Lessons from Local Leaders:

Amie Corbett

From the Pediatric ICU to Your Living Room: How Amie Corbett Built Corbett Style and Design on the Art of Caring for People — and Making Their Homes Feel Like Home

Wallpaper at Age 10 — and a Mother Who Let Her

There is a version of this story where Amie Corbett became an interior designer at 40, and that’s the version that shows up in the timeline. But the real beginning was three decades earlier, in a bedroom she kept rearranging and a wall she covered in wallpaper at the age of 10 while her mother watched with, as Amie puts it, “remarkable patience.”

“Interior design has been a passion for my whole life,” she says. The hunger for it never went away — it just ran alongside everything else. As she built two homes with her husband, as she developed taste and instinct through the lived experience of shaping spaces, the passion deepened. It was always there. It was just waiting for the right moment to become something more.

What also never went away was the desire to help people. Her father has owned his own business for more than 40 years — the entrepreneurial spirit, she says, is something she clearly inherited. And when she looked at what she loved, the two threads came together: a woman who had spent her career caring for people in critical moments, and a designer who had been quietly perfecting her eye for decades.

At 40, she opened Corbett Style and Design. Three years in, the business has grown exponentially over the past year alone, and she shows no signs of slowing down. But she still keeps her nursing license in her back pocket — and she still takes patient care shifts when she can. Some callings, she says, you don’t leave behind. You carry them with you.

Interior Design Is Caring for People in a Different Way

Amie Corbett worked in pediatric critical care for over 20 years. She knows what it means to show up for someone in a frightening, overwhelming situation — to be the calm in the middle of the chaos, the steady hand when everything else feels unstable.

She also served as a nurse manager, which gave her something equally valuable: the experience of leading a multidisciplinary care team, coordinating across physicians, surgeons, nutritionists, and specialists, each with their own communication styles and working preferences. Making that team function required flexibility, active listening, and the ability to meet people where they were.

When she describes interior design now, the nursing vocabulary slips in naturally — and deliberately.

“Interior design is just caring for people in a different way. Your home should be your oasis. I’ve always had that desire to help and care for people, and this is just a different expression of it. It’s that warm fuzzy — and that was something very important for me to layer into this business.”

The “warm fuzzy” she refers to — the particular quality of care that characterized her approach to pediatric nursing, where connecting with a child and their family was as important as the clinical work — is something she has consciously built into every client interaction at Corbett Style and Design. From the first intro call to the 10-hour installation day, she’s not just executing a design. She’s holding someone’s hand through a process that is, for most people, genuinely stressful.

“While you’re dealing with a fragile human life in nursing, it might not be as life-or-death serious in interior design — but it’s their day-to-day life,” she says. “And that is important.”

You Get Amie — Not an Assistant

Corbett Style and Design is deliberately boutique. Amie has a growing team around her, but the intention is not to scale in the way that most businesses chase scale. The intention is to deepen — to expand the services offered and the quality of care delivered, without sacrificing the personal connection that makes the work meaningful.

When a client first reaches out, Amie is the one who takes the intro call. When the in-home consultation happens — a two-hour session at the client’s home — Amie is the one who shows up. She is not a figurehead who handles the first conversation and hands clients off to a team they’ve never met.

“Our intention is not to grow big. It’s just to grow the services that we offer. Having that personal connection from the get-go — you’re going to get me the majority of the time. It’s not that you’ll have your first intro call with me and then be handed off to an assistant for your in-home consult.”

Those two hours at a client’s home are not primarily about the design. They’re about the person. Amie asks about children, about elderly parents who might be living in the home, about how the family moves through their space — who uses which rooms, how they flow between the kitchen and the main living areas, where the chaos happens and where the quiet is. She asks about lifestyle, about pets (Molly the sofa-climbing kid comes up), about what kind of environment makes them feel at ease.

Only once she understands the people can she design for the space. That sequence is not accidental. It’s the whole philosophy.

The Family of Five Who Decided to Stay

One of Amie’s earliest clients is still with her today — three years in, and going. They built a builder home with limited selections, ended up with something clean and modern that felt like theirs in potential if not yet in execution. When they discovered Amie had started a design business — they knew her outside of work — they asked if she could help.

She started with surface-level work: furnishings, some finishes, high-level touches. The intention at the time was to eventually sell. This wasn’t their forever home. They were making it presentable, not making it theirs.

Over three years, that changed entirely. The main level has been transformed. They’re moving upstairs next. And a few months ago, as they were getting ready to tackle the next phase, they told Amie something she wasn’t expecting.

“They said, ‘You know what? We’re not moving. We’re happy where we’re at. We feel like the home is really becoming ours and really starting to show our personality with all that we’ve done.’ And so they’re going to stay. And that — knowing I helped them do that, especially with five kids — is amazing.”

Five children. A family that had every logistical reason to move and had planned to. And they’re staying — because the home finally feels like theirs. That transformation, from a space you live in to a space that actually reflects who you are, is what Amie is most passionate about delivering.

“I want my clients to truly feel content in their home,” she says. “Not looking around thinking, ‘I need to do this, I need to do that.’ Just content. At ease. Comfortable. And not having to safeguard everything either.” A home that’s beautiful but untouchable isn’t the goal. A home that’s beautiful and liveable — that’s the goal.

Timeless Design That Grows With You

Amie is thoughtful about trends — not dismissive, but measured. She loves a bold, moody room. She’s done them and loved every result. But she’s also deeply committed to protecting her clients’ investment, which means helping them think carefully about what’s timeless versus what will feel dated in five years.

Her approach is layered: establish a foundation of neutral, timeless elements — the bones of a room that will always feel considered — and then bring in the trend through pieces that can be swapped out as tastes evolve. The sofa stays. The throw pillows can change. The paint color is a bigger commitment. The art can travel with you.

“I love doing luxury, high-end design — but I’m not the designer who will come in and say, ‘You need to buy this $15,000 couch that your kids are going to jump on.’ It’s so important to balance quality and cost. Protecting our clients’ investment is a huge part of our business.”

This philosophy extends to how she thinks about designing for families specifically. Understanding how the kids actually use the space — not the theoretical children of a showroom, but the real ones who climb, spill, and treat cushions as trampolines — is how she makes sure a design is both beautiful and durable. She designs for the life that will actually be lived there.

The Pre-Planning Conversation Every Homeowner Needs to Have

The most common mistake Amie sees in home renovation projects is the one that happens before the contractor even shows up: the failure to have a plan.

Everyone is excited at the beginning. Everyone wants to start immediately. And so they do — sometimes without having thought through what they actually want. Then, mid-renovation, with walls open and timelines running, the decisions that should have been made weeks ago suddenly become urgent. The pauses are stressful. The rework is expensive.

“Having a plan is so important. Even if you don’t go with a designer — share pictures with your contractor. Tape the example photos up in the space so there’s no misstep or rework. Do the pre-planning. It’ll save the stress mid-reno.”

She’s the first to acknowledge that the pre-planning phase can feel overwhelming — which is, of course, one of the reasons a designer is valuable. But even for clients who decide to navigate the process on their own, she offers the same advice she’d give anyone: brainstorm extensively, collect visual references, and communicate with your contractor in pictures, not descriptions. A contractor who can see exactly what you’re envisioning makes far fewer costly assumptions than one working from words alone.

What COVID Changed — and What It Didn’t

The home renovation boom that came with COVID has leveled off in some ways. But the underlying shift in how people think about their homes — the desire to actually love the space they live in, not just occupy it — has stuck.

Amie sees it constantly in new clients. Someone moves into a brand-new house. It’s beautiful. It checks every box on the list they had before they moved. And still, something feels off. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like them. They don’t know where to start.

“They’ll say, ‘We love it, but it just doesn’t feel warm and cozy. How do I even begin?'” She hears this regularly. And her answer is always the same: this is exactly where she comes in. Not to impose a vision, but to draw out theirs — to ask the right questions, listen to the answers, and translate what a family knows intuitively about how they want to feel into the physical language of design.

Northern Virginia, she notes, is a particularly intense environment for this. The pace here is fast. Everyone is working hard. The commutes are real, the schedules are full, and the moments when you actually sit down and breathe are precious.

“Even if it’s 9 PM when you finally sit down,” she says, “you need that reset. We all need that peace at the end of the day.”

The Imposter Syndrome and the Contractors Who Said It’s Just Different

Amie is refreshingly honest about the entrepreneurial journey — including the parts that are hard.

She entered this business with absolute confidence in her design skills and genuine uncertainty about everything else. The business side — the five-year grind, the networking events where everyone seems to have been doing this for a decade, the administrative learning curve — brought its share of imposter syndrome. She says it plainly: “Am I a businesswoman? I don’t know.”

What has shifted that narrative, gradually and meaningfully, is evidence. The business that has grown exponentially over the past year. The client relationships that span projects and years. And perhaps most tellingly: the contractors.

“I have collaborations with contractors who say, ‘I don’t like working with designers. But I like working with you.’ They say, ‘You’re available to us. You’re happy to meet with us. It’s just different.’ That has started to quiet the imposter syndrome a little.”

Her nursing background has given her something most designers don’t bring to contractor relationships: a genuine comfort with collaboration and the ability to adapt to how other people work best. She doesn’t insist on one way of doing things. She asks how a contractor prefers to communicate, what makes a project run smoothly for them, and then she accommodates. The feedback she gets in return is consistent: she’s easy to work with. She shows up. She cares.

“Everyone has opportunities for improvement,” she says, with the matter-of-fact humility of someone who spent two decades learning it in nursing. “I’m always asking for feedback. Always open to it. We will always be learning and growing.”

The Moment That Makes It Worth It

The 10-hour installation day is Amie’s favorite day of every project. She describes it with the enthusiasm of someone who means it completely: it is a very long, very full, sometimes exhausting day of hanging curtains and arranging furniture and placing the last objects that turn a room from a plan into a reality. And at the end of it, she tells her clients the same thing every time: “I can’t wait for you to come home tonight and see this.”

The texts that follow are what she carries with her.

“Clients have texted me, ‘Oh, Amie, this is breathtaking.’ Or, ‘Amie, I finally love my house.’ Just that happiness and contentment — giving them the ability to sit in their space and look around and think, ‘Wow, this is mine.’ Not like a showroom where nobody can touch anything. But: ‘This is our home. We love it. We’re at ease.'”

She wants her clients to feel content. Not wowed in a way that makes them feel they can’t live in their own space, but settled and at ease in the most genuine sense. A home that reflects who they are, that functions the way they actually live, that they’ll want to come back to at the end of a long day — not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s theirs.

From a 10-year-old hanging wallpaper with her mother’s patient permission, to more than 20 years of caring for the most fragile patients in the hospital, to three years of building something that carries both of those threads into every single project — Amie Corbett has built Corbett Style and Design on the conviction that loving your home is not optional. It’s essential. And she will help you get there.

Connect with Corbett Style and Design

Corbett Style and Design serves Northern Virginia clients for everything from luxury design to family-functional renovation and refresh projects.

🌐 Website: www.corbett-style-design.com

📸 Instagram & Facebook: Corbett Style and Design

📱 Reach out by message, text, phone call, or email — she communicates whichever way works best for you.

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