Elizabeth Von Lehe, ASID

“I’m a passionate believer in design as a holistic practice — aligning our teams as the visionaries that craft amazing experiences.”

A seasoned design leader with professional experience across multiple industries, Elizabeth champions a holistic approach to design, embracing not only the built form, but branding, curation and the development of user experience from every angle. She redefines the idea of a branded environment to be thoughtful and impactful at multiple scales by helping guide the development of projects from early concept work through to execution. Elizabeth’s experience includes developing product collections for both fashion and furniture industries as well as guiding master plans and interior design concepts. The projects of which she is most proud, Elizabeth says, are those that have touched on every scale.

For example, she points to her work for 21 West End, a 660-unit residential building with almost 50,000 square feet of amenity space, as one of her favourite accomplishments. For the project, she led experience design, which encompassed strategy, community involvement and ongoing programming, interior and lighting design, art consulting and curation, along with graphic development and identity. She even designed the artist-in-residence program and selected an onsite chef, helping ensure the initial vision of the space would be filled with life and engagement.

Elizabeth is well-known throughout the design professions as a leader in the field of experience design. She is a regular keynote and workshop speaker at the national and chapter levels for the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) and the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), advocating for experience design to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration and integration beyond what most designers usually practice.

She is chair of the Executive Advisory Committee for ASID and is a regular graduate mentor and panellist for her alma mater, Columbia University. Her work has been featured in several industry publications and she has been interviewed by national outlets such as Bloomberg and NPR.