Welcome to Our Home

Your full-service interior design studio serving Central Alberta, Okanagan, and Vancouver Island.

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Welcome to our home. That's not just a turn of phrase. It's genuinely how we think about this studio, and about the homes we get invited into with every client we work with.

This is the first post on the Wren & Company journal, so before we get into philosophy, services, or process, we wanted to do something simpler. We wanted to introduce ourselves properly, tell you what we believe, and give you a real sense of who you'd actually be working with if you called us.

Who We Are

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Wren & Company is a full-service interior design studio founded by Emera Howden-Gareau and Katie Osmond. Emera leads design and creative direction. Katie leads operations and the day to day experience of working with our studio. We're based in Central Alberta, offering residential interior design services to homeowners from Calgary to Red Deer and the surrounding communities, as well as in the Okanagan and on Vancouver Island.

We built this studio around one idea we keep coming back to: a home should be designed for the people living in it, not for an audience.

Our Philosophy: Form, Function, Feeling

Everything we design gets measured against three things.

Form is how a space looks: the proportions, the materials, the way light moves through a room.

Function is how a space works: whether the layout supports how you actually move through your day, whether there's enough storage, whether the mudroom can handle muddy boots and backpacks at 8 a.m.

Feeling is the part most design conversations skip. It's whether a space feels calm or chaotic, whether it feels like you, whether it makes your everyday life a little easier instead of a little harder.

A room can succeed at form and still fail at function. It can succeed at both and still fail at feeling. All three have to hold up together, or the design isn't finished, no matter how good it looks in a photograph.

What is Full-Service Interior Design

Our work covers residential renovations, new builds, furnishings, and select commercial projects: kitchen and bathroom design, space planning, custom cabinetry and millwork, décor and furnishings sourcing, window coverings, 3D renderings, and technical drawings for construction and permits. As a full-service interior design studio, we also work with Airbnb and rental properties, and offer interior refreshes for homes that need new life without a full renovation.

Underneath all of it is the part that doesn't photograph well but matters just as much: budgeting, sourcing, technical planning, and coordination with contractors and trades. Flooring, cabinetry, plumbing, lighting, paint, hardware, and furnishings all have to be chosen, and none of those decisions happen in isolation. Choose a tile without knowing the final cabinetry finish, or a light fixture before the ceiling height is confirmed, and you end up with an expensive problem once construction is underway. Part of our job is making those decisions together, in the right order, so your finished home feels considered rather than like a collection of choices made under pressure.

What Makes Us Different

Honest guidance. Our job isn't to agree with every idea. It's to give you our professional read on what will and won't hold up, explain the trade-offs, and help you spend your budget where it will actually matter. If something is going to cause problems later, we'll tell you before it's installed, not after.

Design grounded in real life. A home has to survive kids, pets, busy mornings, dinner parties, and the everyday mess of actually living somewhere. We design with that in mind from the start, not as an afterthought once the "pretty" decisions are made.

A collaborative approach. A successful renovation involves a lot of people: contractors, trades, cabinetmakers, suppliers, sometimes architects or engineers. We work alongside all of them, rather than designing in isolation and handing you a plan to figure out on your own.

Clarity throughout an overwhelming process. A full renovation can involve hundreds of interconnected decisions. Part of our role is organizing those decisions into a sequence that makes sense, anticipating what comes next, and making sure you always know what's being decided and why.

Thoughtful sourcing. When we choose materials and furnishings, we're weighing aesthetics against quality, durability, availability, budget, and how much upkeep something actually requires, not just whether it photographs well.

Relationships over transactions. We want you to feel heard, respected, and genuinely supported through a process that can otherwise feel overwhelming. That's a big part of why people choose to work with a design studio at all.

The Wren Perspective

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A successful home isn't the one that looks the most impressive online. It's the one that works beautifully for the people who actually live there.

We say this often because it's easy to forget in an industry built on photographs. A kitchen can photograph perfectly and still frustrate the family cooking in it every night. A living room can look styled and still feel like nobody's allowed to sit down. None of that shows up in a photo, but it shows up in daily life, which is where a home actually gets used.

That's why understanding a client always comes before finishes, furniture, or trends. We want to know how you move through your space, what wears you down about your current home, and what you need it to do for you, not just look like, before we ever open a materials binder. The aesthetic comes second. It has to. A beautiful room built on the wrong foundation, wrong layout, wrong storage, wrong flow, will always feel like it's fighting the people inside it.

Good design should feel like relief. Not a performance for anyone walking through the door, but a home that actually makes your life easier. That's what welcome to our home really means to us, and it's the standard we hold every project to.