Luminosus Designs Featured in Westchester Home — Winter 2013

In the Winter 2013 issue of Westchester Home magazine, Mimi Fong, founder of Luminosus Designs, was featured in a “Designer Secrets” interview that focused not on a single project, but on the quieter influences that shape her work over time. The piece offered readers a glimpse into the personal references, habits, and observations that sit behind the finished rooms.

Rather than presenting design as a series of statements or signatures, the interview framed it as an accumulation: of places visited, objects kept, and details noticed. Fong spoke about favorite out-of-the-way sources, a long-standing relationship with a particular antique shop, and the kinds of elements she believes give a house lasting presence rather than temporary polish. These were not offered as rules, but as reflections — a way of describing how taste is formed through attention rather than intention.

What makes this kind of profile distinct from a project feature is that it shifts the focus from outcomes to sensibility. The conversation moves easily between travel, antiques, and everyday environments, not as inspiration in the abstract, but as a way of staying visually literate — of learning to recognize proportion, patina, and restraint in many contexts, not just in finished interiors.

The interview also touches on details from past client projects, not as a portfolio recap, but as examples of how ideas tend to reappear in different forms. Certain concerns — comfort, usability, and a preference for things that feel settled rather than staged — recur less as a style than as a way of working. In this sense, the feature reads less like a professional profile and more like a short essay on how a designer pays attention.

There is an emphasis throughout on observation. Fong describes noticing how rooms are actually used, how objects are handled, and how houses age. This attention to the ordinary is presented not as modesty, but as discipline — a way of keeping design grounded in lived experience rather than in imagery alone.

What Westchester Home captured in the “Designer Secrets” format is this quieter dimension of the work: the part that happens before a plan is drawn or a material is chosen. The feature does not attempt to define a signature look. Instead, it describes a set of interests and habits that make consistency possible across very different houses and projects.

Read years later, the piece remains a concise portrait of an approach built on accumulation rather than assertion — on the idea that enduring interiors are not invented all at once, but assembled over time from things that have been looked at carefully and chosen for lasting reasons.