Perfect Spaces

Tish Miller’s life-long love of creating balance and comfort coalesces into a career as one of the region’s premier interior designers

ARTICLE BY MICHAEL DEVAULT | PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRAD ARENDER

When Tish Miller was a young girl, there wasn’t much of a question in her mind what she wanted to do with her life. Her father also had designs for his daughter’s career might look like. The problem was that their visions weren’t exactly in synch. In fact, they both envisioned completely different professional journeys.

“Of course we encourage things that we know and love,” Tish tells BayouLife. From the time she was a student at Sallie Humble, Tish’s father, Dr. Myron Bailey, had encouraged her to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in the medical field. Tish had different ideas. “But both my mom and my dad were happy to have me find my own way, and I wanted to be in fashion.”

Throughout junior high at River Oaks and high school at Neville, Tish returned time and again to the idea that she’d like to work with textiles, design clothes and maybe own a boutique of her own. It took a little convincing, but Tish finally persuaded her father that her future was in fashion. Her mother was also a strong influence in her life, pushing her to follow the path Tish saw for herself.
“She has always been my biggest cheerleader and supporter,” Tish says of her mother. “She taught me to be my own person, and she always believes in me.”

After studying first at Louisiana Tech and then at the Fashion Institute, her father encouraged her to pursue the opportunity. He insisted she learn every aspect of the business, bringing a surgeon’s mind to bear on a sprawling industry with hundreds of potential career paths.

“I had ended up at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York,” she says. “It was there that I was offered a position at Jacques de la Marre and Associates overseeing Atlanta and Dallas showrooms.”

Tish went on to spend five years in Dallas with de la Marre and Associates. Along the way, she began to realize the time was fast approaching for her to step out, finally, and open her own store. By 1992, she felt she was ready. She had a few criteria she needed to meet, first Tish knew she wanted to return home to Monroe to open her store. She also had traveled extensively, so she knew she didn’t want just another clothing store in another strip mall. Instead, Tish envisioned a neighborhood clothing shop, the kind of quaint place one might discover by accident. When a building became available on North 3rd Street in Monroe’s Garden District neighborhood, she knew the “right time” had come.

The Indigo Company opened in 1992, and Tish filled the store with the kinds of beautiful, unique designs that she believed Monroe buyers would like. Very quickly, they added accessories for the home to the collection. As customers came in, Tish did what any good retailer does. She followed the opportunities, always knowing that she wanted Indigo “to be a little different.”

By the time the building next door came available, Tish was offering private label bedding in addition to her clothing designs. They expanded the business and added even more offerings. Inside Indigo was born.

“It evolved, changed, and grew,” Tish says. “We expanded that part of the business and started to bring in furniture.”

Customers adored Tish’s flair for staging a space, selecting the perfect pieces of furniture and the accessories to bring them to life. She even recruited local artists to create works, hang them in the store and sell them. As the store’s furniture offerings expanded, so too did Tish’s efforts to present them well. Whole rooms in the two stores began to take on a particularly Tish Miller feel. As the interest in Tish’s work on home interiors expanded, the offerings inside her stores followed suit.
“The two buildings ended up being almost completely taken over by furniture,” Tish says.

Before long, customers weren’t just picking Tish’s brain for ideas and tips on how to create the perfect space. They were actively seeking her out to come do rooms in their houses. She’s unsure of the first time she stepped into someone else’s space to bring her touch to their home. But soon enough, her designs were finding their way into homes across northeast Louisiana.

Tish’s designs feature a mixture of old and new, contemporary and classic, and organic metallics and woods. Whether the woods she selects are rough or finished is driven more by the each project than a preconceived aesthetic.

“It’s all about how a space feels to me—the curated items selected and the quiet spaces between,” Tish explains. To round out her designs, she layers neutrals with earth tones and warmer colors for a lush, yet classic feel. Each accessory is hand-selected from the owner’s own possessions, a slew of markets and antiques stores. She’s also not afraid of bold statement pieces or subtle understatement. The result is an always-inviting, sometimes contradictory environment onto which she imprints the owner’s wishes.

Elegant and refined, yet at once comfortable, each of her rooms is unique, expressive of both the owner’s desires and their needs. Unlike other designers whose works all fall into a similar aesthetic vein, in no situation is there a clear “Tish Miller style.” Yet it’s clear any time someone steps into her creations that she’s the one who perfected the space.

Between the two stores and work for dozens of clients, Tish found herself traveling to five or six markets a year, a grueling schedule of travel-shop-purchase-install that would slow anyone else to a crawl. If operating two stores and a burgeoning career as an interior designer proved a challenge, though, Tish took it in stride and decided to start a family.

First came a daughter, Bailey, followed a few years later by her second daughter, Emery. Adding motherhood to the busy schedule was just a matter of course for Tish, whose energetic nature and natural buoyancy infused everything she did with a youthful enthusiasm. Each week, it seemed, design was where she was headed. However, she’d been working for a long time to establish the stores as fashion houses first, furniture stores second.

Four and a half years at Jacques De La Marre had prepared her well for running a boutique, providing her the business acumen to navigate the transition. She credits her father’s steadfast advice and direction with her tenacity.

“When I began going down the road into fashion, I wanted to know everything, learn everything I could, about the business,” Tish says. “My dad pushed me into that. He understood it was my career choice, but he wanted to make sure I understood what it was I wanted to do.”

Tish likens the process she undertook to becoming a surgeon. The methodical nature in which she dissected the industry, becoming intimately aware of each level of the fashion business, and understanding how they all relate helped to inform her journey. It was a journey with many stops, to be sure. By the time 1992 rolled around and it was time to open Indigo Company and, later, Inside Indigo, Tish knew what she wanted.

“I wanted to come up with something organic, comfortable and not foreboding or confrontational in any way,” she says. In Indigo Company, she chose something that fit her business and design goals. “I knew I didn’t want my name on it. We were very life-style driven, approachable and relatable.”
For almost 20 years, Tish operated the Indigo Company and Inside Indigo until, at last, the demands of her now-thriving design business overtook the time she could spend on the store. She shuttered the shops and set out as Tish Miller Design, the business that’s combined all of her loves, from textiles and décor to layout and design.

Her girls grew up, Tish’s business thrived, and it seemed life was moving forward in all the ways she had always hoped. Bailey went to Houston to pursue a career in contemporary art, while Emery ended up at LSU in New Orleans, studying nursing. Tish’s design company continued to flourish, and though she missed some of the hustle of the shops, she knew she had made the right move.

“I made a lot of beautiful friendships, just beautiful relationships and connections during that period,” she says. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

At the end of September, 2015, Tish faced her biggest challenge yet, when doctors informed her that symptoms she’d been experiencing were due to B-Cell Lymphoma. She immediately headed to MD Anderson, in Houston to “figure out the best treatment,” relying on the advice and experience her sister had had with the hospital.

MD Anderson Cancer Center is one of the world’s premier treatment and research facilities for persons with cancer. The hospital has a long record of innovative and thorough treatment. Her oncologist set her at ease with the coolness and intent with which he approached treating her cancer, which she says he didn’t stage.

“He said he treats everything like it is Stage 4, which I really appreciated,” she says.

From October of 2015 through July of 2016, she underwent numerous treatments, a grueling process made more difficult by the cancer’s invasion of her central nervous system. She calls cancer an “awkward, ugly disease,” because each case is different, each tumor responds differently, and these constantly shifting sands make treating the disease especially hard. For someone with a long history of rising to the challenge, cancer and treatments became a new awakening of sorts.
“It was a challenge, but a different kind of challenge,” Tish says. As bad as it was, she still felt blessed. Friends and family rallied around her, her doctors were encouraging, and in the end, she persevered. She’s been cancer-free for two years.

“There were so many blessings within that very scary period of time that, maybe, something was telling me to slow down, look around, and just stop for a minute,” she says. “It was a quiet time, an introspective time that I felt, in spite of the reason I was having to be quiet and introspective, that within all of that was a blessing. I saw how kind people are.”

These days, Tish is still hard at work creating some of the region’s most expressive and inviting interiors. She’s especially proud when she can create the exact environment that her clients are looking for to spend time in. Tish understands spaces shouldn’t be trendy but, instead, should be classic – in the world of the owners.

And she’s still making sure each piece, each interior, tells a story. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
“If nothing in a house has a story, it’s going to be a long time before a story is created in that house,” she says.