The Pfeiffer Design Series: Where the Love of Design Began

Join us as we interview Susie Pfeiffer, Director and Founder at Pfeiffer Design, to uncover the journey behind her 30-year success story. In this series, we’ll be diving into where Susie started and how she’s developed Pfeiffer Design into a cornerstone of design excellence in the South East of England. Kicking off Part 1, we’re exploring Susie’s early life and career, and where Pfeiffer Design all began.

For many designers, the love of interiors develops gradually, shaped by experience and exposure over time. For Susie Pfeiffer, however, that spark ignited at a very young age.

“I can remember as a child being so engrossed in a picture book about a fantastical house called The House that Beebo Built,” Susie recalls. “I continuously made houses out of boxes and any containers I could lay my hands on.”

This imaginative curiosity soon became a hallmark of her personality – a creative child fascinated by the idea of shaping spaces, even before she knew such a profession existed.

A Creative Upbringing

Susie’s mother nurtured her love of art and design by filling her childhood with visits to stately homes and art museums during the summer holidays. “She really encouraged me to explore creativity,” Susie explains. “Those visits opened my eyes to the beauty of architecture, history and design – and I think they quietly planted the seeds of what was to come.”

Her father, on the other hand, instilled something very different: an entrepreneurial streak. Growing up in a family business, Susie always had a vision that she would one day run her own. The combination of artistic influence and business acumen laid the foundation for what would later become Pfeiffer Design.

A Seed Planted Early

Looking back, Susie admits she didn’t immediately realise that interior design could be a career path. “At the time, I didn’t really realise interior design could be a profession; I simply knew I loved imagining and shaping spaces.”

This innate passion would eventually evolve into a career that seamlessly merged creativity with practicality, a love of aesthetics with the realities of how people live.

For Susie, those early experiments with boxes and picture books were more than childhood play – they were the very first steps on a journey that would lead her to become a designer, a business owner and ultimately, a creative leader in the world of interiors.

In our next journal post, Susie shares how she first broke into the design industry, the challenges of being an interior architect in the late 1980s and the pivotal projects that set her career in motion.