Lori Shinal was never supposed to be an interior designer.
After graduating from college in 1993 and moving back home to North Jersey with her parents, she worked catering jobs, espresso bars and eventually as a manager for Ralph Lauren’s former home collection at the Bellevue.
Shinal remembers all the ways she’d try to innovate and sell her furniture in new and unorthodox ways. The manager at the time had her dress like an equestrian, despite working in an upscale boutique hotel. What set Shinal apart, though, were the house calls.
“The Main Line clientele just loved this whole thing where I came up with this idea to go out to clients’ homes,” she says. “I just used my entrepreneurial spirit that I didn’t know that I really had.”
While out in the suburbs, she’d find herself in the homes of wealthy Main Liners dressed to go riding or yachting. There, Shinal spoke to residents about what kind of look or design they wanted in their home and recommended pieces that might suit what they already had before proposing items from the Ralph Lauren catalog.
That eccentric gig and getup became Shinal’s career for several years until 1998 when her big break came in the form of couple Greg and Leslie Schloppack. After meeting Shinal at the Bellevue on a trip, they wanted her to personally redesign their estate up in Rockport, Massachusetts. To this date, it’s still the biggest single job Shinal ever took on, and it launched her career.
“It was overwhelming, but exhilarating, for my personality,” Shinal remembers. “The challenge was so exciting.”
Such an extensive project might have been too intense for many 29-year-olds, especially those without formal design schooling, but Shinal took it on with enthusiasm.
Over the ensuing 27 years, after officially launching Lori Shinal Interiors, her business has boomed. In 2008, Shinal got her second big break when she cold-pitched her self-designed pillows to Barney’s New York.
“I got in my car with literally hundreds of pillows,” she remembers. “Drove up there, schlepped all this stuff into their hideous buying office—You would think it would be so glamorous, it was like an elevator shaft—and met with the buyer and the assistant buyer.”
The Barney’s representatives liked the design and, for the following 11 years until the outlet’s closure in 2020, her pillows had a permanent space on store shelves at one of the Big Apple’s premier boutiques.
Today, you’ll find Shinal mostly working with clients around the Main Line and other Philadelphia suburbs. She still sells her pillows as part of her client-based interior design work.
Detail-oriented and boasting decades-long relationships with builders, contractors, tradespeople and artisans, Lori Shinal Interiors has become a local institution. She wants her rooms and houses to feel livable and elegant, balancing style with utilitarianism to create thoughtful, purposeful designs.
For Shinal, it’s all about authenticity. She turned her passion for interior design into a science, where combining everything to make a gorgeous pillow or a beautiful room is an art.
Related: This 1890s Ardmore Home Blends Victorian Architecture With Modern Amenities
