Priya Mehta
Lead reviewer · NCIDQ certifiedSpecialty: small-space living rooms and rental-friendly makeovers. Has personally re-styled 240+ rooms for our guides since 2019.
About · Issue No. 47
A Brooklyn studio of designers, editors and real-home decorators — publishing what actually works in real rooms.
HomeDecorTips is an independent decor publication run by 23 editors, certified interior designers and photographers working out of a converted brownstone in Brooklyn. Since 2017 we’ve documented 1,400+ room makeovers in real homes — photographed before, photographed after, and costed down to the last $2 of hardware.
Before → After
$487 total
Before
The founder
Founded by Maren Holloway, a former Better Homes & Gardens stylist who got tired of rooms nobody could afford to copy.
Maren spent eleven years styling photo shoots for Better Homes & Gardens — rooms so glossy they could stop a reader mid-scroll, and so loaded with $6,000 light fixtures that the same reader would close the magazine and reach for the takeout menu instead. When she left in 2017, the brief she wrote herself was unromantic and specific: every guide on HomeDecorTips would be photographed in a real home, every line item would have a dollar figure next to it, and no room would ever appear unless a real person had lived in it first.
Eight years later, that brief still sits above the desks of all 23 full-time editors, designers and photographers who work out of the brownstone studio on Cumberland Street. It is, more or less, the entire company in a single paragraph.
Browse the makeover archive
The review team
11 certified designers review every tip before it ships.
Every guide on HomeDecorTips passes through at least two reviewers on our in-house panel. All hold NCIDQ certification or an equivalent state-issued interior design credential, and each one is still actively taking on client rooms of their own. That’s the rule — if a designer isn’t working in actual homes, they don’t get to write about them.
Theo Park
Senior reviewer · LEED accreditedSpecialty: kitchen and bath. Built the original 5-step Room Refresh Method we still use to structure every published guide.
Carla Vance
Reviewer · ASID memberSpecialty: paint, lighting and the unsexy half of decorating. Reviews every budget breakdown before it leaves the building.
Jules Okafor
Reviewer · wellness-design certifiedSpecialty: bedroom and nursery makeovers — the rooms our readers stress about most, and the ones where our budget breakdowns get scrutinized line by line.
+ 7 more certified designers on staff — meet the full review panel below.
By the numbers
Seven years of documented, photographed, budget-broken-down makeovers.
1,400+
published room makeovers, every one photographed before and after
2.3M
monthly readers reaching the site through search and Pinterest
340K+
active subscribers to our Sunday Decor Idea Weekly newsletter
50
US states documented through reader-submitted case studies
18–22
new room makeovers and decor guides published every month
$487
average cost per room makeover, fully itemized down to the hardware
11
days the average reader takes to finish a styled room using our 5-step method
380+
free downloadable mood boards, floor plans and room templates
Press & partnerships
Featured by the publications you already read — and trusted by the brands already in your home.
We don’t buy awards and we don’t swap links. Every mention below was earned through the work, by editors who have read enough of the site to know the difference between a render-only spread and a room someone actually lives in.
Award
2024 Digital Media Awards — Bronze
Best Home & Lifestyle Publisher, presented by the Digital Media Awards jury. The citation specifically noted our transparent per-room budget reporting as the strongest entry in the category.
Press feature
“Best Home Decor Blog” — 2023 roundup
Named simultaneously by Apartment Therapy, Domino and Better Homes & Gardens in their 2023 editor-curated lists of the most useful home decor publications on the open web.
Pinterest
Top Decor Publisher — 2022, 2023, 2024
Verified Pinterest publisher across three consecutive years. 2.3M monthly readers pin from our galleries, more than any independently run decor publication in our category.
Brand partners
Trusted by 14 national furniture brands
IKEA, West Elm and CB2 are among the brands who point their own customers to our guides as a styling resource. We do not take paid placement — every link in every guide is editorially chosen.
- Apartment Therapy
- Domino
- Better Homes & Gardens
- Pinterest · Verified
- IKEA
- West Elm
- CB2
The studio
Where we work, who works here, and how often we publish.
The publication is run by HomeDecorTips Media LLC out of a converted brownstone studio in Brooklyn. Twenty-three full-time editors, certified interior designers and photographers work out of the third-floor suite on Cumberland Street; another fourteen freelance contributors shoot on-location across the country. The studio is not open to the public, but the address is below so you can verify we exist, write to us, or send a reader-submitted case study our way.
We publish 18 to 22 new room makeovers, decor guides and shopping roundups every month — never more than that, because every guide goes through our two-designer review process and we refuse to publish faster than that system can keep up.