Fun for Every Season

Sarah Randolph may have started her design career in San Francisco, but these days, she’s happy to focus on her clients and volunteer design work in and around Minneapolis. Since 2008, Randolph has brought her years of experience at high-end residential design firms to her own business—Randolph Interior Design—using her design expertise and commitment to the local community to delight her clients.

Randolph begins any project by “understanding and uncovering what the clients are looking for”—by listening to their needs, in other words. And she brings her own understanding of the Minnesota lifestyle to every project. “Summers are a really big deal here in Minnesota,” she says. “So we always pay a lot of attention to how a family entertains and spends time. It may be cold here for most of the year, but much of the design is actually geared toward summer life.” You can see this attention to warm-weather entertaining ease in the vibrant kitchen featured in Cambria Style’s Summer 2022 Issue. Every choice Randolph and her clients made for that project was intended to facilitate fun—and to minimize maintenance—for the summer months when the owners use the home. “Cambria is really the perfect material, to me. It’s beautiful, of course, and all the designs make it a really flexible choice for me as a designer. But more than that, it’s just so durable—a client won’t have to spend valuable vacation time on care,” she says.

Of course, the cold Minnesota winters have their own requirements when it comes to specifying materials. “We need to be really careful with the products we use—the doors we specify, for example—because of the extreme temperature variations we see here. And we try to balance all the summer-friendly entertaining spaces with warm, soothing spots that help make the winter cozier,” she says. “It’s all about helping create an atmosphere that’s comforting and supportive year-round.”

Randolph’s private design clients aren’t the only ones who benefit from her focus on that basic human need for comfort. She lavishes the same attention on the clients she serves in her work with a local chapter of the national charity Design for a Difference. “We volunteer to help create spaces for local nonprofit organizations. It’s a small way I love to give back to this great community,” says Randolph.

For more information on Design for a Difference and the organizations it serves, visit DesignForADifference.com