Brigette Romanek and Elaine Welteroth

The Many Lives of Brigette Romanek and Elaine Welteroth

By Bonnie Langedijk

Success is one thing, redefining an industry is another. Interior designer Brigette Romanek and journalist, author and entrepreneur Elaine Welteroth understand that deeply. Their ability to look beyond the constraints of the established order and craft a path of their own has made these two multi-hyphenates simply unstoppable. Since founding her studio in 2018, Romanek has become one of the leading voices in the design industry. After a career in music – following in her mother Paulette McWilliams footsteps –  and a successful line of handbags, Romanek found her true calling in creating beautiful spaces. Her signature style of crafting interiors that are both elegant yet exuberant, luxurious yet liveable, have led to a star-studded client list including Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow and Demi Moore and a steady spot in Architectural Digest’s AD 100 and 1st Dibs’ 50 List. Elaine Welteroth’s list of career accomplishments isn't any shorter. The former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief, New York bestselling author and co-founder of The 15 Percent Pledge defined the voice of a generation. Welteroth’s tenure at Teen Vogue expanded the magazine's focus to activism and politics, and with it, revitalizing its tone of voice and relevance in culture. After stepping down in 2018, Welteroth signed with CAA, published her memoir ‘More Than Enough: Claiming space for who you are (no matter what they say)’ and launched vodcast ‘Built to Last’ spotlighting insights and lessons from influential Black founders, past and present. She also writes a column for The Washington Post. Most recently, she founded BirthFUND, an initiative advocating for safer childbirth following her own experience of becoming a mother. Founding funders include Serena Williams, Chrissy Teigen and Ashley Graham.

The two women first met at the launch party of Romanek’s book ‘Liveable Luxe’ hosted at her house. “I have to be honest and say, when they shared with me who had RSVPed and I saw your name, it brought me a lot of joy. I've seen you on TV and your energy is always so open and present and kind. I couldn’t believe you were coming to my house,” Romanek shared. “The moment I received the invitation I thought, ‘I get to go to The Brigette Romanek's home and meet her?’ I've been in awe of you for years. Watching this Black woman navigate this design world at such a high level. You always do it with a smile and with such elegance and such grace. I always wondered, who is this woman?” Welteroth chimed in.  Since then, the two remained fast friends. 

Having built careers with purpose, Romanek and Welteroth have shifted the perspective of how creative industries can affect change. While listening in to their conversation over Zoom, one thing is clear, these women have a vision for the future and aren’t waiting for someone else to create it. But we’ll let them do the talking.

Elaine: I want to know, Brigette. How did you start your career? You mentioned that you’re self-taught, which is kind of unbelievable. 

Brigette: I always knew I was creative as a kid, but I didn’t know this was a career path. I had done other creative things that I liked, but then when I started doing interiors, I loved it. I had such passion for it, and I couldn't not think about it. I started my firm in 2018 after helping friends and really doing it for fun beforehand. It fuelled me and continues to. I know the effect [a space] has on people and their life, on how they move about and function, whether they know it or not. I want to be part of making someone feel good. There’s so much chaos out there. My take on it is, when I close my front door, I want to be in my oasis. That’s what it should be about, the people who really live there. 

Elaine: Who mentored you or who inspired you to take this path? 

Brigette: I can't say I had a mentor. I say this all the time, and I mean it in a good way, and not insulting myself, but my ignorance was bliss. I just felt like I could do it. Every day it's a learning process, but I just continue because I have such passion for it. No matter what comes down, I'm going to keep rolling, keep pushing, keep believing, keep manifesting, keep steering the ship. That's how I started. I was actually having an event at my house, when someone asked me if I could help them. That was the beginning. The first big job I had was this house in Los Feliz. A real estate agent had seen a friend's house I had worked on, and asked for my information for one of his clients who had just bought a house. I remember thinking, what do I wear? I don't know how to dress to go to these meetings. But anyway, I got there and she said, I'm interviewing multiple designers. That's when I first heard someone call me a designer. It didn't even really register for me that was what I was doing. I got the job and as I was celebrating,I realized I had never sent a proposal. It was really a learning-on-the-job kind of experience. That house was 10,000 square feet and I haven't looked back since. 

“I know the EFFECT [a space] has on people and their life, on how they move about and function, whether they know it or not. ”

Elaine: When you were a little girl, did you have the best decorated room of all your friends? 

Brigette: I think I probably did. My mom's a singer and she and I were a team. She had to go wherever the work was, so we would move all the time. I was always the new kid, quite often, the only Black kid. I had to have that space that was my own, and it was always my room. I didn't know at the time that's what I was doing, but I was creating my space. Sometimes I would have to live with relatives, but my mom always tried to keep us together. To do that, sometimes we'd have money, sometimes we wouldn't. She just gave me my room and said, do whatever you want. So I could try out paints or, I had a collection of stuffed animals she would allow me to take everywhere. I think that was huge in starting to formulate what brought me comfort and realizing, oh, this feels good and that doesn't. My grandmother worked at a factory that produced magazines. Living on the South Side of Chicago, she would bring home these magazines at night. None of the other grandkids were interested in them but me. I lived on the South Side of Chicago, which I love but it was in the hood. These magazines allowed me to see a whole other world. 

Elaine: I love that we have magazines in common. When I look back at my childhood, magazines also played such a role in inspiring thoughts about what kind of life I could have, what it could look like beyond what I could see around me. Magazines were a portal to another lifestyle. My brother's in town, and he is a punk rocker to the core, always has been. For him, music shapes his identity, always has. He was kind of going riffing through all the bands that have inspired him throughout childhood and his teen years and into his, you know, now he's 40. He asked me what my early influences were and I couldn't think of anything, because to me, music doesn't play that role in my life. 

Brigette: Right.
Elaine: Hearing you talk I'm realizing magazines were that for me. I remember being so drawn to them and whenever the magazine would come in the mail every month, it was an event, and I would sit and pour over the pages. I grew up in a mostly white area, other than church and the hair salon – which we did spend a significant amount of time on weekends – I really didn't get to see this universe of Black women, Black excellence, Black beauty, and the full spectrum of it. For me, I was exposed to that through the pages of Essence and Ebony Magazine. I remember, that was what formulated the visions of the kind of life that I could have. Whatever I was watching on TV, whatever magazines I was looking at, I was drawn to the more luxe, glamorous life. I remember loving to watch Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Brigette: That was an event.

Elaine: By the way, pulling up to your house, I thought, this is truly like watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It’s just so beautiful. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to live in a big house with stairs and a pool. That was my thing because I didn't know anybody who had stairs. And I loved Barbies, the pink Corvette top down. 
Brigette: Yes. 

Elaine: I always thought, I need a hot pink Corvette with the top down. Or with Essence, I was really drawn to these beautiful fashion swans. The editorial pages were when my heart would just beat faster. Even watching the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, I was drawn to Hillary or I was obsessed with Whitley Gilbert. It was the bougie girls, the well dressed kind. I felt connected to them and to that world, even though I had never experienced anyone or anything like it. 

Brigette: It was the exact same for me. Somehow I was just like, if this is an option, I'm in. As someone who has already achieved so much, what legacy do you hope to leave? And what lessons do you hope to pass on to generations?

Elaine: I honestly think in some ways, I'm just getting started. Everything that you do in your life and your career builds upon itself. I don't ever want to rest on my laurels. I always want to be in a state of evolution, learning from my experiences. I think now more than ever, my personal life and my professional life are intersecting for the first time in a really meaningful way. Being a new mom has shifted my perspective so much on the world and the opportunities for necessary change. It's exposed me to how broken the maternal healthcare system is, something that I never once thought about before. I think most of us don't think about it until it's our turn, and that's the first time we get this wake up call. I'm at this point where my years as a magazine editor — not just learning how to write stories with impact, but also learning how to sell those stories — building relationships with corporate partners, building relationships with influential people in the world, and building a sense of credibility as a storyteller and a journalist has all led me to this point. When I was going through this really scary journey into motherhood where I wasn't having great experiences with doctors, and I really felt pretty bewildered, and I was learning about the maternal health crisis that impacts Black women disproportionately, I felt very disempowered. The way forward for me was to put my journalist hat on and to try to understand it through that lens. That's what made me feel empowered. As I started to understand the stats, I wanted to understand why this crisis is so bad in this country and why we're not doing more about it. 80% of maternal health deaths in this country are preventable. Why are we not talking about it? When I learned that the US is the deadliest place to give birth in the developed world, I thought, I know way too many powerful, strategic, influential women who if they really knew this, would be compelled to do something about it. And I think if we came together, we could fix this in our lifetime. Women and mothers, we don't play about.

Brigette: That's right. 

Elaine: I just think we need some connective tissue that joins this stark reality with our culture to allow us to see how we can fix this together. I'm at this moment in my career and in my life where I’m able to bring my professional experience, skillset and network together to create a coalition of families that are ready to create change ourselves and not waiting for these systems to change, not waiting for lawmakers to do the right thing, not waiting for insurance companies and hospitals to figure it out. That’s what the BirthFUND is about. It's on us to save us. I really feel that deep in my bones. I've never felt like this activated for such a consistent period of time on one thing maybe ever. Even when I was in the magazine business, we were thinking about a different thing month to month and in the digital space it was day to day, but this is so big and so important. It feels like part of a calling, but it doesn't feel adjacent. It feels like the intersection of all that came before.

Brigette: Absolutely.

Elaine: At Teen Vogue we were able to pivot, to become this magazine that people started to know of as this more progressive voice for young activists. But the only way we were able to do that in a relevant way, was because we embraced who we had always been. We’ve always been about fashion, we've always been about pop culture, we've always been about celebrity. We just integrated this part with more meaningful conversations. We grew with the audience. The only way I can get people to care about maternal health is because we're putting lipstick on it. We're bringing the right people to it. We're framing it in a certain way. It's kind of doing the same thing, I think, as what we did with Teen Vogue. We put lip gloss on politics. I hope the legacy I leave will have created a generational impact that will outlive me. Ava DuVernay always says, “if your mission isn't bigger than you, then it's not big enough.” For so long, you work really hard to establish yourself in your profession. You want to make a name for yourself, but you come to a point in time where that’s no longer enough. Now it's about how I can use my name or what I've built to have an impact that’s so much greater than me. 

Brigette: I feel like this is such a natural step for you just because of the way that I've seen you exist in your career. Everything I've seen you do, you bring more consciousness to it. It's not as though you're looking at it just in a singular way. You look at it as a way of how to make things better. That's really quite incredible and not always an easy journey. 

Elaine: That means a lot coming from you. For you to start your design career in 2018 at this stage of your life, after building a family and just having success after success after success. You've been in the AD100 pretty much every year out the gate, that's uncommon. It's certainly uncommon for a Black woman in the design world. I'm curious, what have been the challenges for you that you’ve had to face and overcome in order to get where you are and to stay where you are?

Brigette: I don't know if this is a weird answer or not, but I just refuse. I obviously am aware and I'm so proud to be a Black woman. I’m raising two Black girls and that's a conversation all the time. I don't ever think because I'm Black something might not happen for me. The older I get, the more I know that our time here is valuable. Sometimes they say it's long days, but it's short years. I'm not going to let someone tell me that I can or I can't. I want to make this my journey and my story. I went really far down the line for this job I was working on with a couple. I was really excited about it. In the end, the woman had to come and tell me her husband just couldn't wrap his head around that, I'm Black and that I was going to be designing his house. She loved everything we did, and all of a sudden, she finally just said, I know it's not great, but here's what it is and I really apologize. I was sad, but I was sad for him because I'm great at what I do. I knew I could contribute something wonderful to their lives and that was my goal. I hear no all the time, but it's not going to define how I move about in the world. My mom used to say that the worst anyone can ever do is say no. It made me realize, I've heard that before, but I'm still here. It doesn't mean that it doesn't sting, but that's just part of the story. Hopefully, how I work and exist gives some guidance to young women of color out there and to all women, to say, come on, let's go. Let's not be held in this one place. If someone says no over here, okay, let's find a way over here to do it. Let's come together. Things try to hold me down and push me back. I'm just not allowing for it. I'm strong. I'm going to do better. What you said at the very beginning of the conversation, if I'm not growing or learning or pushing or trying to help, what's the point? 

Elaine: That's so inspiring. I feel energized by that. You're reminding me of this quote that I reposted the other day, “Your success is determined by how many times you say, fuck it. I'll figure it out anyway.” Is that not the realest thing you ever heard?

Brigette: This is it, this is it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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