After more than 20 years in the business, Newton-based interior designer Vani Sayeed is still aiming high.
Vani Sayeed
For Vani Sayeed, principal of Newton-based Vani Sayeed Studios (vanisayeedstudios.com), guiding clients toward design excellence is all about dreaming big. “I always push them a little outside their comfort zone and show them ideas that are not what they expected,” says Sayeed.
An Arlington dining room
It’s a fitting approach for a businesswoman who’s applied the same creative risk-taking to her own life and career. Sayeed, who immigrated to the U.S. from India, launched her California-based practice in the early aughts. After a few successful years, she undertook her next adventure: relocating her burgeoning design studio to Greater Boston, where her husband (an academic and physician) landed a new job. For Sayeed, who at the time had zero east-coast contacts, the move was daunting. “It was tough,” she recalls, but she wasn’t ready to call it quits. “I just went to the Design Center and opened accounts, and I would go to events, shake hands with people, and introduce myself.”
It paid off. What started with a small new-build project on Martha’s Vineyard has since blossomed into a bustling, multi-employee operation that earned Sayeed the Interior Designer of the Year Award from IFDA New England in 2023. Clients turn to Sayeed for her globally inspired, layered aesthetic, not to mention her keen understanding of light and color honed through years of painting and sketching.
These days, Sayeed balances her interiors work with product design, which she leapt into a few years back courtesy of a collaboration with rug makers at Boston-based Landry & Arcari. It’s just yet another outlet—and opportunity—for the designer and artist, who describes herself as a “lifelong learner,” to try her hand at something new. “I’d love to create hardware, [more] textiles, trim, wallpaper—all kinds of stuff. There’s so much great product out there, but I feel like there’s always room for something fresh,” Sayeed says. “The world is my oyster; why stop at one thing?”
Photography by: ROGER FARRINGTON; JARED KUZIA
