provide structure and streamline the process. All this takes time, though. “It takes a while to build up the business so that you can afford someone who has that kind of talent. They always say, hire the things you can’t do,” she explains. “If you’re not great at social media, hire someone to do that. If you’re not great at PR, hire someone to do that. And of course, all of that takes funding too, and a lot of financial planning.”
Key quote: “We should not be afraid of technology. I think we should be afraid of how humans use it. For instance, social media is a great tool, an amazing connector. But what we’ve learned is that the way people use it and the way algorithms work, we become siloed. Your algorithm serves up only what you were looking at, so you become extremely siloed in your worldview. I think for AI, it’s the same thing. If you use it to determine all your creativity, then it becomes very dangerous. I think it’s helpful as a thought starter, and it could have an incredible application for democratizing design.”
This episode is sponsored by Ernesta. 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 editor in chief Kaitlin Petersen discuss the biggest news in the design world, including the latest on tariffs, highlights from design events in Paris and London, and why a robot might be making your next sofa. Later, Lauren Hudson, Claire German and Charlotte Roberts join the show to talk about Design Destination London.
This episode is sponsored by Loloi. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
