Alumni Gazette

Winning Design

Penny Drue Baird ’73 was planning to make a career with the psychology degree she was working on at Rochester in the early 1970s.

But then she began visiting classmates who were living in Helen Wood Hall, a Medical Center building that originally housed nursing students.

And inspiration struck. Soon the molding in each room had been painted a different color.

“I helped all my friends decorate their rooms,” says Baird, now a nationally recognized interior designer. “That’s where I started—practicing with my friends.”

Baird has long since graduated beyond dormitory rooms. The owner of the Manhattan design firm Dessins, she was named to Architectural Digest’s most recent listing of the top 100 architects and designers, the second time in a decade that she has been included in the magazine’s regular ranking.

Her work also frequently appears in Architectural Digest as well as other publications focusing on interior design and architecture.

But for several years after graduation, home decorating remained an avocation, even as she went on to earn a doctorate in psychology from Yeshiva University.

Eventually she realized that she wanted a career in interior design and launched Dessins.

With six to eight people on the staff, the company typically has about two dozen clients, mostly in New York but in other parts of the country as well. Baird also keeps an apartment in Paris, where she scouts for ideas.

Known for using architectural elements in her design, Baird prides herself on not locking herself into a specific design style.

Each client’s needs are unique, she says, and she tries to understand that.

That’s where her training in psychology can be helpful, if only in an “oblique way.”

She’s learned to envision what her clients are looking for, even if they can’t quite articulate it clearly.

“I really believe that each person’s house should represent that person, not me,” Baird says.