<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Last night was quite the competition! You had to revamp a chair, create a tablescape, and pull together an exterior garden space for ELLE DECOR. What was your favorite leg of the triathlon? I&amp;#039;m such a plant lover, so being in a nursery and doing the exterior room was definitely my favorite part. I wish I could have had all day to work on that project. What was the hardest part about creating a space for an ELLE DECOR photo shoot? It&amp;#039;s always timing. The way I approach shopping in design or even for personal clothes is by taking my time. In a nursery, I would walk through the whole space and look at each plant and look at the pricing\u2014because there&amp;#039;s always a budget involved whether it&amp;#039;s high or low. Here, your time is so limited, so you&amp;#039;re not really able to firm up the design. You just have to kind of go with it. That&amp;#039;s not really the way I work. Good design takes time. This was the first completely individual challenge. How did you like being on your own? In life, you definitely have collaborations, and for me that&amp;#039;s always really fun\u2014but that&amp;#039;s when you have time on your side and it&amp;#039;s not a competition. [In Top Design] being on your own was definitely a much better way to go. I think we all probably felt that way. It&amp;#039;s nice to have the physical help and partnership, but it&amp;#039;s nice to have your own voice. In Jonathan Adler&amp;#039;s blog  on Bravo, he compared your space in the third challenge to the plant section of Wal-Mart. Those are some pretty harsh words. Can you explain what you were going for in your design? It definitely wasn&amp;#039;t sugary or pretty, and it&amp;#039;s not something that everyone was going to like. What I was going for was more of a Zen, more of a serene, space\u2014a place you could come to and kind of reflect and relax. What I wanted to do was to have this warm, rich color palette. Criticism is going to happen here and there and everywhere. It sounds cheesy, but it&amp;#039;s different strokes for different folks. Thank goodness we all don&amp;#039;t like the same things. But I did also receive a lot of positive comments. When you say you received positive comments, do mean from the judges? Todd Oldham\u2014he saw my face after the judging and he came back in and he said, &amp;quot;Sweetie, that looks great. It&amp;#039;s very sophisticated.&amp;quot; That was great because I so respect Todd. He&amp;#039;s this phenomenal, fabulous, happy person. A nurturing heart and soul is a good thing, and I definitely think Todd got that about me. I mean, I do yoga and go to Whole Foods. I garden\u2014that&amp;#039;s probably wimpy compared to some\u2014but it&amp;#039;s a good thing.  Do you think your setup would fit in a magazine like ELLE DECOR? Sure, that was kind of the point, but it would be a more modern, Zen, Asian-inspired garden. I was in the Northwest for ten years, and there&amp;#039;s a lot of that there. Zen is rather timeless and it&amp;#039;s been around forever. Those plants, they were exquisite and gorgeous. I think especially for what I do, I never want to just\u2014boom\u2014put it out there. It&amp;#039;s nice to have a space where you don&amp;#039;t see it all at first; it&amp;#039;s nice to kind of discover it. I don&amp;#039;t think they showed this on the show, but one of my favorite pieces was this beautiful little Buddha that was just nestled underneath a plant in the back. It was a space that definitely drew you in. You mentioned that you thought you were one of the weakest competitors but not the weakest designer. Can you explain? Like I said, I&amp;#039;m a Whole Foods girl. I&amp;#039;m a vegetarian. Physically, it was very, very daunting. It was 20- to 22-hour days. Everyone on the show kept talking about getting thrown under the bus. I&amp;#039;m like, no, the bus kept running us over, and I felt like it ran over me a few times. I just felt really physically weak, and I&amp;#039;m usually really fit and strong and have a ton of energy. So no time for yoga? No time or energy for yoga. I would do a child&amp;#039;s pose, and then I would start snoring. I was so beyond exhausted. It takes you down a few notches, and it&amp;#039;s tough to think quickly and move quickly and be really creative when the bus just ran over you and backed up and stopped. Somehow I was still vertical and still getting something done, and that was amazing to me. You kept referencing your modern Zen aesthetic. What are some of your influences? My mom and I used to visit this incredible mansion that&amp;#039;s now an art gallery. When I was ten years old, I remember being out on the back deck, and there was this koi pond in between the house and this beautiful gazebo with tall Corinthian columns. From the house, you could look down at the pond and see a perfect reflection of the gazebo, and from the gazebo, you could look down and see the house. It was such a simple thing, but as a ten-year-old child I could imagine how much probably went into that. That moment is what kind of did it for me\u2014just the simplicity and beauty of that koi pond.  Get the full scoop at Top Design Central. Click here to check out all the past interviews.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/interior-designers/interviews/a1766/top-design-exit-interview-teresa-a-52021/>