Chelsea Sachs Design

I worked with Chelsea last year on a complete redesign of our master bathroom. I had been thinking about a renovation for several years and although I had previously designed all the rooms in my home myself, and have a strong personal style, I sensed that I needed professional expertise. I was looking for someone who could maintain a look that is consistent with my traditional home while bringing a fresh creativity that was original, elegant and inviting. Both the experience of working with Chelsea and the finished master bath have far exceeded my expectations.
Chelsea was a pleasure to work with. Her warmth, intelligence and energetic personality were easy and inspiring. She has a gifted eye for design and knows just how to make a room come alive. She’s clear about her ideas but is a very fine, intuitive listener. She took my somewhat vague ideas and transformed them into an exquisite and highly functional bathroom.
I knew I wanted to use a pair of beautiful antique sconces from my late mother’s bathroom. Chelsea took that desire and created a subtle theme honoring my mother’s life of grace and beauty. She encouraged me to use some of my mother’s glass and silver pieces on the bathroom shelves along with a tiny framed photo of her. These small gestures acknowledging my mothers memory are meaningful to me every time I enter the room.
I know this will sound like hyperbole, but it’s true, the bathroom is perfect — there isn’t a single thing I would change.

My husband and I hired Chelsea to help us organize, de-​clutter and revitalize the look, feel and energy of our home. We have two young kids and very little time or energy to work on our house. Chelsea’s natural flair for style, color and flow mixed with her commitment to eco-​friendly/​sustainable design was a perfect match for our needs. She was able to work with both our limited budget AND our desire to not buy a bunch of new «stuff», by rearranging our existing art and furniture to create a completely fresh and new space. From the beginning Chelsea walked us through a very thought provoking process that helped us get in touch with what was most important to us about our home and the changes we wanted to make. She’s a great listener and took all of our jumbled ideas and pulled them together into a coherent plan of action. We truly felt like a team working together towards our goal of a more beautiful and organized home. We can’t thank her enough for the work that she did with us. Everyone who comes over is blown away by what a fabulous improvement we were able to make while staying true to our values… and budget.

Chelsea helped us design our living room and dining room in New York City and did an exceptional job. She far exceeded our expectations. My girlfriend and I had very different style ideas when it came to designing our new home, Chelsea navigated this beautifully and found a common ground we could not have achieved without her. The end result was a beautiful space that reflects both of our personalities that we love coming home to every night.
One of the things I found most exceptional was that she was able to do this remotely, without ever physically stepping foot in our home! With Chelsea based on the west coast and our home located in NYC she was able to transform our space with just a few pictures and a schematic of the dimensions she would be working with. We scheduled regular weekly Skype meetings to discuss our progress which I always found myself looking forward to. She was a joy to work with. Decorating our home had gone from a project that felt like work to something we were now having fun with every day.
She had a vision and kept us on schedule and on budget. People often say «we could not have done it without her», we literally tried (for months) and she came in and completely transformed our home in a fraction of the time. A few months later we were happy to welcome her into our home to see her finished project in person. We can’t wait to work on the next big project with her.

We hired Chelsea to update a very dated bathroom in our Oakland home. It was no longer functional for our family of four and not at all appealing. We also knew that while we really needed to get the remodel done, we didn’t have the time to go to tile, flooring, appliance and paint stores. Chelsea did this work on our behalf and presented us with some great choices! We were excited to see that she captured both our style and vision in what she picked out. She then ordered and arranged for the multiple deliveries (or picked up the items herself) for all the necessary elements of the project and stuck with us until it the project was complete. The product is a beautiful and highly functional bathroom. Thank you Chelsea!

I worked with Chelsea to design my corporate offices when we moved from Berkeley to downtown Oakland. We had just rebranded our design agency and wanted to have our physical space match our brand feel and values.
Chelsea took to this challenge with passion and worked not to suit her own tastes but to truly capture the spirit of our firm. She helped us make choices that would otherwise have felt way too risky but ultimately turned out to be beautiful and striking. She kept us firmly on budget and in a process that continually went off the rails with contractors, landlords etc, Chelsea was our one rock who always delivered on time.
As a creative professional with very high standards, I usually look back on past creative projects with something I’d like to do differently and some amount of regret. I can say that every time I step into my office, I feel we’ve got this one just right.

Chelsea designed and furnished a home of mine on Flathead Lake in Montana. It was a gut remodel of an ordinary mid century home which was transformed into a beauty of a place. She stayed within budget, worked well with the contractor and the sub contractors, made the home practical for large groups to rent (home sleeps 14 people). Her choice of colors was unique and beautiful. The lighting, which was a challenge because of the vaulted tongue and groove ceiling, turned out to be a spectacular central feature of the main living/​dining room in the home. She has a great vision and makes decisions effortlessly. I highly recommend her for your remodel or new construction jobs.

Chelsea helped us renovate our master bedroom, bath and finished attic — we could not have done it without her! She helped pick tile, paint color, rug etc and make sure it all flowed together as one integrated design. Chelsea has a unique way of leading the process but with choices that felt very much our style. She saved us tons of time and pain pulling a few choices for everything so we didn’t have to canvas the bay area sorting it out. She’s got a great eye and so her selections were right on and made for easy picking. We are so happy with how it all came out and feel like she saved us from many mistakes!

Chelsea was unquestionably the best possible decorator for my wife and me during several months in 2014. She redesigned our living room and the color scheme throughout our home and made it a truly beautiful and far more comfortable living space. She was able to negotiate differences of opinion between my wife and myself in ways that we both thought were fair and right. She identified superb colors from which we choose (with solid guidance from Chelsea) — colors that were drawn from our existing carpets and worked beautifully together. She is well connected to expert and delightful craftspeople who, for example, built our living room cabinet or made new coverings for our chairs. She also did a lot of the «pre-​shopping» so that our visits to stores (for chairs and a sofa, or fabrics for seat covers, for example) were targeted and our time was much better spent. She is also an incredibly warm and enthusiastic person who follows through and will do as much or as little as you want. But, thankfully, she also «pushed» us sometimes when it was necessary to move forward. In terms of money and rates, she was fair and we feel we got far more than our money’s worth! Without qualification, we highly recommend her.