About Design and Dwelling
Design and Dwelling is a home design and DIY site about making ordinary houses feel considered — without a designer’s budget, and without pretending every room starts from scratch.
We publish room-by-room guides, step-by-step project tutorials with real costs attached, and honest assessments of the products people actually buy. Most of what we cover has been done in a real house — usually more than once, and often badly the first time.
Who writes this, and why there’s a pen name
Articles here are published under the name Quinn Parker. That’s a pen name, and we’d rather tell you outright than let you assume otherwise.
The reason is straightforward. The person writing this site works full-time in residential design, and her employment makes publishing under her own name a conflict of interest. The pen name is how she writes about her own field without creating a problem at work. It isn’t there to manufacture a personality or to paper over a lack of experience — it’s there because a working designer would otherwise have to stay silent.
What that means for you as a reader: everything attributed to Quinn was genuinely done, tested or specified by that person. The projects are real projects. The opinions are hers. Nothing on this site describes an experience nobody had.
Her background: around fifteen years working in residential interiors — more than ten of them in the Atlanta area, and the last five in the Pacific Northwest. Most of that time was spent with a home design company, working on hundreds of homes on everything from single-room decor refreshes to full remodels.
The range matters more than the number. A 1940s Atlanta bungalow and a Pacific Northwest split-level have almost nothing in common — different light, different bones, different problems, different budgets. Working across both is why this site doesn’t assume everyone is solving the same problem in the same house.
Who publishes it
Design and Dwelling is owned and published by Attain Brands, LLC, doing business as Design and Dwelling. Editorial decisions, corrections and partnership enquiries run through the publisher, and a real person is reachable at the address below.
What you’ll find here
- Project tutorials with the actual materials list, the actual cost, and the part that went wrong.
- Room-by-room guides for the spaces people struggle with most — small bathrooms, awkward entryways, low-ceilinged basements.
- Product assessments that name specific models and prices, and say when something isn’t worth buying.
- Seasonal decorating that doesn’t require replacing everything you own each year.
How we work
We’re straightforward about our process, including where we use AI tools and where we don’t. Two pages cover it in full: How We Create Our Content and our Editorial and Review Policy. Some links on this site earn us a commission — that never changes what we recommend, and our Affiliate Disclosure explains how it works.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections and collaboration enquiries are all welcome at hello@designanddwelling.com, or through our contact page. A person reads everything that comes in.
You can also follow along on Pinterest.