When Creative Stars Align: Glenna Stone ’97 of Glenna Stone Interior Design

Glenna Stone ’97 thought she might like to do something creative for her college major but was encouraged by her artist mother to instead pursue her strengths in math and science. So the Delaware native came to Lehigh because of the reputation of its engineering program — and she fell in love with the campus on sight.

Focusing on the technical
After earning her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, Stone got a consulting job at PricewaterhouseCoopers working with Fortune 500 consumer products companies. “It was a lot of supply chain management and process optimization from a manufacturing perspective — what I went to school for.”

Stone was later offered an opportunity to work directly for Gillette. And while she loved her career, her creative side needed an outlet. “I took an interior design class at the Rhode Island School of Design and got completely hooked,” Stone says. “It was the perfect blend of the creative and the technical, and I saw how I could leverage so much of my educational background and my work experience in that field.”

In 2007, Gillette was acquired by Procter & Gamble. Staying with the company would have required a transfer to Cincinnati, Ohio. Stone and her husband, Matthew ’98, decided instead to move closer to their families in Philadelphia. She left Gillette and began a three-year graduate program in interior architecture and design at Drexel University.

The business of creative expression
After receiving her master’s degree in 2010, Stone began slowly building her firm, Glenna Stone Interior Design, on her own schedule, which afforded her the flexibility to care for her two young children. “The first few years I worked out of my home. Now, 14 years later, I have a nine-person interior design firm,” Stone says.

"Your home is such an important space — it’s where you spend so much of your time. Being able to impact people’s lives in such a personal way is so rewarding.”

Things are going quite well for Stone: She and her company were recently named a 2023 New Trad Rising Star of Design by Traditional Homes magazine. Her work has been featured in Traditional Home, Architectural Digest, Home and Garden, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Forbes.

The firm’s clients are a mix of residential and commercial, mostly within a two-hour radius of Philadelphia, including New York City and Jersey Shore towns. But working on clients’ second homes has taken Stone and her designers as far as Martha’s Vineyard, California, and Florida.

Challenges met
Stone finds that most people don’t realize the complexity of the interior design world, in which she manages not just the creative details of a job but also integrates the work of architects, builders, and landscape architects. “We bring everyone’s designs together to create these beautiful projects,” she says. “There are a lot of details to be sorted through, but that’s what I like about it — that’s what makes it fun.”

Her favorite project so far, Stone says, has been working with a client to first build a detached three-car garage with an apartment above it, then designing the main home, a pool house, and a barn — complete with a bowling alley. “It’s been an incredible project, working with an awesome project team. Sometimes the creative stars align when it’s the right project, the right team, and a spectacular client.”

Lehigh connection
Having a background in industrial engineering has been advantageous for Stone in her interior design career. Her well-rounded Lehigh education has also helped her run her business. “I took a lot of business and accounting classes as part of my major,” she says. “I learned to read a balance sheet and understand a profit and loss statement. And at Lehigh, nothing’s handed to you — you learn how to figure things out on your own. In design, there’s so much of that. People come to us with a vision of what they want, but there’s no roadmap of how to get there. It’s up to us to create that for them.”

“I feel so lucky,” Stone says. “I know there are many people who don’t love what they do every day. Your home is such an important space — it’s where you spend so much of your time. Being able to impact people’s lives in such a personal way is so rewarding.”