Liz Dunigan Design

Guest: Liz Dunigan
On shaping stillness, designing for sensation, and holding space for what isn’t always seen—but always felt.

Liz Dunigan is a designer who works beyond category—moving between coastal homes, commercial interiors, and healing-centered interiors with the same clarity and care. With roots in evolutionary biology and healthcare, she sees design as a living system: intuitive, precise, and attuned to what matters.

Her spaces don’t perform—they listen. Think custom terrazzo embedded with local shell fragments. Native woods that shift with the light. Spatial geometries that feel less styled, more remembered. In a culture that prizes spectacle, Liz builds for stillness, for breath, for return.

Her work comes from lived experience. She resets in cold ocean water. Not for the thrill, but for the quiet after. That same presence runs through her work: spaces that don’t just surround, but recalibrate.

entrepreneur, creator

june 05, 2025

Quickfire Palette
What color feels most like you lately—and has it changed over time?

Liz: Color finds me in moments of vulnerability. A quiet joy I don’t chase—just notice, when I’m soft enough to feel it.

After a cold plunge, what’s your go-to comfort ritual?

Liz: I don’t do much after. It clears the noise so I can drop into creative or quiet work more fully.

Favorite city for design inspiration—and one that haunts you from afar?

Liz: The places that fuel me aren’t always cities—they’re shaped by quiet extremity. Northern Europe, Arctic Circle, snow that silences. I didn’t grow up in the cold, but I’m pulled to it. There’s a grounded, elemental rawness there. It strips everything down to what matters.

A film or documentary that shaped how you think about space or emotion?

Liz: The Seventh Seal. The way it holds tension, the presence of death just behind it. Spare, luminous. Fanny and Alexander. Lush, opulent, rich in texture and emotional undercurrent. Mulholland Drive. How it unravels space and identity. Disorienting. 2001, scale, silence, precision

Most unforgettable material experience—when and where did it move you?

Liz: When a texture, material, or color matches my internal weight, it hits. Rare, but unmistakable. A flash of color, a pause in texture, the way something moves with its surroundings. Not dramatic—just a quiet recognition. And in that moment, I’m fully there.

First scent memory tied to design?

Liz: The smell of dry desert plants chaparral. It’s the smell of my childhood. It still floods me.

Is there a pre-project ritual—an object, a space, a silence?

Liz: No ritual, just a peeling away. Disorientation, discomfort. The work begins where certainty ends.

When you need clarity—not creative, but existential—what do you do?

Liz: I drop into the body, into sensation. Just feeling. And in that stillness, the truth rises

Deep Cut Dialogue
Liz, ultra-luxury design isn’t just about finish—it’s about feeling. But the work that creates those feelings is often invisible. What made you want to build in the space between seen and sensed?

Liz: Before design, I came from science—forestry. I studied tree health, tracked pathogens, read ecosystems for stress. You learn to observe closely. A healthy forest breathes: light, airflow, absence of tension. You sense it before you see it.

That shaped my eye. Not aesthetics—systems. Not trends—signals.

Growing up in San Diego, the seasons didn’t announce themselves. You had to read the shifts—light, scent, shadow. It trained me to notice nuance, to move with rhythm, to understand atmosphere without needing to name it. That’s how I design.

You often speak about rhythm, proportion, and tension. When did you first start recognizing those qualities in space—not as concepts, but as sensations?

Liz: Being sensitive strips things down. You feel the weight of a pause, the shift in tone, the undercurrent others miss. There’s pressure in the body when something’s off—even if nothing’s been said.

That sensitivity deepened during a heavy season. Not dramatic, just a slow awareness. I began to recognize tension not as thought, but as signal.

Rhythm, proportion, tension became coping—ways to locate honesty. Sometimes that meant softness. Sometimes, facing what hurt. But it tuned me.

It taught me to move at the pace of seasons. That slowness isn’t failure. That tension is what the body notices first—and sensation is how it begins to heal.

You're entering homes, but you're also entering psyches. How do you build trust in spaces where emotion lives just beneath the surface—but isn’t always spoken aloud?

Liz: You’re not just entering homes—you’re entering nervous systems, relationships, memory. Emotion lives just beneath the surface, even before it’s named. That’s where my strength is: noticing what’s there before it’s spoken.

I learned attunement early—working in healthcare design, where people often can’t articulate what they need. Not because it isn’t there, but because the words come slowly. You learn to sense vulnerability without asking. To read the room before it’s ready to speak.

That shaped how I design. I know in some circles this approach gets dismissed. But I’ve seen the power of making space for what’s unsaid. There is language—it’s just slow to arrive. The work is in listening long enough to let it come through.

What’s a moment in your career where the project demanded more from you than planned—not creatively, but emotionally? How did you hold the weight of it?

Liz: It’s rarely the project that weighs the most—it’s the power dynamics behind it. Not clients, but teams. The politics, positioning, the quiet dismissals. That’s the real labor: staying clear on purpose when the room doesn’t reflect it back. Holding focus when the air around the work gets murky.

You’ve worked with clients who live in extremes—minimalists at heart but maximal in life. How do you design around contradiction without defaulting to compromise?

Liz: To me, that’s not contradiction—it’s symbiosis. One speaks to the other. My imagination is constant—ideas, motion, sensing—so I need minimalism around me to stay grounded. Order isn’t aesthetic; it’s a cognitive need. Many of my clients feel the same. What looks like tension is actually balance.

The work asks for precision—but also softness. Structure, but not control. How do you hold that tension in your creative process without tightening it too much?

Liz: For me, everything starts in the soft: sensing, feeling. From there, it’s constant management. That’s what I bring: the ability to hold both. Not everything needs to be said out loud. A contractor doesn’t need to know a detail feels like the moment before fingers touch in the Sistine Chapel. They need a drawing that gets it right. That’s the job—holding the poetry in one hand, the schedule in the other.

In ultra-luxury, feedback is rarely direct. Approval is often a feeling, not a phrase. How do you know when you've gotten it right?

Liz: My clients may not always want to get into how something’s built—but they care deeply about what it means. What the space signals, how it functions, and whether it reflects what they stand for. It’s not “Do you like this?” It’s “Does this uphold what matters to you?”

I’ve worked with clients who didn’t want shared sofas in leadership spaces—not for comfort, but to uphold sovereignty and personal boundaries. That’s not aesthetic. That’s design as intent.

I know it’s right when the space meets them where they are—how they move, what they need, how they want to be seen. It’s not about approval. It’s recognition.

What’s something you’ve had to unlearn about how people actually inhabit space—especially when their lives don’t mirror your own?

Liz: Every project is a kind of cognitive dissonance. My worldview gets shaken—gently, sometimes not so gently—and asked to merge with someone else’s. I wouldn’t call it unlearning. It’s more like learning to sit with my own discomfort. Letting it be beside me, without letting it take over. That tension is part of the work. It keeps me honest. It keeps the design human.

Cold plunging is a ritual that resets the nervous system. Do you find echoes of that sensation in your work—moments where space itself shocks, soothes, or awakens?

Liz: Yes—there are moments in design that feel like a quiet shock to the system. Like a cold plunge, they wake something up. The discomfort doesn’t go away, but it settles. You learn to hold it. I think good spaces do that. They disrupt just enough to bring you fully into the present—and then invite you to stay.

You build in silence, but you also shape emotion. Do you ever worry the subtlety gets missed in a world addicted to the loud and obvious? How do you stay rooted in the quiet?

Liz: I don’t think the world craves loud—I think people are taught to believe that’s the only way to be seen. But subtlety doesn’t get lost; it just moves differently. Sometimes it’s a shift in sightline, a sequence, a pause—and suddenly, the space speaks.

I stay rooted in the quiet because it’s structural. It’s how trust is built. How a space earns its calm. And in the end, it’s what people remember, even if they don’t know why.

You often talk about proportion and geometry as intuitive rather than imposed. But when the stakes are high and timelines tight, how do you defend intuition as a form of rigor?

Liz: I don’t defend it. Some things don’t need to be explained. That’s something I’ve learned over the years: not everything needs to be named in the room. I apply my filter, stay attuned, and speak to what matters for the people in front of me.

Intuition isn’t the opposite of rigor. It’s what shapes how a space feels, how a story lands, how trust builds. It’s there in the atmosphere, in the clarity, in the decisions that hold.

People who work with me tend to slow down a little. They start to care more about nuance. And over time, that care earns its own respect.

Many creatives suffer from visibility fatigue—especially when their work resists trends. How do you sustain your voice when algorithms reward noise over nuance?

Liz: I ignore algorithms. Not because I’m above it but because I’m building something different. My work, my voice—it doesn’t come from the outside in. It comes from attention, rhythm, and trust in the long arc.

I don’t buy the idea that noise always wins. Algorithms reward consistency & clarity. Nuance, when practiced over time, becomes unmistakable.

Resisting trends isn’t a weakness—it’s a strategic advantage. When you’re not playing the dominant game, you’re free to see it clearly—and rewrite the terms. You stop chasing visibility. You start building something people actually remember. David didn’t beat Goliath by matching his size. He won by seeing the fight differently.

What’s a belief, ritual, or private practice that anchors you—something that would never show in a design rendering, but without it, none of the work would hold?

Liz: I’m an introvert, so time alone is essential. Space to think and feel without interruption. Music grounds me. Art resets me. On warm days, I’ll sit outside with my hands in the sand or take short naps between stretches of work. Without it, the work wouldn’t hold. I need that inner rhythm to do what I do.

Lastly: if you could fast-forward five years—not to awards or press, but to one quiet moment—a client walking into their home, a visitor pausing mid-step—what would you want them to feel?

Liz: Some of my favorite moments are when clients tell me there’s a detail they see every day, and it never gets old. It keeps offering something—calm, clarity, even awe. That’s the kind of beauty I care about. The kind that holds up, quietly, over time.