Happy Black History Month!!! I am so excited this month to be having this interview with Jean Brownhill, who is literally making Black history as we speak with her company Sweeten.

Happy Black History Month!!! I am so excited this month to be having this interview with Jean Brownhill, who is literally making Black history as we speak with her company Sweeten. I have been looking forward to this interview for a while because I wanted to learn how Jean got into the contractor’s business as an architect; and how was she able to streamline a service that so many people ask me about all the time as an interior designer, “Can you refer a good contractor?” 

Jean Brownhill launched Sweeten (as in “home, sweet home”) in 2011. Today, Sweeten has nearly $1.5B of construction projects in the pipeline. The two-sided marketplace brings trust, transparency and technology to a $400B industry, creating the end-to-end standard for the renovation experience. Sweeten has been called a “Renovation Game-Changer,” with Jean hailed as “The Contractor Whisperer” by New York Magazine and one of Inc. Magazine’s “Most Innovative Women Founders in America.”

Jean is a Loeb Fellow from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where she co-founded the African American Student Union (AASU), an organization supporting African Americans in architecture, real estate and urban planning. As a member of the 2018 Class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, she recently launched SAW (Sweeten Accelerator for Women) to help female contractors build their businesses.

The Interior Design Game this week is, TRUE OR FALSE? This week we focus on a piece written by Zoe Sessums for Architectural Digest, Renovation Trends for 2021. I wanted to get Jean’s opinion on whether these ideas are really trending or just farfetched? 

I decided this week to design a shoppable mood board based on my dream ADU (accessory dwelling unit) office that would be built by a dream contractor from Sweeten one day.