Meet Tara — the founder behind Yellowwood Atelier.

Fifteen years as the chief marketing officer of a national brand. A family of artists and architects. A conviction that the rooms guests photograph and post about are designed deliberately, or by accident.

The name on the door is Tara Sprakel. The studio is Yellowwood Atelier. The work is short-term rental interior design — and a few things adjacent to it that most STR design firms don't do.

This is an introduction. I want to say what I came from, why I started Yellowwood, and what we mean when we say a short-term rental should be designed for the visit, not for residents.

Where I came from.

I spent fifteen years as the chief marketing officer of a large national brand, leading multiple design and marketing teams across product, retail, and hospitality. The job was, in essence, getting people to walk into a space, feel something they didn't expect, and tell their friends about it.

That's also the job a short-term rental has to do, every booking, every weekend, every season. Most rentals are designed by people who haven't run that play before. Most are decorated by accident — a sofa from one place, a rug from another, a kitchen stocked from a Costco run, and the host hopes the photos work. They usually don't.

Editorial design is not decoration. It is composition. Every choice answers to a measurable question: what does this room ask the guest to do, and how do we make it photograph well enough that ten thousand other guests want to do the same thing?

I came up in a family of artists and architects. The dinner-table conversations were about composition, not square footage. About what a room makes you feel before you can articulate it. About why one space invites you to stay and another asks you to leave. That gets into your bones early. It's also the part of design that almost no STR firm leads with — they lead with style boards and Instagram references. We lead with the question.

Why I started Yellowwood.

What I noticed, again and again, was the gap. Between a finished interior and a finished listing. Between a beautiful design package and a property that actually books. Between the design firm that hands over a moodboard and the operator who has to live with whatever the guests do to it on a Saturday night in July.

Almost every short-term rental design firm I admired stopped at the design handoff. The interior was lovely; the photographs were lovely; the listing copy was generic; the welcome basket was an afterthought; the operations were someone else's problem. That gap is where 70% of an STR's first-year ADR and review velocity is decided.

Yellowwood Atelier exists because someone has to design across that whole arc — strategy, interior, hospitality details, launch, operations — as a single, considered piece of work. Not as separate projects handed between firms.

The design fee isn't a cost. It's the highest-yielding line item in the project — if you let it work all the way through.

What we mean by designed for the visit.

A residential interior is designed for the people who live there — for the couch they'll fall asleep on, the kitchen they'll cook in five times a week, the bedroom that has to last ten years.

A short-term rental is designed for someone they've never met, for a stay they'll only have once, for the photograph they'll take in the kitchen at 7:42am with the gold light coming through. The brief is fundamentally different. The materials have to hold up to volume use. The lighting has to be right at three different times of day. The kitchen has to be stocked for the guest who wants to cook on vacation, not for the homeowner who already knows where the espresso pods live.

And then there's the part that almost nobody plans for: the moments guests actually photograph and post about. The welcome basket. The sound on arrival. The way the towels are folded. The book on the nightstand that says, deliberately, *we thought about you*.

That's design. Not style.

What this journal is for.

The Yellowwood Atelier journal is where we publish what we know. Furnishing budgets, operator notes, hospitality details that compound across a season, the math behind editorial design, the pricing transparency we wish we'd had when we were owners ourselves.

Some of it is studio philosophy. Some of it is technical. Some of it is a free tool — like our furnishing budget estimator — that exists because we think pricing transparency is the wedge most boutique firms refuse to pick up.

We hope you'll read it. We hope you'll borrow what's useful. And if it ever feels like the work would be better in our hands than yours, the application is here when you want it.

— Tara