Founder · Editor-in-Chief
Maren Holloway
ASID · Brooklyn, NY
Small-space and rental-friendly design. Writes the weekly editor's letter and oversees editorial standards.
Issue No. 547 · About
The woman behind
312,000 living rooms.
Maren Holloway started Creative Home Decor in a 480-square-foot Brooklyn apartment in 2014. A decade and ten thousand room photographs later, the publication she built in that same small space is still tested the way it began — one real room at a time.
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Origin Story
Started in a 480-square-foot apartment.
Still tested there.
Maren Holloway was working as a residential stylist in late 2013 when she realized the home decor content she kept reading — glossy photographs of rooms that no one actually lived in — was doing her readers a quiet disservice. Recommendations arrived without context. Price tags without proof. Stylists without names.
So in March 2014, with a used camera, a Squarespace login, and one very patient roommate, she launched Creative Home Decor from the living room of her 480-square-foot Brooklyn apartment. The rule was simple: every product she recommended had to survive a real room first — her own.
Eleven years later, that rule still governs the publication. The team has grown to eleven full-time staff and nine contributing interior stylists across the U.S. and Canada. But every recommendation you read on this site has been physically placed, photographed, and lived with before it earns a byline. The acceptance rate is roughly 14% — fewer than one in seven products pitched to our editors ever makes it into an article.
"I never wanted to publish a room I hadn't slept in," Maren says. "It's a low bar. It is also, somehow, the only one that matters."
The Lead Stylists
Six credentialed interior designers.
One specialist for every room in your home.
Six of our eleven staff hold credentials from the American Society of Interior Designers. Each leads a specialty beat — so when you read a bedroom roundup, it was written by a stylist who has styled bedrooms for a decade. The names below are the bylines you'll come to recognize.
Lead Stylist, Coastal & Light-Filled Spaces
Priya Anand
ASID · Charleston, SC
Eleven years styling waterfront homes. Leads our coverage of breezy palettes, natural fiber rugs, and linen everything.
Lead Stylist, Maximalist & Pattern
Daniel Okafor
ASID · Toronto, ON
Pattern mixing, gallery walls, and color-drenched rooms. Former textile designer — brings the fabric knowledge our readers ask for most.
Lead Stylist, Scandinavian & Minimalist
Elsa Lindqvist
ASID · Minneapolis, MN
Warm minimalism, light wood, and the "less but better" school. Writes our most-clicked kitchen and dining coverage.
Lead Stylist, Heritage & Period Homes
Camille Beauregard
ASID · New Orleans, LA
Craftsman bungalows, pre-war apartments, and how to make a 1910 floor plan feel like 2025. Our most-cited expert on Architectural Digest.
Lead Stylist, Family & Kid-Friendly Spaces
Naomi Reyes
ASID · Austin, TX
Washable slipcovers, hidden storage, and rooms that survive a toddler. Three kids of her own — the in-house test panel.
The Full Newsroom
Eleven full-time staff.
Nine contributing stylists.
One set of editorial standards.
Maren leads a permanent team of eleven — a managing editor, three staff writers, two staff photographers, a style quiz producer, an audience editor, a partnerships lead, and two fact-checkers who do nothing but verify that the product linked in a paragraph is the product that ships.
Beyond that core, a roster of nine contributing interior stylists — based in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, and Montreal — file monthly dispatches from the rooms they're working in. Most readers will recognize two or three of their bylines within a month of subscribing. That's by design.
- 11full-time editorial staff
- 9contributing stylists across the U.S. & Canada
- 6ASID-credentialed lead stylists
- 3ASID advisors reviewing standards annually
Editorial Standards
Fourteen percent of what we see.
One hundred percent of what we publish.
A note from Maren on how this place actually runs.
Every product that lands in a Creative Home Decor article has been through the same gauntlet. A brand sends us a sample, or a reader asks us about a piece, or one of our stylists spots it in a room they're working on. From there, it moves to a small Brooklyn studio where two of us — usually me and one of the lead stylists — test it for at least thirty days.
We put the rug in a hallway with a dog. We hang the sconce above an actual reading chair. We launder the linen. We ask whether a guest would comment on it, or whether it would embarrass us in a photograph. If a piece can't survive three real homes, it doesn't get a paragraph. Of the products pitched to us each month, only about 14% clear that bar.
The standards themselves are reviewed once a year by an external advisory board of three ASID members, who have been quietly correcting our color-theory copy since 2017. Every monetized link on the site carries a transparent affiliate disclosure — the same disclosure, in the same place, since the publication's first week.
We are not a retailer. We do not sell products. When you click a link from one of our articles, you leave our site and land on a brand we believe in. Sometimes we earn a small commission. We have never let that change what we recommend.
— Maren Holloway, Editor-in-Chief
Press & Recognition
Quietly cited, often quoted,
and ranked among the best.
A partial list of the publications that have featured our work, and the awards we don't usually put on a shelf.
Apartment Therapy
Domino
Better Homes & Gardens
House Beautiful
Real Simple
Architectural Digest
The Spruce
HGTV Magazine
2024
Feedspot · Top 10 Decor Blogs
Ranked #4 on Feedspot's "Best Home Decor Blogs" — up from #11 in 2022.
2023
Annual Bloggers Conference
Recipient of the "Best Home Design Voice" award.
2021 → present
House Beautiful · Design Insider
Continuing contributor to the publication's expert panel.
2024
47 press citations
Editorial commentary cited across The Spruce, AD, HGTV Magazine, and Apartment Therapy last year.
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