We recently connected with Melissa Corpuz and have shared our conversation below.

Melissa, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

I think this may sound trite, but the timing of our business was almost serendipitous. We started the business at a point in time when our children had grown to become slightly less dependent on us and our jobs were a little more steady. We had finished our second renovation and we were almost itching for a creative project. I have one of those minds that needs to multitask and Joe loves a good challenge. So we decided to give it a shot. I think the timing worked for us and certainly our life experience at that point left us wiser and more flexible to take on such a task.

Melissa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For those who don’t know me, I am Melissa Corpuz and my husband is Joe Corpuz. We are Artful Home Interiors. We are a Dallas Interior Design and Home Staging Firm. We have a small team comprised of our designer Kathee and our assistant Kendall and we just do it all. Joe makes the 3D models by hand and visits properties while Kathee and I pull samples and build palettes. We work with everyone under the sun and we celebrate talent everywhere we see it. The metroplex never ceases to amaze me with its amazing architecture, history, art (I was an art major and I am a classically trained artist, fun fact), and it’s fashionable people. I met Raymond Nasher as a young artist at his home in Turtle Creek and that was pretty special. I am a huge fan of Kelly Wearstler, and Jason Saft. We don’t do trends, but we will design around our client’s wants and needs. I am humble enough to know whose home I am working in. I think the thing that makes us special is our servant mindset. We are here to deliver an ideal. True perfection is not possible, but the pursuit of it is honorable.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We had a few tough years where we were really struggling through major life events. It felt like Murphy’s Law was written in response to us. Every single day we seemed to think it couldn’t get worse, and then it would. We could have curled under the covers and given up and we really really wanted to. We knew if we did that, we would have to give up everything we had built up. It is that resolve that kept us going and I have to say that is very encouraging. Being able to share your gift with others may seem like a small thing at times, but the impact is huge and the ripples run wide. That is the kind of gift you don’t take for granted. I appreciate that I am not the only person that gets to share a gift like that, but to have someone chose me to design or stage for them is still super special and rewarding every single time.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Really really hard work. We started by staging… wait. Rewind (plays tape rewinding in head) we started by renovating our own home on a shoe string budget and we were very poor. I was a teacher, an art teacher. I studied art for 10 years and I had to pay for my hiatus. I was an expert in painting, drawing, printmaking, pottery, sculpture, color theory, art history, but was earning barely anything. I met this miracle loan agent who found me a grant and helped me become a home owner. My boyfriend at the time was devilishly handsome and had already renovated a home. So we enlisted my dad, my brother, some other friends, and some sledgehammers. After a blissful wedding and a few years we slow flipped that house so we could pay off all my expertise, i.e. student debt. Then, we did it again. Afterward, we started staging. We did all the labor ourselves. I grew up poor, however, my grandparents were very posh, Dallas-ites. My Grandfather owned a foundation repair company and my Grandmother was a celebrated abstract painter. The dichotomy between poor and wealthy had left an imprint on me and I became well versed in both realms. Joe’s parents immigrated to the United States after they got married, and his Dad worked his way up the ranks in the US Navy and built business acumen along the way. Eventually Joe’s Mom and Dad started a small business together and his Mom even does floral design to this day. Entrepreneurship taught us both how respect the power of a dollar. I think our clients, both staging and design, appreciate the versatility we have gained through generations of understanding hard work. We recently had the opportunity to reflect on what our brand mean to us and we found ourselves organically referencing this phrase, which we have adopted as our motto, “Every Style, for Every Home”. We hope that conveys our vision to our current and future clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artfulhomeinteriors.com
• Instagram: @artfulhomeinteriors
• Facebook: @artfulhomeinteriors

Image Credits

J Turnbow Photography
Curb Appeal Pics
Eleno Photography