Jennifer Welch on Life, Design and Larry
Welch, like many high-level creatives, is paradoxical. She’s a bold-thinking extrovert who likes her solitude and prefers to be in her pajamas by 8 o’clock.
There may be a reason you’ve never seen Jennifer Welch and comedian Larry David in the same room. Kidding. Sort of. If they’re not actually the same person, the uncomfortably funny curmudgeon is, at the very least, her spirit animal. For one thing, Welch is really smart and hilarious. Like belly-laugh hilarious and Mensa smart. For another, at the end of the day, she really just wants to be left alone. She wants to get up really early, work really hard and then go home.
Perhaps that’s why she’s been pretty sanguine throughout the year-plus of quarantine, other than during her bad, long-haul bout with COVID-19. “Honestly it’s mostly been good for me. I don’t miss socializing. I find that the older I get, the fewer people I need in my life,” she says. “I don’t have to lie anymore. My kids are too big now to use as an excuse not to go places. I talk all day long at work, and when I come home, I’m all talked out.”
She (sort of) jokingly says she suffers from FOMB (fear of missing bedtime), not FOMO (fear of missing out). “I shine in the mornings. I wake up before sunup and if I happen to be somewhere and it gets to be about 8:45 pm, I get anxious. I need to be home. For me, about eight hours of sleep is ideal. I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t smoke. My life is very scheduled, like a toddler,” she says, laughing.
Welch, like many high-level creatives, is paradoxical. She’s a bold-thinking extrovert who likes her solitude and prefers to be in her pajamas by 7:45 or 8:00. She’s an avid global traveler with a designer wardrobe that will blow your mind, but she also loves athleisure and tennis shoes and has honed her non-travel life down to only what’s crucial to her: family, business, fitness and pets. Mostly one dog. Tubby is Welch’s soulmate. “Tubby was originally a gift for my son Roman,” she says, but fickle fate intervened, and Welch fell in love with the French Bulldog.
Her older son Dylan is leaving for college in the fall, and, like for most parents, the transition is bittersweet for Welch. He’s going to Syracuse to study journalism, and she’s extremely proud but also a little misty about his childhood being all but over. Younger son Roman saw a chink in her armor and wisely seized the moment, making his move. “My child has been rather irritated with me for about five years that I stole his dog, and he has a valid point… so Roman caught me at a weak moment, and he’s like, Dylan’s leaving and I’m going to be so lonely and you’ve got to get this dog for me.” Enter Cha-Cha Welch, French Bulldog and newest member of the family.
“I used to not say it, I was like ‘I don’t have a favorite dog,’ but Tubby’s my favorite dog. And he’s actually my favorite creature that I live with. I love my children, but they are moody. Sometimes they are assholes. But Tubby is consistently happy to see me -- if I’m gone an hour or if I’m gone a week. Children are distant, conditional, depending on their mood or if they’ve eaten,” she says, laughing, “So now I’ve completely come out of the closet about it and said Tubby is my favorite creature on the planet, but my kids are 14 and 18 and they’re like ‘fair enough.’”
You may know the now-famous Tubby from his starring role in the 2017 hit Bravo reality series “Sweet Home Oklahoma,” which followed Welch and her cadre of sophisticated yet wackadoo friends, family and colleagues through their daily adventures. In addition to Cha-Cha, the Welch menagerie also includes a Pomeranian named Spike and a cat, Kitsky, who’s remarkably high-maintenance. “Kitsky has asthma and diabetes, so we use an inhaler, and I give her two shots a day.” If there was ever a question that these are truly miraculous times, the cat inhaler is all the evidence needed.
Aside from being a walking “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode, Welch is also a divinely talented designer, whose work takes her all over the nation, from Rye, New Hampshire, to Houston to Des Moines, albeit these days often by Zoom. “Rye is a little beach town on the East Coast. Our projects are all over the United States, and you know, there are these pockets of sophistication all over the country, kind of like in Oklahoma City.” She’s got about 20 projects on deck at the moment and has just collaborated on a line of fabrics for the indoor-outdoor textile company, Link Outdoor.
“Prior to COVID-19 hitting, Link Outdoor asked me to collaborate with them on a fabric line, so I worked with their design team and we created a fabric line, and I’m just really excited about it because, as an interior designer, you have clients who want nice things but they want to be able to enjoy them. So if you buy a really expensive sofa but you’re scared to have a cup of coffee on it or drink a glass of wine on it, you’ve spent all this money for something you just feel like you can’t enjoy,” she says. The fabrics from Link Outdoor are soft, lush and fabulous and her collection is based around textiles she loves: Ikat fabrics from Turkey and Uzbekistan.
Another big, super-empowering event in the past year: Welch bought a building, a headquarters for her empire. “Jennifer Welch Design had been a renter for all of my interior design career, and in early summer I bought a building for my firm. It felt really great. I bought it. I didn’t have to ask my dad, I didn’t have to ask a husband, I bought it. It’s a really beautiful space with all this natural light. I love it. The greatest thing about my career is having the freedom to completely live your life the way you want to.”
That world, the world Welch has created for herself, means dogs are sleeping under her desk and a framed photo of Larry David is sitting on top of it.