Inspired By: INSIDES

The design studio that nails traditional, modern, effortless style 🌼 (also our blanket backdrop!!)

May 14, 2026

Can you even imagine having this much to say about blankets?

It’s pretty astonishing and I can only believe it because I am LIVING IT.

We’ve been really excited about the blanket response, which I really appreciate. Thank you for all the nice things you’ve said to me (if you happen to have been one of the people who said nice things to me about blankets).

After Hannah and I had finalized the blanket itself, there were more creative decisions that needed happening: Namely, we needed photography. I’d worked with Tabitha Barnard for our Post Supply zine collab a few Novembers ago and thought she’d be a great fit. With one visual heavy-lifter decided, I needed a location and my first thought (sometimes called best thought) was to ask Kacee. One half of design studio INSIDES, Kacee Witherbee’s home strikes just the right balance of historic and real life/modern for our blankets (and, you know, living more generally). She agreed and I just couldn’t be happier with how these images turned out.

Of course I couldn’t exactly stop there, so I asked Kacee if she’d answer some questions about her design process, inspiration, and all things insides/INSIDES.

How did you first get started with interiors? Any other careers before that lead you here? I’m from a small town in Georgia, and when I was a teenager I worked for this designer who was a bit of an enigma for the area. Not only did she design homes, she also had this beautiful antiques shop. She would travel to Europe twice a year and fill shipping containers with incredible antiques, artworks, and textiles that were unlike anything else around us. She seemed so exotic and cool to me at the time. I worked in her shop after school and on weekends and completely fell in love with decorative arts and the way history shapes material and decision-making.

I later moved to Charleston for school and studied Historic Preservation. I had plans to move to Massachusetts for architecture school, but on a whim I applied for an interiors job in New York (I was watching so much Sex and the City at the time so, duh, obviously NYC) and somehow landed it. The designer I worked for was very fancy and traditional, and I learned the ins and outs of interior decoration in the most practical sense: I was introduced to bespoke upholstery, couture detailing, and the application of decorative arts within interiors. I was a complete sponge for it all.

Eventually, though, I became restless. I had all these friends working in film and creative production and became curious whether I could shift my skills into that world. Through sheer naïveté, I left my full-time job and started taking any music video, commercial, or indie film work that would have me. Those jobs shaped me enormously. I once worked on a music video with artist Marcel Dzama where we essentially turned one of his paintings into a physical world. On another job, I got to witness famed art director Carl Sprague bring entire worlds to life through these incredibly detailed hand-drawn renderings and storyboards before filming even began. Film taught me so much about narrative, emotion, flexibility, and how to walk into a space and quickly dissect its essence and feeling, as woo as that sounds!

What’s it like working between Maine and New York? Difficult? Fine? Where are most of your projects located? Currently all of my projects are in New England, though I’m gearing up for a potential project in California and I’m excited to reconnect with the West Coast after spending some time living there years ago.

Because I’ve lived in Charleston, New York, and San Francisco, I’ve built relationships with creatives and craftspeople all over, which has become really valuable. For a long time I went back and forth on whether I wanted to run a more traditional design firm with a larger local team, but ultimately realized that felt a little limiting for me personally. I tend to think about projects almost like productions: who can I bring in for this specific project?

I’m also an introvert in every sense of the word, and I’ve found that living in Maine and working out of my barn studio alone really suits me, especially during the initial concept phase of projects. But having work in other places forces me out of my hermit tendencies and re-energizes me creatively. I feel very lucky that with age and experience I’ve realized I need both.

I’d also be remiss not to mention my creative partner on many recent projects, Juliana Barton. She’s based in New York and I’ve never met someone so aligned with me aesthetically. Collaborating with her is such a joy because we share a very similar sensibility around what we ultimately want our interiors to feel like.

I love your style and the rooms you put together look so elevated by ready to be lived in... How would you describe it? I really love decorative objects and layers upon layers of textiles and materials. I like fancy things, not necessarily expensive or elite, but things that can elicit pleasure, curiosity, or imagination. I enjoy beginning a project with a sense of curiosity: exploring what excites a client, what feels sentimental to them, how they envision their future home and life within it. I think each project’s style is ultimately shaped by those early conversations and discoveries. More than once, someone has reached out because they appreciate that my interiors don’t feel overly designed. I welcome that. I don’t like anything too done-up or perfect. At the end of the day, I want spaces to feel deeply personal and long-lasting.

How has your style evolved over the years? Has it always been the same or shifted quite a bit? More than anything, I think I’ve become more confident in embracing my love of decorative arts and historic references and speaking up about that with clients early on. And also more trusting of my gut, both in design decisions and in the projects I choose to take on.

What’s your favorite part of the client process? The concept phase. The dreaming and scheming part. Getting to know clients and what inspires them. It’s such a personal process, and I feel really lucky to be invited into people’s worlds in that way.

What’s your favorite part of your home? Our little round breakfast table next to the wood stove in the kitchen. It’s where we eat family meals, where the kids do Legos and art projects. It’s honestly a little too tight for a dinner party, but we make it work and it always feels cozy and communal.

Without naming names, where are your favorite places to source materials / furniture / objects / etc. ? Honestly, Maine has some of the best treasures to be found. For upholstery, I often prefer to either have high-traffic pieces custom made or source something secondhand that’s already proven itself over time, whether that’s Howard & Sons, Jamb, Billy Baldwin pieces, or something similar that can be reupholstered and given another life. And if I’m lucky, my favorite thing is often sourcing from the client’s own collection and imagining familiar pieces in new ways.

What’s the #1 thing you see that people do in a home that you would change? Less of a specific thing and more of a mentality: the idea that people always need more space. Bigger rooms, oversized kitchens, rooms designated for every specific activity, spaces just for kids. Bigger isn’t always better!

I actually love constraints. I revel in taking a smaller room and figuring out clever storage solutions or interesting millwork moments. Boundaries can produce really thoughtful, creative conditions.

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