From the ASID Awards Stage to Our Studio Floor
Last week gave us two very different opportunities to connect with the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID): celebrating exceptional work at the 2026 ASID Design Excellence Awards, then welcoming the next generation of designers into our studio.
Together, the two moments were a reminder of what being part of the wider design community can look like. It means continuing to refine our own work, contributing to the profession around us, and making space for the people who will shape where it goes next.
Why This Matters When You’re Hiring an Interior Designer
The American Society of Interior Designers is one of the leading professional organizations advancing the practice of interior design. Through education, research, advocacy, professional development, and its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, ASID works to strengthen the profession while helping communicate the impact thoughtful design can have on the way people live.
For homeowners, a designer’s involvement with an organization like ASID represents more than industry participation. It reflects an ongoing connection to professional standards, continuing education, and the wider conversation around health, safety, accessibility, sustainability, and human-centered design.
That matters because interior design is about far more than how a room looks. A designer is considering how a space functions, how materials perform, how people move through it, and whether the finished environment genuinely supports the people living there.
For Yates Desygn, staying engaged with the wider profession is part of how we continue learning, challenging our thinking, and ultimately doing better work for our clients.
What Award-Winning Spaces Can Reveal About a Designer
At the 2026 ASID Design Excellence Awards, Yates Desygn received recognition across three distinctly different projects. For us, that range says something important: there is no single visual formula for good design. The best spaces respond to the architecture, the people using them, and what each environment needs to do.
The Dallas Design District home of Yates Desygn Studio took First Place in Commercial Corporate, Small Under 15,000 sq ft. We never intended for the studio to function as a typical office. Instead, it was designed as an experiential environment where our team and clients can sit with materials, work through ideas, and experience our process firsthand rather than simply hearing us describe it.
The same attention to customization, functionality, and craftsmanship that we bring to residential work shows up throughout the space, giving us a place to explore ideas in much the same way we do for the homes we design.
Second Place in Residential Model Home/Show Home went to our 2025 Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas space. Without a traditional client brief to work from, the room began with the architecture itself: proportion, balance, and flow. Materiality, lighting, and furnishings followed, allowing each layer to build on what was already there rather than competing with it.
That same order of thinking carries through our residential work, where lasting quality matters more than following a trend and even the smallest detail has a role to play in the finished space.
The Girl’s Room from Designer’s Dream also earned Second Place in Residential Child/Youth Bedroom/Playroom. Set within a nearly 19,000 sq ft Preston Hollow residence, the project needed to balance the home’s traditional architecture with a more personal, contemporary sensibility.
Reworking the layout gave the space its own passageway and a dedicated game room. They were relatively small architectural moves, but they helped the daughter’s suite feel more independent and more reflective of the person it was being designed for.
Seeing work recognized across commercial, showhouse, and residential categories in a single evening was meaningful because each project asked something completely different of us. The common thread was not a particular look, but the same starting point: understanding how a space needs to function, how it should feel, and who it is ultimately for.
The strongest spaces begin with listening. Once you understand how someone wants to live, work or feel in a room, the design has somewhere meaningful to go.
Bryan Yates, Yates Desygn
Opening the Studio to the Next Generation
Not long after celebrating those awards, ASID gave us another opportunity that felt just as worthwhile: welcoming interior design students from across the country into the Yates Desygn Studio.
Firm tours form part of ASID’s student programming because they offer something a classroom cannot fully replicate: a real look at how a working design studio operates day to day.
We opened our workspace for a casual conversation about our process, collaboration, and what it actually takes to move a project from an early idea to a finished room. Students toured the studio, learned how our team works together, and got a glimpse of current projects and the many moving pieces behind the rooms they may eventually see photographed.
The point of a studio tour is not to present a polished version of the profession. It is to show what happens behind the finished work, including the conversations, problem-solving, material exploration, technical decisions, and countless smaller choices involved in bringing an idea to life.
There was something especially rewarding about having students experience all of that inside a studio ASID had just recognized itself.
Passing It Forward
An award is always an honor, but being part of a professional organization also means staying actively involved in the profession around you. For us, that includes continuing to learn, supporting strong professional standards, exchanging ideas with our peers, and making room for the designers who will shape what comes next.
In the space of one week, we had the chance to celebrate where our work has taken us and open our doors to students just beginning to imagine where design might take them.
We couldn’t think of a better way to mark the moment.