The inside scoop on Spoak with founder, Hilah Stahl

Have you ever dreamed of turning your interior design visions into reality? Say hello to Hilah, the founder of Spoak; where crafting your ideal home environment is a fun and easy process. She is the visionary behind Spoak’s innovative tools designed to corporealise your interior design concepts effortlessly.

In this exclusive interview, we delve into Hilah’s journey of founding Spoak and her overarching vision for the brand. Prepare to be captivated by her unwavering passion for transforming interior design aspirations into reality! 

Introducing Spoak

If you were to introduce Spoak to a new user, how would you explain what Spoak is and what people can do with it? 

Spoak is a suite of easy-to-use online interior design tools – think rendering, visualizing, floor planning, budgeting, sourcing, and organizing – for both professionals and everyday hobbyists designing their own homes. 

What does “Spoak” mean, and where did the inspiration for such a unique name come from? 

The name “Spoak” is a portmanteau of the acronym OAK (one of a kind) and “bespoke.” The essence of both felt like what great design is all about, but so often gets muddied in today’s trend-based culture. Our company motto is “Do your thing,” and we really try to embody that message of individuality and empowerment in everything we do!

We know that Spoak was founded in 2018 when you were decorating your first apartment. What did you envision people doing with Spoak? Were there any surprises along the way? Did people do anything different with it that you didn’t expect?

At first, we just wanted to help people visualize their space and organize the products they were considering, so when we initially launched the tooling in 2020 it was with a V1 of both our rendering tool, Viz, and our project editor. In the four years since, we’ve added so many capabilities – many of which were based on our vision for the product, but many of which were in response to how our users were using it! For example, we recently launched an elevations tool after seeing people use our floor planner to create them.

And more broadly, we’ve loved seeing how widespread our tooling can be! We’ve seen people plan and design weddings; realtors showing their clients how their furniture might look in the home they are considering; dinner party aficionados plan tablescapes; there have been restaurants, exercise studios, spas, and even film sets designed with our tools – it feels like if it’s visually appealing and in a physical space, it’s been done with Spoak. 

Over the years, Spoak has completed over 150k design projects. What are some of your favourite Spoak designs?

It’s like asking me to pick my favorite child! I’m not sure I can. But some of the best Spoak project transformations are in our lookbook (including my house, which has been designed using nearly every Spoak feature, and I’m very proud of it)!

Spoak’s design, project, & business tools

We LOVE the super fun Interior Design Style Quiz on Spoak, which gives us our very own “Spoak sign” at the end of it. How was it developed, and how did you know you needed to introduce a quiz into the process? 

The Spoak Signs were one of the first things we launched, even before our tooling! I felt so pigeonholed by the mainstream design styles, and I never really fit into any of them perfectly. I wasn’t squarely mid-century, bohemian, eclectic, or modern – and not knowing how to articulate my aesthetic made me feel isolated from the industry as a whole. I noticed our users feeling similarly lost. They were commonly asking one another how they’d define a style based on an inspirational picture or a piece of furniture because it is never that straightforward. 

The more we wrestled with this tension, the more we also noticed how much personality plays a role in one’s aesthetic. It’s not enough to know you’re just “art deco”; it also matters how you want to use the space, and how you want the space to feel when someone is in it. The emotion behind the design is not captured in mainstream design styles.

We conceived Spoak Signs as a way to try and solve these problems – to not define your design style as a specific furniture style but rather as a state of mind. For example, the Lynx Spoak Sign is known to be adventurous and bold stylistically. They take risks and care deeply about their individuality and unique points of view. They’re the friend who not only has great clothes but also has the perfect accessory and are commonly told, “I wish I could pull that off”. That feeling, that essence, is neither mid-century nor Art Deco – but you know when you’re sitting in a room designed by a Lynx.

BeSpoak Design School is a freely accessible resource on Spoak.com and is super helpful for anyone wanting to learn the basics of interior design. What was the goal behind this initiative?

I was 28 when I fell in love with interior design. It was too late for me (and financially prohibitive) to enroll in a multi-year interior design curriculum at that point, but I desperately wanted to learn as much as I could.

My friend-turned-Spoak-advisor, Lisa Galano (Principal of Studio Cake), deeply empathized with my predicament. She is a seasoned professional and has multiple design degrees, but agreed with me that if you didn’t have the great fortune to know you wanted to be a designer when you were 18, your options for a design education were very limited. She was really passionate about helping to bridge that gap for people like me, and together we authored the entire initial curriculum. A year after BeSpoak School launched, we brought on another incredible interior designer, Tiffany Thompson (Principal of Duett Interiors), who was self-taught and enormously successful. Together they’ve co-created the entire curriculum.

Can you tell us more about the perks of being a Spoak member and how that differs from what Spoak offers to the public? 

Spoak actually is not available for free to the public, so to use our tools, you are a member! You can join our community forum for free though 🙂 

In addition to the tooling, members also get discounts at 30+ partner brands, regular design challenges with sponsored prizes, community events, and if you’re in one of the professional tiers, you also get a suite of business tools and business-specific BeSpoak School classes and free resources.

Getting to know Hilah

Okay, on to the fun stuff! As the founder of an online interior design platform, I’m sure you have your own interior style. How would you describe your own style, and has it changed a lot over the years? 

Yes! This is why we did Spoak Signs – because style is a reflection of personality, and so it changes all the time! In the past 5 years, I’ve lived in a modern apartment in Berlin and a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, and I designed them completely differently –  but they both felt fundamentally “me”. 

I’m still in Hudson, and my house is a combination of my own unique spin on eclectic meets modern meets British farmhouse meets Tuscany. I’m sure you can just picture it now, right?! 🙃

On to hobbies -vintage hunting sounds like a super fun way to spend your spare time! What’s your favourite find from your vintage adventures, and what made it special for you?

Oh my gosh, again with the hard-hitting favorite child questions!! Like all good parents, I probably do have a secret favorite… which is this floral sofa I won for $50 at an auction.

In your expert opinion, what are some of the predictions you might have for 2024 in the interior design world? 

I hope it’s trendy to have fewer trends 🙂 I feel so strongly that your home is a deeply personal space, so while trends are a ton of fun and a great way to inspire you and inform some of your smaller accessories – I hope people start to feel more comfortable paying less attention to what everyone else is doing. 

In a similar vein, hopefully, we’ll all spend less time online and more time in person (and outside) – and perhaps that will reflect in our homes. Earthy tones and materials, foraged accessories (example one, two, and three), and spaces for non-screen oriented play (game tables! Wine and cheese counters! Reading nooks!). 

So many of us out here would love to be designers of our own home! What advice do you have for those who don’t know where to start; how to not be afraid of taking that first step? 

You’d be amazed how quickly ideas come to you when you (proverbially) put pen to paper. It’s one of the many reasons I find Spoak so helpful – I can have a million inspo photos floating in my head, but then I sit down to have some fun and design the room with no strings attached, and all of a sudden, the vision comes pouring out of me. It’s as fun as playing the Sims but as satisfying as finally bringing your chaotic design vision into crystal-clear focus. It’s so empowering!

Ready to design your own space? Explore Spoak today!