Lynn Fleming doesn’t do trends.
She’s not the designer to call if you’re looking to recreate the latest farmhouse-chic aesthetic, or if you’re heavily influenced by Pinterest’s algorithm. Lynn doesn’t want your home to feel like someone else dreamed it up. She wants your home to feel like nothing but you, pure and simple.
Lynn has long let her artistic talents and eye for detail speak through subtle touches of luxury and spa-like comfort in her work. Once the creative force behind high-end restaurants and luxe island resorts, the Coeur D’Alene-based interior designer and owner of XACT Interiors now focuses on making her clients’ dream homes happen — exactly as they’ve always dreamed.
>> Creating luxury
Growing up in Canada, Lynn always sensed she had a “creative edge” begging to be put to good use. She first envisioned going into city planning, using her talents to create beautiful cities of the future, but she realized quickly that field wouldn’t allow her the creative freedom she desired. Lynn wanted room to stretch, bend and break the rules of design.
After graduating from the University of Manitoba with a degree in architecture, Lynn joined a small design firm that focused on hotels and restaurants. Soon, she was “locked in” to the world of luxury hotels. She orchestrated the design process for Four Seasons and Westin, and the full, five-year renovation of Victoria, B.C.’s Empress Hotel was “her baby.” Eventually, she became a director of design for the Marriott family of hotels, spearheading designs across Canada. It was “a joy” to be surrounded by talented craftsmen each day, Lynn said, by workers just as dedicated to creating a memorable design as she was.
As her husband’s job took him to new locations, Lynn followed, taking on projects in Los Angeles, Mexico and beyond, and even taught architecture as a college professor in Tennessee for a time. As the Canadian design industry began to enter a downturn in the mid-2000s, Lynn began looking for a way to reinvigorate her work — and just then, an old friend from her Marriott days came calling.
“He said, ‘We want to kickstart tourism out here in the United Arab Emirates. We’re building this massive resort to get it going, and we want you to come out and design it.’”
Lynn hopped on a plane, thinking she’d try it out for six months and head home. She ended up spending five years in the Emirates creating destinations beyond the average vacationer’s wildest dreams. At the Desert Island resort just off the UAE coast, Lynn oversaw the construction of habitats for exotic animals from giraffes to gazelles, who roamed the island freely. In the Empty Quarter, the vast expanse of desert that stretches across much of the Arabian Peninsula, she helped create a lush oasis destination among the shifting red sands.
“It was five years of pure, unadulterated design joy,” Lynn said. “But when I came back, it was time for more intimate projects, for less travel and less grandiosity, just working on the small scale.”
>> Your personal oasis
These days, Lynn’s projects aren’t quite so expansive — less private island and more private oasis. She’s often involved in the custom home design process from framing to finish, advocating for the owner’s vision by selecting just the right stone backsplash for the kitchen or arranging the light fixtures just so.
Where she had almost unlimited creative freedom during her time in the UAE, Lynn’s work now centers on creative collaboration between herself and her clients. She spends hours in conversation with clients before she ever puts pencil to paper, learning how their lifestyle will impact their living space. One client, an avid hunter, now has a walk-in cooler to store his latest kill; another client wanted a room dedicated to displaying and preserving his collection of 680 antique firearms.
“It’s always fun to kind of take that aspect into myself, to throw myself into learning about how to care for guns, in that case, though I’d never been into that myself in my own life,” Lynn said. “The result was this room with a specialized alcove for each piece of the collection, and the client was thrilled to see his passion all laid out before him in that way.”
Despite the more personal approach Lynn takes in her work these days, she still finds ways to incorporate the luxury and comfort she became so well-versed in creating during her days as a hotel designer. Those touches come across differently depending on the space, and that’s the point — Lynn works to make each home exactly the kind of comfort its owner needs it to be.
Lynn takes pride in becoming part of the house, in blending into the background seamlessly and letting her clients’ influences shine through. But there are a few elements she brings to the table regularly, borrowed from her travels around the world: pops of color, inspired by the streets of Austin, Texas and the pastel, weather-worn back alleys of Rome, often make appearances in her work.
“I think color is so, so important to our world,” Lynn said. “I don’t like the trend of monochrome, everything being black, white or gray – we have too much gray in this climate as it is.”
The projects Lynn takes on tend to be multi-million-dollar affairs, simply because those are the people who have the budgets to get so in-depth with their design. But Lynn brings an environmentally frugal ethos to her work still, often fashioning leftover building materials into one-of-a-kind furnishings that serve as elegant solutions. Her designs emphasize economy of space, encouraging homeowners to prioritize creating useful spaces that they love rather than expanding endlessly outward simply because they can.
Her ultimate goal? Someday, she’d like to design a two-bedroom house that can be prefabricated and slotted into a development, focusing entirely on reclaimed materials, eco-friendly design and affordability without sacrificing design. That’ll be the next generation of designers’ big challenge, she thinks — bringing that same comfort and warmth to homes in a world with less space and less waste.
“There’s a way to live well without living huge and wasteful,” Lynn said. “It’s something I’ve always been empathetic to in my work and it shows, and I hope the industry at large will start leaning that way, too.” N
Story by Riley Haun
Photography by Joel Riner