My Palace in Dallas - Sara Garza
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happened to be”
What’s that I hear? Oh, it’s the crispy, crunchy sound when I stepped on the first leaf of fall! That’s right, folks, when this piece came out, we should all be in cute coats, a cute drink in hand, and get ready to sip wine by a cozy fireplace, or in my case, my heater.
I started My Palace in Dallas during the height of the pandemic, and it was born from pure curiosity: I want to know, I want to see, and, most importantly, I want to document what the people around me have become after these unprecedented years. They can be artists or comedians, or they can also be the people you meet on the street—which is quite hard cause, supposedly, people in Dallas don’t walk at all. So, what is it that they do? This project delves into their stories and, as the name suggests, explores their Palace in Dallas.
Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Sara Garza. Funny enough, I’ve been pretty immersed in her work long before I met her in person. It wasn’t until last summer, when I got to talk to her at the new Punch World launch party, did we started showing up in each other’s orbit. With her eclectic taste and our overlapping circles, we became fast friends, and I’m so excited to show y’all what we talked about as we sat in her gorgeous dining room, admiring her art collection and amazing finishes that make her space worthy of all applause. I hope you’ll enjoy this one as much as I did writing it!
Hello, Sara! Thank you for sitting down with me today! Now, before I bomb you with questions, for anyone who might not have the chance to know who you are, would you like to tell me a bit about yourself? Who are you, and what is it that you do?
My name is Sara Garza, proud mom of two kids, interior designer, and the owner of the interior design firm called Punch World. We now have a team of great girls as we expand and continue to do more residential and commercial work for various clients.
First of all, biggest congratulations on the AD feature, and witnessing your various projects come to life is truly a treat. Could you tell me what the journey was like for you? How did you get to where you are now?
I graduated from Texas Tech with a major in interior design and a minor in architecture. One thing I noticed while interning at architectural firms is that they valued interior personnel with a strong knowledge of architecture. I guess that’s why, during my internships in NYC and working under HSK in Dallas, both firms placed me on the architectural side. However, I’ve always known my true passion is interior design, and I don’t see myself doing CAD forever.
Eventually leaving HKS, my husband and I—recently married—looked to our love of photography as a creative outlet and a potential new career. Although self-taught, my husband and I shoot regularly on weekends, and by the end of 2009, we decided to dive into wedding photography as a duo after shooting a few weddings. It fascinated us, even if it can be stressful at times. For seven years, Rocky and I shot weddings full-time. It was an incredible experience—traveling together for destination weddings and extending our stays for a few extra days wherever we went.
After documenting 250 weddings, we had our first child. Funny enough, someone once told us we wouldn’t care as much about shooting weddings once we became parents, and they were right. I realized I didn’t want to spend every Saturday at shoots and miss out on precious moments with my son. Gradually, I shifted to photographing moms and babies, while Rocky launched his own business in a completely different field.
During that time, we owned several small businesses. One of them involved me doing interior design for friends’ homes. I knew I could handle running a small business. With the connections and community I built through weddings and our shared projects, I decided it was time to start my own venture.
For the first 4-5 years, it was a one-woman operation. Then COVID hit. Many businesses struggled during the pandemic, but I’m grateful that’s when my business grew. Spending so much time at home made people realize they wanted a better home office or to redesign entire spaces, and they were willing to invest time and money. As business picked up faster than I expected, in early 2021, I brought on a new partner, Maddie, a talented designer with a branding background. Our team continues to expand after that, and now there are six of us.
Growth has been slow and steady. It’s a blessing not to make decisions alone—I have great people to share the responsibilities with.
Punch World just celebrated its 9 year anniversary and is now your biggest business to date. What type of projects did it start out with?
It was mostly residential, and mostly small projects like furnishing the room, like the home office or the nursery. It was a gradual build towards my first full kitchen and bathroom renovation, where I got to lay it out and work on it from soup to nuts. I’ve had some retail projects sprinkled throughout the past 9 years, but now we have several full commercial projects across Dallas and Fort Worth.
Was there a learning curve or realizations as you went from doing rooms to a full residential project?
You just have to be extremely organized and know what practice to put in place to help you achieve that. Creatively, there wasn’t much of a change. It was more of understanding what you need in your practice to help your client execute a renovation in comparison to simply furnishing a room. There are CAD drawings for everything, and even more so, going into construction. There will be times when I just crave a good furnishing project because it’s so much simpler than construction-heavy ones. When construction comes into play, there are more teams you have to watch over and work with for both quality and timeline, which is a challenge I had to face head-on and ultimately helped me to be more equipped in this industry; if you’re not organized or have a process in place, things can really easily look overwhelming real fast.
Coming from both an interior and an architectural background, when you work on a full residential project, how do you decide what portion of the house needs structural renovation, while some may require a simple furnishing touch?
Their budget. *laughs
Most people come to us already knowing remodeling is on the table, versus me coming in and suggesting so. Under the same mentality, if clients come to us only asking for furnishing, they probably won’t have the budget to do a full renovation, which makes perfect sense because construction can be expensive!
Budget aside, I still believe from an interior side, it’s still up to the client. The last thing I want is to push something that they didn’t ask me for. However, I think I have a knack for feeling whether the flow is good when you walk into a house. How you move through the space is important when I’m observing a project, and I made a suggestion based on that feeling.
Part of what makes you a good designer – traditionally trained or not – is to let your design flow seamlessly with the existing architectural work. I’ll suggest things like redoing a fireplace or adding a built-in, but ultimately, it’s up to the client to let me know how many opinions they want me to bring to the table.
Following up on bringing your suggestion to the table, when you work on residential projects, have you ever had to convince your clients to keep things as is or leave certain elements untouched?
Oh yeah. A lot of times, people only know what they've heard, but sometimes, your 1950s powdered blue bathroom is badass and in perfect condition, you don’t need to tear it out. Maybe at some point, that means we’re just not the right designer for them, and they just want something different, that’s all fine too. It’s really popular to rip things out and make them brand new, but people knew what they were doing back then. This house, for example, when I walked in, the entire house was in disarray, but when I saw the steel window and the marble windowsills from back in the 40s, I knew it was my house. Another example is our pink powder room that we had kept after my mom gave it a full deep clean. It doesn’t really match the rest of the house, but I know it’s in perfect condition, and we cannot get rid of it.
Don’t rip a room out just because. We will push pretty hard for people to keep the original elements of the house.
The same reason your business got its rapid growth during the pandemic, not only did people notice they have a need for interior design in their lives, but it also opened a window towards sharing it online. From my observation, this might increase the chance of people coming to you with a strong pre-established vision when it comes to remodeling. As an interior designer, how do you balance the need to accommodate a client’s vision while allowing yourself to still have that creative expression when working on a project?
At the beginning of my career, I leaned more towards accommodating what the client wanted. As time goes by, I realize I don’t really enjoy my work, and it doesn’t really feel like me. Slowly, you start to only show styles you’d like to work on. It’s like photography, I’m not going to show anything I don’t like shooting because this isn’t what I want more of.
Knowing that, I started showing more colorful works I’ve done in the past, or even just releasing a moodboard showcasing a clear taste of what I enjoy and align with my personal design styles. Almost like manifesting, we did more projects that were more aligned with the style we want to work on, to the point where we were able to attract people coming to us for them.
Once our brand’s aesthetic is fully established, we rarely have people coming to us with a vision for their project, and it looks like something we would never do. We’re pretty particular about what we show, which definitely helps us inform people of the style we excel at and love. We also have a list of designers that we can pass on to if we still have clients coming to us for a complete non-PunchWorld style. Because remodeling is an expensive and big commitment, you want to work with someone who is working on your vision to be just as excited as you are.
You started taking on commercial and retail space design as well. What was the biggest difference you've noticed designing for commercial spaces versus residential?
Commercial is much simpler in the sense that people aren’t as emotionally involved in comparison to residential. For small businesses, it’s incredibly personal too, but it’s on a different echelon than designing someone’s forever home.
There’s a different energy to it, when you’re in someone’s home, it’s personal and families or other factors, such as moving away for six to eight months while the renovation is happening. Elements like these don’t usually happen with commercial projects. The timeline might still be extended, or there could be unexpected delays, but the family won’t have to stay somewhere else during that time or disrupt their quality of life.
We do this with residential, too, but for commercial, it’s often pretty straightforward with only one brand visual message in mind. Every room has a different need, and for commercial, we just need to fulfill one single need and allow the visual language to flow together in one huge space.
You mentioned brand visual identity earlier for both commercial and residential. How do you translate that process to clients when the project is extremely personal and not just a retail space with a physical brand identity to reference?
We use this questionnaire at the start of every project. The questions help us understand not only the style of the house but also what you, as an individual, family, or couple, are into. It could be your favorite hotel to stay at, your preferred brand, your favorite cities to visit, or even something as simple as your favorite clothing brand.
Maddie is the one who introduced this into our process with her branding background; she helped set everything up even before we begin each project. We don’t start looking for any pieces other than purely inspirational elements until we have all the information. For us, the core idea is how to blend your personal brand and taste seamlessly with your home in the coolest way possible.
Once you have a good grasp of the bones of the house and their personal taste, what is the first thing you start working on?
We spent a lot of time during the inspiration phase. Not necessarily looking for specific design style or pieces, but something that we think would match the client’s visual identity. Pinterest has been a great tool for us because it helps curate non-interior-centric elements, allowing us to pull from something that isn’t as literal as an image of a bed in a room.
Before we start digging in, we will look for a common thread that brings the entire mood board together. Using what we learned from the questionnaire as a reference, in the sea of pinned elements on the mood board, it could be, for example, that we’re seeing a lot of chromes, so that will be included in the direction we move forward for our clients. Once we have the vibe established, that’s when we start looking for furniture or lighting pieces that fit into the mental mold we had for this person.
We’re still learning because it’s just been me and Maddie for the longest time. Now that our team is growing, we’re figuring out how to translate our taste and all be on the same page when multiple people are working on the same project.
I don’t know if you share the same problem, but home is an extremely personal thing, and sometimes, what we enjoy seeing or elements don’t translate to what we enjoy waking up to every day. Had there ever been times when you underwent multiple design revisions because the aesthetic your clients expressed from the questionnaire was different from what they wanted in their space?
I believe that, in any capacity, it’s inherently difficult to explain yourself to someone.
With clients, it becomes a practice. We have a slide in our deck called “Here’s what we heard you say,” which features all the answers we’ve gathered from them, presented in quotes. We then build our mood board and overall direction based on this feedback. Regarding your question, there are times when, after showing them our initial design, they realize they didn’t fully mean it when they filled out the questionnaire. Sometimes, it takes a physiological process for them to really figure out how to articulate what they genuinely enjoy and who they are.
Under these circumstances, our revisions often go back to identifying words to live by, giving them a second or third chance to express who they are at their core. In addition to revisions, it’s sometimes up to us to interpret which abstract element our clients refer to when examining a very literal object. For example, a client might give us three hotels and say in the questionnaire that she doesn’t want a replica of the rooms, but rather wants to incorporate elements that evoke what she felt while staying there. I’m glad we have a larger team now because so much of what we do involves analyzing emotions and objects, which can be very energy-consuming.
After multiple revisions, we might pause the design process to allow our clients to clarify and refine what they truly want. It’s a delicate and beautiful process to give them space to find the right design language and for us to guide them toward a conclusion — one that we help realize in their forever home.
Even when I’m working on my own house, I face many rooms and a wide range of styles I like and would be happy waking up to. Just like our clients, I have to pick one direction and trust my taste, believing everything will come together harmoniously in the end.
To further peek into who you are, can you tell me where you usually get your inspiration from?
In our line of work, not just for clients and myself, we look at an enormous amount of items daily, and even more are saved onto our roster. I often focus on vintage pieces; everything eventually returns to the forefront, and there are recurring items I make sure to stay updated on. I don’t think I put in too much effort to stay current; instead, I naturally learn about it from the people we follow on social media, whether it’s curators or brands I like to shop from the most. It can be overwhelming, so ultimately, the things I choose to keep up with are what inspire me and influence my decisions.
It’s been five years since the pandemic hit, and for some reason, we all came out alright, if not stronger. What did you do to stay centered and sane? Have any of those new habits carried over now that things are back to normal?
I worked out quite a bit. Took our kids, who were 5 and 2 at the time, on many walks. It all feels like a kind of blur now as I try to recall them. We’re a pretty outdoorsy family, so taking them out to run around and burn off energy within social distancing guidelines comes naturally.
I believe the pandemic has made everyone learn to appreciate their homes more. Whether you love it or hate it, your home has become your safe haven. I am very much the same with our own house; no matter how busy we are, I make sure we have time to relax and lounge around at home. One thing that has stuck with us is maintaining that balance between the fast pace of post-pandemic life and the slower pace during the pandemic.
I’m sure you have your fair share of traveling experience and exposure to different scenes across the states and even countries. From an industry perspective, what do you think sets Dallas apart from all the other well-known big cities or any other city you’ve been to?
I love Dallas, and I didn’t think I would love it as much as I do.
As an interior designer, I don’t think we will ever run out of work, especially in Dallas. Dallas will always have something for everybody; people here enjoy having beautiful home spaces, with so many styles of homes and neighborhoods coexisting, we will never run out of clients, no matter what your design language is.
We have a lively design district populated by great showrooms run by very passionate people. Artists and the whole creative scene here are bigger than I thought they would be. As often as people like to say – for lack of better words – the southern hospitality, where we all want to support each other, helps drive and form a big yet tight-knit industry scene. Finding ways to highlight or work with as many local creators or designers is a common theme here in Dallas.
I have not had a bad experience with people in the industry here, and I think on top of the community being tight-knit and supportive, it goes back to the idea of knowing there’s enough for everybody. If I needed to pick up the phone and call about how to solve certain design problems, they were always so open to us. We try to do the same thing to others, trying to find their start in the scene, or help out with problems by sharing contacts and resources.
Are you a Dallas native? Having spent quite some time in the city, discovering your creative identity. What do YOU think of this city?
I love it here!
I love my neighborhood; if I didn’t live in Oakcliff, I don’t know if I would love this city as much as I do now. We’ve been here for over 14 years, and it feels like a small town in a big city, seeing the same people at the same coffee shop every day.
We found great friend groups, and I love that with a little drive, everything you need resides in the city. In this big city, I’m glad we found our people and our little pocket we’re proud to call home.
As I look around, I can see a lot of your taste in a tangible form! Now, the hard part is, what would you say is your most prized possession in your home?
If I had to pick one thing, it’s going to be these wooden built ins.
Part of the house for our Architectural Digest feature had already been photographed, but we haven’t gotten around to shooting the living room and dining room. Three weeks before the shoot, I decided we needed the built-ins here, but our contractor told us it would be impossible to pull it off in three weeks.
My parents are the most handy, perfectionist people I’ve ever known. My dad had done carpentry his entire life, and in his mid-seventies, I pulled him out of semi-retirement, and we made it happen. My husband helped him finish it, I helped my mom stain the entire thing, and got it installed in the nick of time, right before the shoot.
It’s super special to me because it’s the one thing in my house that was handmade by my parents, and it couldn’t have happened without all of us coming together as a joint force.
And we are almost to the bottom of my list of Qs for today, for those who are interested in getting into this business or starting something of their own. What suggestions or advice would you like to give them, or wish you had known sooner?
We’ve had a lot of high highs and low lows. If there’s one thing I wish I’d known a little sooner, it's how important it is to protect your business and keep an eye on your own well-being. Making sure you can trust the people you bring in is crucial, especially when you’re in the midst of all the excitement and want nothing but to trudge forward.
Taking care of yourself while seeking out your dream is easier said than done, but it will definitely be beneficial for you in the long run. Now that I have a business partner, it might still have its challenges, but it’s fun not to be in the silo all by yourself.
As fun as simply being creative is, you can never run away from the business side of it. Make sure your numbers are right, taxes are done properly, and know that sometimes you can’t just keep going if the logistical part of your practice clearly isn’t working.
To wrap this interview up, also because I am curious personally, what’s on the horizon for you? Are any “Big things coming” in the works for you? What would you like the world (whichever random soul stumbled upon this article) to know about?
We have a few projects in the works that we’re pretty excited about: a cake shop commercial space, and several full home renovations. Just recently, we got booked for designing a huge modern lake house, lots of natural materials, and it’s all hands on deck between me and Maddie because it’s such a huge project. It’s slightly different from what we usually do as a studio, but we’re having so much fun putting our own unique spin on it.
James Kung : https://www.instagram.com/j_kung/
Sara Garza: https://www.instagram.com/saragarza/
Punch World Studio: https://www.instagram.com/punchworld.studio/
