Some designers design for themselves.
We design for you.
There is a version of interior design that treats a home like a portfolio piece — a statement about the designer's taste, their aesthetic, their moment. You can feel it when you walk in. The space is impressive, maybe even beautiful, but it doesn't quite feel like you. Something is slightly off. It performs rather than breathes.
Studio Kestrel was founded on a different conviction: that the most extraordinary space a designer can create is one that feels unmistakably like the person who lives in it — only better than they could have imagined it themselves.
The science behind how spaces make you feel
Every design decision we make is guided by a deep understanding of how human beings actually experience space — not just visually, but physically, emotionally, and neurologically.
We think about how natural light moves through a room across the day, and how to amplify it through proportion, reflection, and sheer layers of fabric. We consider ventilation, acoustic softness, and the quiet elimination of tension — the low hum of an appliance, the intrusion of street noise, the harsh glare of overhead lighting — because these things accumulate in the body without us ever consciously registering them.
We select materials with an awareness of how they feel underfoot, under hand, and how they age. We design around how people actually move, gather, rest, and work — because a home that supports your daily life is not a luxury, it is the entire point.
This philosophy draws from years of study in the spatial traditions that cultures around the world have refined across millennia: the way ancient builders understood proportion and flow, how different societies learned to weave architecture into its natural surroundings, how rooms can be arranged to encourage ease, togetherness, and calm. Where Western design culture often treats these principles as decorative choices, we treat them as structural ones — a framework as rigorous as engineering, and as intuitive as instinct.
The result is spaces that feel grounded from the moment you walk in. Not because of any single element, but because everything has been considered together.
Where this came from
Studio Kestrel's founder, Paul De Andrade, didn't follow a straight path to design — and that's precisely what makes his work different.
Trained as a biomedical engineer at Georgia Tech and later involved in research at Harvard, Paul spent years thinking analytically about the relationship between environment and human wellbeing before he ever picked up a drafting tool. Then he left. He traveled for years — living, teaching, and absorbing across South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East — searching, as he puts it, for what he was actually meant to do.
What changed him wasn't any single revelation. It was accumulation. The aging colonial grandeur of Buenos Aires, where whole streets feel like footnotes from old Italy. The gold-gilded temples of Thailand, saturated with color and centuries of intention. The master-planned boulevards and sculpted gardens of Paris, where beauty was treated as civic infrastructure. He came to understand that there are infinite ways to achieve something truly extraordinary — and that most of them are rooted not in trend, but in history, craft, and a respect for the human beings who would inhabit the space.
When he returned to New York, the realization crystallized not in a studio or a classroom, but in a neglected apartment in Chelsea that he made his own. Over several years, he painted, built furniture, hung mirrors, sourced textiles, shaped the light. He was also spending his evenings at the Art Students League, studying sculpture, drawing, painting, and printmaking — learning to put what lived in his imagination into physical form. Somewhere in all of that, two things became undeniable: he loved design deeply, and he understood something essential about it — that any four walls, however unremarkable, could be transformed into something nurturing, beautiful, and alive.
Studio Kestrel was founded in 2019 to bring that understanding to clients who deserved it.
