LIVING
SYSTEMS
DESIGN
Starting Sunday is a residential interior design firm working at the full property scale. Planning starts with how a home is actually lived in and extends outward into working landscapes. I believe houses are connected systems. Interior rooms aren’t isolated environments, but the center from which daily rhythms, functionality, and land use take shape.
Starting Sunday approaches residential design through patterns that repeat across scale—from the intimacy of a room to the structure of a landscape. The way a home unfolds, the way a garden is organized, and the way historic places grow over time often follow similar principles of proportion, rhythm, and expansion. These patterns appear in nature, in the layouts of the most vibrant cities, and in the spirit of places that continue to feel coherent and alive.
With careful attention to natural materials, structure, and daily use, Starting Sunday brings these ideas into residential design. Interiors, gardens, and working landscapes are considered together so that homes feel grounded in their surroundings and capable of evolving—places where beauty, function, and stewardship coexist naturally.
Project 01
As the first major renovation of a historic church-to-home conversion in coastal Maine, the primary bath resets the material story of the house. The project became an early exercise in clarifying the tone and posture of the home through a selection of finishes—natural stone, limewash, handcrafted zellige, cast concrete, and bold chrome fixtures chosen for their depth, weight, and architectural presence. Applied with intention, these materials establish a language that feels both historic and distinctly contemporary, defining how the house moves forward.
Project 02
The primary bedroom becomes an exercise in textural layering—playing with color, material, and proportion to create a space that feels richly composed yet calm. Light maple floors and color-drenched walls establish a quiet backdrop, while exposed church beams introduce a sense of structure and history. Furnishings bring in deeper tones and varied textures—burl, velvet, wool, leather—balanced by chrome lighting, sculptural and lightly brutalist forms. Together, these elements build a room that feels collected and grounded, where contrast and material dialogue shape the space.
Project 03
Sunday Farm is an experiment in working landscape design, where the logic of the house extends outward into gardens, high-yielding market beds, poultry and small ruminant infrastructure, and long-term soil building and land stewardship. The property is being developed gradually through principles drawn from permaculture, organizing the landscape in zones that radiate from the house and respond to daily life. Orchards, three-season vegetable production, and rotating animal systems are introduced alongside spaces for gathering, allowing the land to function as both a productive environment and an extension of the home. Like the house itself, the landscape is evolving over time—designed not as a finished composition, but as a living system that deepens with use and care.
ABOUT ME
Starting Sunday grew out of my own work and life. I’m Miriam—a freelance writer and project manager, and a mother of soon-to-be three—currently restoring an 180-year-old church in coastal Maine and gradually transforming it into a design-forward family home. The project functions both as our home and as a working case study in living systems design, exploring how architecture, interior design, and landscape planning can evolve together over time.
The practice reflects an effort to translate a long-held sense of taste and spatial intuition into something more durable: into process, into repeatable ways of working, and eventually into commissions and a sustainable design career. The work is still early, and this site reflects that. What’s here is not a finished portfolio, but the beginning of one.
The name Starting Sunday points to the pace I’m aiming for—optimistic but quiet, restrained, disciplined, and deliberately slow. For me it represents beginning before urgency takes over, with a clear head and a long view.
