Today we’d like to introduce you to Brehanna Joy Ryssemus.
Hi Brehanna Joy, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I think my work began long before I knew to call it interior design. When I was eight years old, an incredible artist and elder in my church named Cathy began picking me up every week and taking me to her studio for Impressionist oil-painting classes. Looking back, there is something incredibly sacred to me about an elder recognizing creativity in a child and making space for it to grow. She taught me technique and color theory, but she also introduced me to the experience of creating—to observing light, color and movement, and slowing down enough to feel what I was seeing before translating it onto a canvas.
A year later, when I was nine, I began shadowing my late Aunt Kym while she worked as an interior design consultant. I would follow her into clients’ homes and accompany her while she shopped for their spaces. I watched her obsessively. I was watching someone notice the intimate details of another person’s life and translate them into an environment. I didn’t have language for it then, but I was learning that a home could be both deeply personal and deeply creative.
And home had already become something significant to me for another reason. I moved a lot growing up. Every move carried the grief of leaving friends, familiarity and an entire little life behind. But every move also came with a new bedroom. And a new bedroom meant possibility.
I could imagine again. I could choose paint colors, rearrange furniture and create a new little world around myself. Without realizing it, I was learning one of the philosophies that would eventually become central to my work: our environments can help us participate in our own transformation.
I think that is why interior design has always felt deeply spiritual to me. Home became one of the first places where I experienced my own creative agency. Even when circumstances around me were changing in ways I couldn’t control, I could participate in shaping the environment that would hold me through that change.
My path from there wasn’t particularly linear. I studied theology and leadership and spent years working in hospitality, leadership and community-centered spaces. Eventually, I began deconstructing Western religion as I had known it, and as my understanding of spirituality expanded, so did my understanding of myself—particularly as I walked through profound grief and major changes in my own life.
Through those experiences, I became increasingly interested in the idea that we are not simply passive recipients of our circumstances. I believe we are divine beings with the capacity to participate in creation. That perspective fundamentally changed the questions I asked about my own life. Instead of only asking, “What is happening to me?” I began asking, “What am I being invited to create from here?”
Eventually, I realized I had been practicing some version of that question since I was a child standing in another new bedroom.
I started Brehanna Joy Designs by following that instinct to create—painting, renovating, building, refurbishing, designing, making art and helping people transform their homes. I didn’t begin with a perfectly mapped-out business plan. I allowed the work itself, and the people inviting me into their homes, to reveal what it wanted to become.
For more than four years, my business has grown almost entirely through referrals, which is something I’m incredibly proud of. There is something meaningful to me about that kind of growth. Someone trusted me with the intimacy of their home and family, experienced what we created together, and then trusted me enough to invite someone they loved into that experience too. My business has essentially traveled from home to home, relationship to relationship.
As my work evolved, Feng Shui gave language and structure to something I had intuitively experienced throughout my life: our internal and external environments are in constant relationship with one another. I became fascinated by the elements—by recognizing Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood not only in physical environments, but within ourselves. We experience their qualities through color, architecture, material, light and nature, but also through our own seasons of expansion and rest, grounding and movement, creativity and reflection.
Today, I practice Form School Feng Shui as an empowering tool rather than a rigid set of rules. I want clients to recognize themselves as active participants in their environments and, ultimately, in the lives they are creating. So when I enter a client’s home, I’m not only asking what would make a room beautiful. I’m asking: What kind of life does this family want to experience here? How do they want to feel when they wake up? How do they want to gather around a table? How do they want to rest, create, celebrate, heal and grow? What are they dreaming about becoming? And how can their environment participate in supporting that reality?
At the center of all of it is a belief that has become increasingly important to me: love begins in the home. I care deeply about the family and the home as one of our most intimate places of influence. The ways we learn to care for ourselves and one another behind closed doors inevitably travel beyond them. When our homes make space for connection, restoration, creativity, beauty, play and belonging, I believe we become better equipped to carry those qualities into our families, communities and the world around us.
That is also why my relationship with materials has become spiritual.
I don’t experience wood, pigment, metal, textiles, light or an old piece of furniture as lifeless objects upon which I impose my ideas. Creation feels much more collaborative than that. Materials already contain histories, characteristics and possibilities. A home already has a story. The people inhabiting it bring another. I see my role as listening closely enough to all of them that I can participate in ushering transformation through the arts.
The deeper I’ve gone into this work, the less separation I see between interior design, Feng Shui, art, spirituality and life itself. I want people to begin noticing these relationships too—to see the elements in the landscape outside their windows and recognize those same qualities within themselves; to understand their homes not as static backdrops to their lives, but as environments they are continually in relationship with; and, perhaps most importantly, to remember their own capacity to create.
My experiences with grief have made that especially meaningful to me. We don’t always get to choose what enters our lives. I learned that as a little girl repeatedly saying goodbye, and I’ve learned it in much deeper ways as an adult. There are deaths we experience throughout a lifetime—the death of people we love, certainly, but also relationships, identities, expectations, homes, beliefs and versions of ourselves we thought we would always be. Again and again, creation has taught me that an ending does not have to mean the end of our participation. We can work with what is here. We can listen. We can grieve. We can imagine. We can rearrange. We can make beauty. We can begin again.
In some ways, I think that is what my work has always been about: life after death. Not denying what has been lost, but discovering what can still be created from what remains. Sometimes creating the world around us helps us remember that we still have the power to create the world within us—and from there, imagine what else might be possible. That belief has shaped the business I’ve built and the way I try to live: wholeheartedly. I see ourselves as creators, our homes as collaborators, materials as participants, art as a vehicle for transformation, and the spaces where we learn to love one another as meaningful places from which a different world can begin.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
There wasn’t a clean moment where I healed first and then confidently launched a business from the other side. The creating and the healing happened while discovering how to build something that didn’t have an obvious blueprint.
My approach to interior design is different. I’m not particularly interested in entering a home, replacing everything, imposing an aesthetic and leaving behind a beautiful room that could belong to anyone. I want to understand the people who live there. I want to know what they’re moving toward, what matters to their family, how they want their lives to feel, what already deserves to remain, and how the energetic and physical environment of the home can support the life they’re creating.
Building a business around something that lives at the intersection of interior design, art, Feng Shui, spirituality and human experience has meant learning how to communicate the value of something people may not have experienced before. The challenge has been finding language big enough to explain it without reducing it to something more familiar.
There have also been very practical challenges. Finding contractors I deeply trust has probably been one of the biggest. When you are asking clients to trust you with their homes, families, money and daily lives, the people you bring through their front door matter tremendously. I care about the quality of someone’s work, of course, but I also care about how they communicate, how they treat a client’s home, how they problem-solve and whether they understand the level of care I want surrounding the entire experience. Building that community of trusted collaborators takes time.
I’ve also chosen a life that allows me to follow the work rather than requiring the work to stay in one place. My travel trailer allows me to take my home with me wherever opportunities to create, collaborate and live out my passions lead me.
Living this way has required me to become incredibly adaptable. New cities mean new suppliers, new contractors, new relationships, new logistics and new problems to solve. I’ve had to become comfortable entering unfamiliar places and trusting that I can build community there. It can be uncertain, but it has also allowed my business to grow through relationships and opportunities rather than geography.
And in a strange way, it feels like another evolution of the little girl I described earlier—the one who moved frequently and learned that home could be something she participated in creating wherever she landed. Except now, I literally bring mine with me. At the same time, all of that movement has clarified something else in me: I want roots, too.
I’ve chosen Nashville as a home base because there has always been something synchronistic about the way Nashville receives me. Every time I work here, something seems to meet me—the people I encounter who inspire me, the right introduction at the right moment, another opportunity to create, another relationship that somehow connects to the next thing. I’ve learned to pay attention when life repeats itself, and Nashville has shown me time and time again that there is something here I’m meant to keep saying yes to.
It also holds another part of my creative life. I write and make music with my brother as “sister brother,” and we recently released our first single, Brainrot Summer. Making music together has been another reminder that I don’t experience creativity in neatly separated categories. I paint. I design homes. I build things. I write. I make music. To me, they’re all expressions of the same impulse: taking something that begins internally and giving it physical form so it can be experienced and shared with someone else.
So Nashville feels like both expansion and grounding. After years of learning how to make home wherever I am, there is something beautiful about recognizing that I also desire a place where relationships can deepen over time—where I can know the craftspeople, artists, musicians, clients and community around me, and allow them to know me too.
The challenges of entrepreneurship have also forced me to become strikingly clear about where I shine—and to learn that honoring those strengths magnifies when other people shine beside me.
There have been financial uncertainties, projects that stretched me, things I’ve had to learn in real time, ideas that didn’t work, and plenty of moments where being a solopreneur meant realizing that the artist, designer, builder, marketer, administrator and person responsible for figuring out what went wrong were all, unfortunately, the same woman.
For a while, I think I confused being capable of doing many things with needing to be the person who did all of them. Building the business has taught me otherwise.
Part of rebuilding myself has been learning to recognize what is mine to carry, what makes me come alive, and where my particular creativity is most useful—and then trusting other people with the things they do beautifully. I’m proud that I’m now building an administrative team alongside a growing network of artists, craftspeople and contractors. The vision was never really to do everything myself. The vision is to create something meaningful with other people.
In that way, entrepreneurship has become another place where I practice the philosophy I bring into my clients’ homes: work with what is here, remain curious about what is possible, and keep creating.
I think we sometimes imagine manifestation as having a clear vision and watching life obediently arrange itself around it. My experience has been much more collaborative than that. I have desires and intentions, absolutely, but life keeps introducing materials I didn’t select—grief, uncertainty, unexpected opportunities, limitations, beautiful relationships, closed doors, strange synchronicities—and then asking, What can you create with this? That is where my work with physical materials and my approach to life become almost indistinguishable.
Creation isn’t always getting a blank canvas. Sometimes it is learning to collaborate wholeheartedly with what is already here. So no, it hasn’t been smooth. But I think the unevenness has taught me something essential about the kind of designer—and person—I want to be.
I don’t need everything to be perfectly arranged before I begin creating. I can meet what is here, listen closely, trust myself, gather the right people, and participate in what it becomes. And perhaps that has been one of the greatest gifts of building a business while rebuilding myself: realizing I was never meant to create any of it alone.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about brehanna joy designs?
Brehanna Joy Designs is a holistic interior design and creative studio rooted in a simple belief: **love begins in the home.**
I specialize in creating deeply personal, energy-aware spaces through interior design, Form School Feng Shui, original art, custom design and the transformation of existing pieces. Rather than designing toward a particular aesthetic, I begin with the people who live there—how they want to feel, how they want to live, what they value, what they’re becoming, and how their environment can support that life.
What sets my work apart is the intersection of art, spirituality and design. I approach a home as a living environment rather than a collection of objects. Feng Shui helps me explore the relationship between our internal and external worlds, while my background as an artist and maker allows me to respond creatively to what already exists. Sometimes that means sourcing something new; other times it means painting, building, refurbishing, rearranging or creating something entirely original. I believe thoughtful design is less about consumption and more about paying attention.
I’m most proud that Brehanna Joy Designs has grown almost entirely through referrals. My clients trust me with incredibly intimate spaces—the places where their families gather, where they rest, create, grieve, celebrate and become—and then invite people they love to work with me too. To me, there is no greater affirmation of the brand I’m building.
Ultimately, I want people to know that my work extends beyond creating beautiful homes. **I want to help people experience themselves as creators of their environments and their lives.** Our homes can be active participants in our wellbeing, relationships and dreams. When we intentionally create spaces that nourish the people within them, I believe that love has a way of traveling outward—from ourselves, to our families, to our communities and into the world.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that very little has to be wasted.
Not the grief. Not the detours. Not the piece of furniture someone thought had reached the end of its usefulness. Not the architecture I wouldn’t have chosen. Not even the versions of myself I’ve outgrown.
The question becomes: What relationship am I willing to have with what is here, and what might we create together?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://brehannajoydesigns.com
- Instagram: brehannajoydesigns
- Facebook: Brehanna Joy Designs
- Youtube: Brehanna Joy Deigns
- Other: Sister Brother on Spotify
