Piecing It Together

Interior designer Valerie Sartini channels her superpowers.

“It’s all interconnected,” Valerie Sartini says as she buzzes through the showroom, greeting a design assistant, pulling tile samples, referencing floor plans. She’s absolutely in her element.

Valerie, owner of Treasures Interior Design, explains her process for creating beautiful rooms, many of which include tile and stone. “Everything needs to be considered from the beginning. The pieces in a home—big or small—don’t function independently from one another. Our goal is to configure an entire space and present it completed. This way, the client can visualize the finished room and hopefully love it from the very beginning.”

Fitting the puzzle pieces of design together for her clients is one of Valerie’s superpowers. Well, that and her boundless energy—her ability to put those she meets immediately at ease with her girlfriend smile, her spot-on taste. Alright, Valerie has lots of superpowers.

Today she is at Ann Sacks Tile & Stone in West Hollywood, pulling tile samples together for a client’s bathroom. Val focuses on the task at hand as she peruses walls of colorful ceramic and stone. She very much knows what she’s looking for. “There are so many choices, it can be overwhelming for people. My job is to understand what my client wants and then curate and edit so I can present a few options that really wow them!”

It’s obvious that Valerie loves her work as she talks about some of the innovative ways she’s used tile and stone to transform creative vision into functional and beautiful living spaces. “We had a client redoing a pool and hot tub,” she describes, “and we really wanted to integrate it with her home and outdoor space, which was very French countryside—all lavender bushes, black wrought iron, pea gravel, olive trees. It was really simple and natural.”

Valerie and her team researched and then sourced stone and tile patterns and materials that would blend into this breathtaking backyard. “We eventually found a craftsperson to create custom-colored, hand-painted tiles for the pool and hot tub, and we added limestone pavers,” she continues. “Those materials complemented and enhanced the restrained elegance of the existing outdoor space.”

Another project where Valerie used the environment to help inform the design was when she created an outdoor pool house shower. To some designers this little space might be a throwaway, but Valerie attends to details in even the smallest parts of a home. She and her client selected a meticulously planned tile pattern to cover two walls, using the colors of water. The small tile mosaic appears to randomly spill down the fixtured wall from light to dark in a beautiful cascade of azure, midnight and turquoise blues.

“We measured the walls precisely and laid the pattern almost tile-by-tile to create the fade effect of undulating water,” Valerie explains. So instead of an afterthought, the shower is a striking and graphic piece of the home’s outdoor design.

This ability to tease out a client’s aesthetic and transform it into a visual masterpiece has taken years to perfect—years Valerie has spent working in her profession. “It’s not something you can learn on Pinterest or in a couple of years of practice,” she explains. “Many people have style and taste, but this is a learned art. For me it’s such an intuitive thing. Knowing the intricacies, the flow, the timing, working so closely with my clients and knowing how to exceed their expectations all comes with experience.”

Valerie looks happy as she works at a table surrounded by sets of stone. As she prepares to leave, she takes a visual inventory of what she’ll present to her client the next day. “I think they’re gonna love these choices,” she says with the confidence of an expert.