About 30 minutes into a conversation that began with one-liner jokes, introspective reveals and little-known stories from his childhood, DuVäl Reynolds tells me that he’s an introvert. Malarkey, I say.  

“It’s true,” the interior designer replies. “As an introvert, it takes a lot out of me to do something that involves so many people, like at Kips Bay, where I was meeting 300 to 700 people every day.” 

Turns out, if any introvert can handle the massive undertaking of the 2024 Kips Bay Decorator Show House, an annual event in Palm Beach that sees the country’s most celebrated designers and architects transform a local home plus meet an endless crowd of show attendees, it’s Reynolds. The interior designer, who has made a name for himself in his native Virginia, is venturing into the Palm Beach scene in the only way he knows how: with a bang.

Raised in the Southern town of Critz, Virginia, a community whose population hovers around 500, Reynolds says design and aesthetics were not common talking points in his childhood. “Nobody was talking about fabrics in Critz,” he says. 

What they were talking about were Reynolds’s drawings as a kid—intricate, detailed hand drawings of action figures that he would often sell to his fifth-grade classmates. When Reynolds stopped sharing a room with his older brother, Christopher, he designed his private bedroom with intent. He shifted the furnishings around a number of times until it felt spatially correct, a trait that he carries with him to this day. “I remember moving the bed several times because I can’t get to this one space fast enough, or I have to walk around the space to get there,” Reynolds says. “It’s inefficient, and inefficiency kills me.”

Today, as founder and head designer of DuVäl Design, Reynolds has shown his appreciation of efficiency on a broader scale. His work is evident in homes across not only Virginia, but also New York, Atlanta and now Palm Beach. To break into the Palm Beach scene, specifically through a prestigious design event like Kips Bay, is a feat that Reynolds speaks about with pride and humility. Because for him—someone with no familial childhood interior design influences who was on a short-lived track to attend medical school and then worked at California Closets as a receptionist and stayed on for 12 years to become a design and sales manager—the Kips Bay Decorator Show House was an unexpected notch in his career. 

“It felt that I had a voice and perspective that people wanted to see in Palm Beach,” Reynolds says of being asked to design at Kips Bay. “It’s a lifestyle that they are known for that people want to have, being elite and accessible to a few. The aesthetic is so secure: Let’s be honest, pink and green are not going anywhere.”

For his Kips Bay interior space, Reynolds used a trademark DuVäl Design concept for showcases: “Everything all at once, all at the same time.” Using baseline colors of green, pink and gold in the room, Reynolds worked in a dreamy hand-painted wallpaper to cast a warm, moody glow. Light-colored fabrics meld into dark-colored ones, circular rattan chandeliers hang from a trellis-like ceiling pattern, art deco table lamps and furnishings are accented with Scottish-inspired ottomans and a Japanese tea set. Despite the varied pieces, “everything works and nothing takes away from the entire room,” Reynolds says. “I believe design should be one symphony, it’s one sound that comes out of a room.”

When asked how he went from becoming a full-time designer in 2017 to now being a sought-after interior expert seven years later, Reynolds says nothing about his hard skills, which he solidified by earning an interior design degree, but instead quietly references his soft ones, which he says include being easy to work with and someone you can trust to make a good impression. “We got picked up in House Beautiful and Architectural Digest, and it’s people like you who keep our industry relevant and fabulous,” he tells me. “Remember, we move furniture around and work in some rough conditions, but the press allows us to feel more special.”

For his part, Reynolds is paying everything forward. As we speak on a Thursday morning, Reynolds is driving to High Point Market, a semiannual symposium that brings tens of thousands of the world’s premier designers together, where he is a panelist on three topics. Perhaps more importantly, he’s co-chairing High Point Market Authority’s Diversity Advocacy Alliance. Raised by a Korean mother and Black father in the South (“I thought of myself as ‘Blackorean,’” he says, combining his Black and Korean identities), Reynolds brings a multifaceted point of view to interior design, one that he feels is ready to be seen.

I felt that I had a voice and perspective that people wanted to see in Palm Beach.
—DuVäl Reynolds

“Our industry is shifting, and High Point Market is evolving,” he says. “The one thing that I want to do in our community is tell our own story. Other people were telling the story of BIPOC people for years, but now the framework that we are described in and the frameworks that we are telling stories are frameworks created by us and not by someone else.”

For him, that could mean creating more space for BIPOC designers in professional settings or within their own firms (just like DuVäl Design’s own diverse staff of Latinx, white, Black and Asian members, including his wife, Sara). Or, it could be featuring a BIPOC design in advertising or in a magazine. Whatever the case, for this Blackorean boy from a small Southern town, now is his time to show the design world just how beautiful and powerful color can be. “It’s a snowball effect,” Reynolds says. “Once more people see us in marketing, we won’t be considered second-rate anymore.” 

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