For Jennie Rebecca Springer, interior design is part of a formidable, forever healing process.
A Nashville native and University of Alabama grad, Springer put her Textiles/Fashion Merchandising minor to work post-college, traveling across states as a sales rep for longstanding luxury textile brand Schumacher. Then she and her husband, Greater Nashville Realtors CEO Jarron Springer, started a family, and she shifted her focus, staying home to raise their four boys.
Everything changed in 2016, eight days before their son Hayes’ eighth birthday. On Old Hickory Boulevard, the family’s minivan was struck from behind. Hayes was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He didn’t survive.
“I am very open about it, and I’m very open about losing our son,” Springer says, now about seven years into running her own interior design firm, Jennie Rebecca Design. “It is my story, and it’s really where the passion came from.”
Serving Others
A counselor helped Springer process a way forward and consider whether going back to work — doing something that tapped into her interests, her abilities, her desire to give and connect — might be a balm.
She had education and experience in textiles and a knack for interior design, having shaped several family homes and lent ideas and expertise to many friends. Two of those friends helped Springer take the first tangible steps toward turning proclivities into a profession.
“One had also lost a child, and that encouraged me to follow my passion, in knowing that serving others can be really helpful to bring yourself out of a depression and a fog,” Springer remembers.
She picked a firm name, formed an LLC, and kicked off her first jobs as Jennie Rebecca Design, remaking a music room for one friend and a bedroom for the other.
“I remember I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna charge $50 an hour,'” Springer says of those early days. “And I thought it was highway robbery how much I was charging, because truly, I kept telling my husband, ‘I just wanna do this for free because I love it so much.'”
The love, ultimately, grew out of the tangible process of creating comfort — giving people a space that made them feel at ease, loved, at home.
“That truly was the catalyst,” Springer says. “And I have found so much joy in it.”
Comfort and Joy
These days, you won’t book a Jennie Rebecca Design reboot at that bargain-basement rate. But you will get that full focus on what makes you feel comfort and joy.
One of Springer’s more recent projects, on Dale Avenue in Green Hills, was for another busy Nashville family, this one in search of a space to come together and be together.
Dad, a surgeon, works long hours, so having a built-in place to connect and congregate with the kids was key. They considered moving but decided against it. So Springer came in.
An existing upstairs playroom was the clear candidate, but the starting point didn’t offer much.
“It was pretty tragic,” Springer says, laughing. “It was a builder’s leftover and they completed the room with whatever he had in stock.”
Most of the family’s specific asks were functional: space to play (pool, chess, darts); room to run, gymnastically speaking; a lair to listen in; a place to watch the game(s) together.
Stylistically, the direction was simple: a modern, finished-feeling space with cool lighting.
“They really let me take the creative reins, which is so nice,” Springer says. “Because then I’m really able to flex in what I can come up with.”
Fully Flexed
Springer flexed into every corner of the now-revamped family space.
A custom pool table that looks more like an art piece than recreational equipment anchors the room, with modern angles and bold tones. Above it: atomic-esque Swinger Pendants from Revelation. Cool lighting: check.
Curved seating in moody blue and a stylish black, grey, and gold game table flank the billiards field, giving the family room to chill and call checkmate. Where a wet bar once stood, Springer worked in a pro audio nook with warm wood cabinetry, its door design calling to the custom slat wall made by locals Walker & Wood, with integrated LEDs. (Cool lighting: check and check.)
Springer even managed to work in a wide span of TVs without tipping the style sensibility from “high-design hangout” to “sports bar.”
“That’s what makes a project interesting, is to have different caveats or different requests that you’re trying to meet,” Springer says. “And I think that that’s what, you know, keeps my brain churning.”
Back to ‘Why’
Springer wants spaces to feel personal. And art, inherently, is a clear place to bring personal touches and tastes in.
For this project, she called on Danielle M. Goggin, a Nashville artist the homeowners had come across at the Harding Art Show. Goggin’s Memorfiti series is pointedly personal, by design — every client submits a list of meaningful words, which she then shapes into abstract, graffiti-style art pieces.
As you walk up the stairs to the reimagined Dale Avenue family room, moments and meaning pop out of the canvas — names, places, ideas, activities. Each offers a peek into what makes this family tick, from “neurosurgeon” to “baseball.”
The art suits the style, says something, and pulls the family and the family room together, dynamically and distinctly. Springer and the clients are already talking about commissioning another piece for a second project together, at the family’s lake house.
“To this day the homeowners will say, ‘I can’t believe that that’s our space,'” Springer says. “And really, it’s an amazing space. But I just love how happy they are. It goes back to my whole thing of, yeah — why I’m doing this.”
EXPLORE MORE
Jennie Rebecca Design
jennierebeccadesign.com
@jennierebeccadesign
