German native Monika Nessbach came to Charlotte in 1999 to earn an MBA, landing an internship and then a job at the Continental Tire Americas headquarters, where she worked for 14 years. But a love for commercial design prompted her to take classes at Central Piedmont Community College for about eight years and make a change to a more entrepreneurial life.
Since 2009, she’s been building her own business, designbar, where she now works with a team of three.
“I started doing projects with friends and really found my love of [interior design],” she says.
Designbar’s clients include Continental Tire, Charlotte Motor Speedway, Biesse America, and The Vintage Whiskey & Cigar Bar in Charlotte.
Nessbach says her style tends to reflect a contemporary approach mixed with a ton of biophilia, or designing with plants and nature in mind.
She discussed her views on design in an interview that is edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your career change.
Designbar is my little baby that I started in 2009 as a side hustle and started full time in 2014. I was born and raised in Germany and came to the States about 20 years ago for graduate school at Pfeiffer University. I started working with a German company while I was still in school, and they offered me a job before I was done with my MBA.
I had a straight-laced corporate career for about 14 years, and about halfway through my career, I realized my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I did some soul searching and realized I wanted to do something creative. It always made me feel alive when I created something. Out of that, the idea of interior design started.
Why commercial interior design as opposed to residential?
I dabbled a bit, but [residential design] wasn’t for me — which is probably because of my corporate career. I had a good understanding of what employers were looking for and what was important for a company.
I started with corporate design and then ventured into hospitality design, and now we are doing multifamily remodels. It just kind of snowballed into more and more. Commercial is the realm where we operate, and corporate design is where we started.
What are the differences between residential and commercial design?
For me it is the spaces. As a residential designer, you take a look at the usage of the space for a smaller number of people. For commercial design, you think of tons of people you have to cater to, including people with disabilities and people facing different situations.
Residential design is also very emotional — which makes sense because it is dealing with people’s homes. Commercial design is less emotionally driven and more business driven with a strategy and goal in mind. Residential is a personal experience and more emotionally driven.
Why should business owners care about interior design?
Because it is a reflection of their brand. If you come into a space that is very ill-designed, has bad lighting, is dingy, or feels dirty and dark, you already have a feeling as a client. I believe the same is true for an employee.
At the end of the day, design evokes emotions. Good design evokes great emotions.
Employers also want people to come back and work. They want them to come back to the office and collaborate with each other. I feel collaboration is easier when you are one-to-one with someone or with a team of people. And, it’s a big incentive if you get to come back to a really cool space.
How should business owners approach design?
From the perspective of what you would want to have, see, feel, experience when you come back to work. What would get you motivated to come back to a workspace and spend an hour in the car and do all the logistics to come back to work?
What should employers be considering in terms of design?
We believe we will start to see hospitality design jump over to corporate design. Employees will want to have experiences when they come to work.
I think the boutique design movement that has been going on for quite a while will eventually veer into corporate design — or what corporate design is supposed to be.
If you think about it, collaborative spaces and these huddle spaces and things that make workplaces less stiff and more collaborative have been around for years. It is becoming a point where people think these spaces are nice, but they want an experience at work. People may want to take their laptop and walk over to another space and feel completely different or sit outside and feel connected. I think everything is going to be all about experiences.
Employees want to stay home. So how do you get them to come back? You offer them something they can’t have at home. This is what draws people to travel; offering experiences and locations you can’t find at home.
How do you see this shift altering your work?
It used to be that when you would come into a corporate environment, the design requirements would have more of an emphasis on schematic design — process flow, how people work together, how everything is laid out. It was less on the design side in terms of incorporating a “wow effect.”
For hospitality, it’s almost required nowadays to have experiences and those ‘Instagrammable’ moments. While that wasn’t a case for corporate, it is slowly going in that direction. ■