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It’s never a slow time in Wearstlerworld—also the name of Kelly Wearstler’s 30,000-plus-subscriber Substack—but that’s particularly true right now, in her studio’s 30th year. In addition to the designer’s extensive residential work, she has a new Proper Hotel underway in Lake Tahoe (the Cal Neva Lodge); a restaurant preparing to open in Austin (Kappo Kappo); and she’s recently revealed suites of home accessories and furnishings through partners including Serax, Lee Jofa, and Christofle.
All of this is taking place against the steady hum of Wearstler’s prodigious output on social platforms, including Substack (where she’s currently number two on the site’s list of bestsellers in design). A few weeks ago, the designer, 57, unveiled a new collectible design platform, Side Hustle, fêting its inaugural exhibition with a buzzy soiree at her Beverly Hills home.
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You don’t juggle as many balls as Wearstler does without a few best practices up your sleeve. AD PRO caught up with the AD100 Hall of Fame designer—who is also in the midst of rebuilding her Malibu home—to talk through the biggest lessons she’s gleaned through three decades in the design business.
1. Embrace hybridity and creative risk.
While many designers would be content with a business based solely in interiors, Wearstler’s appetite for experimentation has helped evolve her into the multihyphenate creative she is today.
“There are different arms of the business that, when I started, I never thought I’d be doing,” says Wearstler, “like licensing partnerships, and big brands hiring us for creative direction.” Those jobs now make up around 30% of her firm’s revenue.
She sees the same principle at work for the artists and makers that are a part of Side Hustle. “Some of our artists started out doing something entirely different, and this was their side hustle. And they’re now realizing their dreams and being successful at it.” Wearstler’s job, as she sees it, is to be the megaphone for those talents.
2. Don’t scale at the expense of authenticity.
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Wearstler’s studio currently hovers around 65 employees—and that’s the way she likes it. Though she acknowledges it could easily grow beyond that, the current size allows the designer to provide the detail-oriented level of leadership she aspires to, and ensures the studio maintains the integrity and level of nuance they’re known for.
Wearstler calls herself a “free spirit riding the wave of possibilities,” but that doesn’t mean saying yes to everything—new projects must energize the team too. “I’m pretty good at determining what will drive the studio crazy,” she notes. She flags overly aggressive timelines as a key risk. “Sometimes I’ve taken quick turnaround jobs that have gotten messy. I try and make sure that things are controlled and smart, and that my team is excited.”
3. Leverage creative overlap.
“My business is all about the art of collaboration,” says Wearstler. While that’s obviously true of ventures like Side Hustle, it equally applies to her approach to studio culture.
On the architecture and interiors side of the business, Wearstler points out that there’s a natural symbiosis between the staffers that work on homes and ones who focus on hotels and restaurants. “We mix up the teams quite often,” she says. “We want our hospitality projects to feel residential, and we have some designers that do residential but are also interested in hospitality.” Though everyone has a focus, silos aren’t strict—which enables projects to tap into a deeper well of expertise, and also keeps employees growing and engaged.
Maintaining an open-plan studio also helps, as employees can peek at others’ projects and see what’s happening around the firm. “Everyone can easily communicate,” she says. “There’s a lot of cross-pollination that goes on.”
4. Say yes to tech—yes, even AI!
It’s no secret that Wearstler is an AI evangelist: In a 2023 profile with The New York Times, she acknowledged that her studio was experimenting with these new technologies as brainstorming tools. Her enthusiasm hasn’t waned in 2025, and today, there’s a much wider array of sophisticated interfaces at her disposal. Wearstler and her team deploy a host of them in their work, including advanced LLMs like Chat GPT, Claude, and Gemini; imaging tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Sora; the application-building platform Lovable; and Eleven Labs, an AI voice generator. On the operations side, she sees value in the digital workspace Notion, which offers AI agents—that is, automated “teammates” that can handle organizational tasks. It might sound like a lot, but Wearstler is careful to not overwhelm her employees, and relies on an internal AI committee to help guide its use.
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Being an early adopter has its benefits: Tech companies have sent Wearstler beta versions of their software, which allows her to be a part of the development feedback loop. “We can work with giving [the developers] information on what we need to better do our job, and help create tools around that,” she says.
As Wearstler sees it, more efficiency means better, more effective presentations, and more room for the designers in her studio to focus on the important human-led work of layering emotion into design, understanding materiality, and finding IRL inspiration.
5. Stay resilient, and never stop learning.
Does Wearstler have any big regrets over her 30 years in design? Not enough that she’d change any of her past choices, she says. “Maybe there was a business decision I made that wasn’t the smartest, but I learned. And sometimes you have to learn the hard way.” She sees beauty in the process—and encourages other designers to do the same. “So much is about failing and learning and accepting and trying again.”
Of course, Wearstler has her mind on where she’s set to grow next. Wearstlerworld and Side Hustle are two big focuses for her right now; both, she says, have “so much potential.” The Wearstlerworld team is growing, she notes: They’re hiring a managing editor now.
“There’s still so much I want to do,” she says. “I feel like I’m just getting started.”
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