AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 13.

Interior Design
— and by the unique silhouettes offered by Candice’s
many creations.
In the living room, brown leather and wood
tones are warm against the white walls in a space
dominated by the gray brick of the fireplace.
The texture of the brick is reflected in the woven
surface of the pillows and varied in the woven
rope wall-hanging — another of Candice’s works.
Meanwhile, the rough exterior of the coffee table
mirrors that of the stoneware vessels that line her
shelves. Towards the back of the room, more of
Candice’s work completes the scene. An artistic
shelf-and-mirror installation, from a collection she
named Totem, sits alongside an earth-toned abstract
painting, the kind she might have watched her
mother paint when she was a child.
As athletic as she was artistic, Candice won a
scholarship to play volleyball for a local junior college.
It was the end of her high school career, however, that
brought her first brush with design. “I did a one-day
job shadow at an interior design firm,” she laughs. “It
wasn’t the best. I remember thinking, ‘That's terrible.
I don't want to do interior design.’” With thoughts
of a design career set firmly aside, Candice went off
to junior college. But the next two years didn’t go
as planned. “I met a boy,” she recounts. “And I had
gotten pregnant. So I lost my scholarship, transferred
back home, and finished at a private college with
a degree in sports health and strength conditioning.”
As in so many journeys, however, it was just this
shift in direction that would eventually take Candice
to where she needed to be — starting with her first
stab at running a business. “I started an organization
on campus and recruited people in my field to do
personal training and teach. We also went to a local
school in a very poor neighborhood to work with the
kids on fitness. I thought I was going to change the
world through health and fitness.”
Exposure to the larger industry through a job at
a local gym, and being induced to sell supplements
to clients soon disabused her of that notion. Ironically,
that job was followed by a position in sales for
one of the biggest manufacturing firms in the area.
“To everybody here, it's like, the end-all-be-all,”
she explains. “If you can get in there, you're great.”
And while she enjoyed the new position, she quickly
found the downsides there as well.
“It was corporate America,” she shrugs. “The
policies, traveling to trade shows, the high heels, the
gross men, and all the stuff you have to put up with
just being a woman in that environment.” In the
absence of other female managers or people of color
on whom she could rely, it wasn’t hard for Candice
to do the math on the kind of future that lay ahead. “I
quickly realized I was either going to be one of those
employees doing the same job for 40 years, or I was
going to have to kiss somebody's butt to climb up the
ladder. I'm not built like that, so there was nothing for
me there.” Moreover, as problematic as corporate
America was, Candice realized that her biggest issue
was internal. “I was working just to work, because
I had a child to support,” she confesses. “Being
creative wasn't something I did anymore. And I was
miserable, not being who I was meant to be.”
When Candice bought her house five years ago,
she found that the previous tenant had laid some very
deep roots, leaving her with a lot to do to make the
space her own. “The lady had lived here since about
1950,” she explains, “So there were lots of things that
needed updating.” But, seeing potential, Candice was
eager to meet the challenge, updating the cabinets,
shelving and fireplace, mostly with her own hands.
“Having started my creative journey as a DIY-er, it’s
in my blood to just jump in and figure it out.”
By far the biggest hurdle, she recalls, was the
kitchen, though one would never guess, judging from
its current clean and open look. “We went from bulky
wooden cabinets, wallpaper, and outdated appliances
to open shelving, new cabinets, and countertops,”
the designer lists. “We even removed an entire wall to
create a much better flow.” One of the advantages of a
childhood spent exploring her creativity on her own,
is that it’s given Candice a high degree of comfort
with facing problems on her own, and teaching
herself the skills she needs to overcome them. That
combination of traits not only reshaped her home,
but her life as well.
“I had come across this flyer for a farmer’s
market downtown,” she says, recounting the last
days of her career in sales. “And I sort of popped my
head over my cubicle wall to my coworker and said,
‘Hey, I'm gonna do this next month.’” And when her
friend reasonably pointed out that she didn’t make
anything, Candice responded as she always has: “I
was l like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”
Inspired by Pinterest mood boards and armed
only with her upcycling skills, a hastily chosen
business name and whatever she could find, Candice
52 aphrochic