A Chance Encounter And A Life Of Design

It’s not the walls that talk in ’s Velvet Mill space but the objects.

MaryLys Jackson has filled every nook and cranny of the interior planning and design firm’s Stonington office with something. An antique fireplace, a family member’s drafting table, watercolors, books, the list goes on, and yet the space is inviting, lived-in, and organized in a way that simply works.

“Everything has a story,” Jackson said. “Reuse, recycle, renovate,” she adds with a smile.

Two ideas that she tries to use everyday as the owner of Interior Connections LLC in Stonington.

Jackson takes on any task whether it is a simple an inexpensive room staging from existing pieces or the modernization of a healthcare facility such as Lawrence and Memorial Hospital.

An interior designer for 30 years and owner of her own business for 20 there isn’t much Jackson hasn’t seen or done.

“Sometimes, the client has to have patience,” she said explaining about a recent project where just days before she was to have cabinet delivered to a client a fire destroyed the cabinet maker’s business. The cabinetmaker started over, but the client had to expect the unexpected something Jackson learned early in her career.

“I thought was going to be a teacher,” Jackson said.

As a student at the University of Connecticut Jackson stumbled into someone’s dormroom one day and seeing what the time were foreign objects and plans in front of her asked the person what they were. The person replied I’m an interior designer and the rest is as they say history.

But in a way Jackson had always been moving towards a life of design. Her grandfather was an architect and she started drawing at seven or eight when he put a scale in her hand. The drafting table in her office is his.

Jackson calls herself the hidden consultant in Stonington’s Velvet Mill where she has had her business since 2008, and yet her work can be seen around the area. Her projects include the modernization of L&M hospital, the Cherenzia Companies and move into their Newport storefront.

“We’re products of our environment,” Jackson said. “It’s important to work in a nice environment, you’re happier more productive.”

Studying environments and making them better is not only part of Jackson’s job, but something she just can’t help doing. With an interest in alternative medicine, the environment and history Jackson is always studying how things are changing and documenting it on the side through the photographs and watercolors that also line her workspace.

She’s says Stonington and New London county have changed significantly over the 27 years she has been here and so has the industry. 

And she continues to change making a home for herself in Stonington.