A lifetime of design. A career of understanding people

Annie Behrens

I am a Venezuelan physiotherapist with over 30 years in the medical field, a career that has taken me from working alongside the Venezuelan Ballet Company, treating the particular pain that lies beneath beauty and precision, to more than two decades working in the medical field here in Australia.

For thirty years, what I loved most about being a physio was simple: helping people feel better. Understanding how a body moves, where it holds tension, and what it needs to function well and then watching someone walk out lighter than they walked in.

A few years ago, I made a change. Interior design had always been an inclination in me, not a new idea; I grew up in a house where furniture never stayed still for long, where my mother, an interior designer, would shift a piece six inches or curate a single object with such care that a space would become both beautiful and effortlessly functional. Watching her work was my first education in design, taught long before I ever called it that.

Studying interior design later in life felt less like starting over and more like finally naming something I had always understood. My physiotherapy background gave me a precise, practical understanding of how bodies move through space, and how much quiet stress an environment can create when it works against the people living in it. I have simply turned that same instinct toward rooms instead of bodies.

Making people better was the work of my first career. Making spaces better is the work of this one, and I have come to believe they were never really two different things.