Lauren Thorp has been shopping, again. The decorator, interior design student, small business owner, and mother of two spends five minutes a day combing through listings on Facebook Marketplace, training the algorithm to show her the style of furniture and home décor she could be enticed into buying. Thorp is always up for a good estate sale, too, or a peek into a vintage shop, like the one she’s curated at The Hill Antique Mall since 2022. Auctions, on the other hand, bring out the former tennis player’s competitive drive. She’ll often end up in a bidding war and, regrettably, overpaying for the object of her affection. Over the years, she’s learned to walk away. “You don’t have to have everything,” she says.
But on a recent visit to her traditional four-square in the Shaw neighborhood, Thorp enthusiastically shows off her latest purchase: a bold floral sofa from Sherrill Furniture. “I have a few friends who get me, and they like it, but everyone else is like, ‘Wow, that’s something.’” Lee’s Trinkets, an estate liquidation company on Hampton, listed the almost pristine sofa on its website for $20 and delivered it to Thorp’s residence. “It’s not like I’m dropping thousands of dollars every time I make a switch. It’s like $20 here, $200 there,” she says. The sofa fits in with Thorp’s other found treasures, like the blue-and-white upholstered armchair from Miriam Switching Post, a wooden desk she rescued from the alley behind her house, and a minimalist console from IKEA that she plans to zhuzh up with picture molding on the cabinet doors. Thorp’s secret to reinvigorating furniture is her willingness to just go for it. “I’m not scared to try things,” she says. “I think that’s the key, and it usually takes a couple trips to Home Depot or YouTube videos. Some of it I just mess up and say, ‘OK, well, that was an experiment.’”
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Lately, Thorp has also doubled down on her decision to more formally transition from shop owner who advises clients on an informal basis to interior designer. During the pandemic, she closed the doors to BonBoni, her home accessories shop just beyond her backyard, and took the first few steps toward a career in interiors by enrolling in two courses at Meramec Community College. She says she was motivated by the support of her shoppers who found a like-minded aesthetic in her eclectic decorating style, and inquired about her availabilty to help them with their own spaces. “That was the highest compliment,” says the former college finance major. Thorp is now working on matching her gut and intuition with practical knowledge. “I feel like I have a great innate sense of color and scale and balance and all the things that you need to design an interior. But I also want the, OK, what’s the best material for a rug for a family that has kids and a dog? How do I use the software to take what’s in my head and make a rendering that I can communicate design intent to a client?”
Thorp’s plan for the next five years is to make remodeling projects the center of her interiors business. “I’m doing a lot of room designs, but I’d like to get more into whole-house, cohesive design from the get-go,” she says. Historic renovations are especially appealing to her—she and her family live in a brick-clad house built in 1897 with the original wooden staircase.
But Thorp knows that the journey to get there is a slow build. In the meantime, she’ll search for inspiration everywhere she goes. After all, she has come a long way from her first career in international development in Washington, D.C., to achieving her lifelong dream of operating a retail shop, one that Architectural Digest no less named the most beautiful independent store in Missouri.
