Emily Askin

An Interior Design Show House is not a new concept.  Maybe you’ve even attended one of Pittsburgh Magazine’s Ultimate House events (taking this year off, we understand) or the 2018 Junior League Yingling Mansion renovation.  

Rarer in Pittsburgh, these are usually reserved for those HGTV-style high-end markets where, yes, it’s fun to watch designers work with giant budgets and makeover a multi-million dollar property. But they can also leave us peering in from the outside at the aspirational lives of the ultra wealthy.

We wanted to change that.  So we went rogue. 

Have you ever wondered how to turn a house you LIKE into a home you LOVE? Most of us don’t have the dough for a high end, HGTV-style home makeover (spoiler: who does?! Seriously. Call us if you know someone so we can study their brains.) But we all want to understand how to make any space beautiful, regardless of budget.

Empowered by the trust of one of our phenomenal clients, we’ve recruited 6 interior design teams, 4 home decor vendors, and a host of other partners to reimagine what a house in Friendship might be as well as to raise funds for a local non-profit. Designers will had a week to re-imagine their team’s space in the house before we open the doors opened to media and the public.  

We believe design is for everyone, and so did our collaborators on this unique project. So many talented individuals and businesses work daily to beautify and elevate the housing stock in our little city. 

The Gross Street Designer Show House was a labor of love conceived of by a group of friends connected through design and real estate.  The participating designers will undoubtedly be leaders of the next wave of design in Pittsburgh. Further, the majority of the designers recently relocated to Pittsburgh and have all fallen in love with the city and its historic and well-preserved architecture. Designers on the team have came from Austin, Los Angeles, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, and we displayed a wide array of styles from each of their many walks of life.

The Friendship house was a lovely and spacious home with plenty of architectural detail and lots of opportunities to create something really special, but it was also modest in square footage and was never designed to be a mansion, accessible only to the rich. Part of what we hoped to accomplish through this design show house is to make great design more accessible to more people in Pittsburgh.

"We're excited by the prospect of fostering more collaboration within the design community and introducing new interior design ideas to the 'burgh."   

Design teams will had 1 week in the house to bring their rooms to life.  We documented each designer's process and progress along the way via photography and video, sharing daily updates on social media: #grossstreetshowhouse and #designforallpittsburgh.   The 3rd floor of the home was programmed as interactive spaces for art-making, photo-taking, and lego-building!  

All proceeds supported the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium's International Conservation Center, located on nearly 1,000 acres of rolling hills in Somerset, Pennsylvania. This extension of the zoo provides the perfect landscape to focus on conservation science, wildlife management and recovery, and education. The ICC’s breeding herd of African elephants plays an essential role in the preservation of the species and our contributions to captive breeding have had a major positive impact on the North American population. Our Male “Jackson” is tied to nearly 50% of the births over the past decade.  All the animals onsite are threatened or endangered in the wild.  They contribute to the preservation of their wild counterparts and help tell the story of hope and survival into the future.