Lisa Wonsey Parks

When Lisa comes to your home for the first time, she may be tempted to re-hang your artwork or ask you to grab the other end of the sofa and help her move it to the other side of the room. It’s readily apparent: this girl loves to be hands-on.

Don’t worry. She’s not going to redo everything in your house from top to bottom and buy all new stuff. What Lisa really enjoys is using as much of her client’s furniture as possible, knowing when it’s time to go shopping and being able to meet the needs and desires of real people on a budget.

Lisa earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Design from Central Michigan University, but says traveling the world (take a deep breath…France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Holland, England, Scotland, Luxemburg, Mexico, Panama and Greece) and the following work experiences are what really shaped her view of people and spaces.

Currently based in Phoenix, she’s lived and worked in New York City (11 years as a prop & wardrobe stylist and as an interior designer for several architecture/interior design firms), Central Park (as a figure skating coach), Harlem (teaching at the non-profit organization Figure Skating in Harlem), Boston (creating and installing displays for Anthropologie) and the San Francisco Bay area (as a Visual Manager at Anthropologie, responsible for the aesthetic look and feel of the entire store). Readers have admired Lisa’s prop styling work in the pages of Sunset Magazine, Phoenix Home & Garden, The Arizona Republic magazines and Arizona Bride. Her e-Decorating services are featured in the May 2009 issue of Sunset Magazine.

As an interior designer or a prop stylist, just a glance or three is all it takes for Lisa to know which things go where; and why; and how each adjustment of this item, or that item, can reduce or improve the circulation and balance of a room. With eyes and senses so finely tuned, it should come as no surprise that in 2005, after just two weeks in Phoenix, she met a blue-eyed wordsmith named Joey Robert Parks and the two were eventually married (March 2008).

Another designer would probably have put Lisa’s accolades on the front door of her bio, but if you’ve ever met Lisa in person, you know that any praise inspired by her fun, unexpected design sense is something she’d want to reserve for her client and that first moment they walk through their front door.