When people ask me how it all started, I always tell this story.

I've been designing interiors for 13 years now, and I decided I wanted to do this at 13. I am the youngest child in the family, and maybe that's why I had the smallest and darkest room with an old massive dark wall-to-wall wardrobe and purple-brown wallpaper (who on Earth came up with that pattern?). My parrots and guinea pigs lived with me, and the room was so cramped that other family members didn't dare to enter it too often.

One day my dad and I went to a wallpaper store and fell in love with a collection of wallpaper with stars - they were white with yellow stars, yellow with blue, and blue with yellow. We liked all of them so much that we bought two or three rolls of each color and created something completely wild - wallpaper was not only on the walls but also on the ceiling, and the lines merged into one another, creating an entirely new world. Later I discovered that all those stars also glow in the dark! Every time I turned off the light, I smiled because I had my own stars.

Today it sounds awful, but back in 2001, after I added a blue carpet and new furniture with colored knobs, my room became a legend - classmates even told their friends what Anya's room looked like. My main discovery was that with light & functional furniture and nice wallpaper my room was no longer stuffy and cramped (although the guinea pigs were still there, and the window didn't get any bigger).

The connection "beautiful and practical = nice" formed in my head very quickly, and all I had to do was wait until I graduated from high school and go to the design studio to work a year later.

I still get that first excitement from seeing how my design can turn a dull empty space into a stylish and comfortable home.