Lisa Kahn stands at her dining table
Photography by Dan Cutrona

The Healing Home: How Lisa Kahn-Allen Transforms Naples Interiors into Sanctuaries

Merging science and spirituality, the designer crafts interiors offering more than aesthetics—her creations provide refuge in a chaotic world.

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Lisa Kahn-Allen has spent more than a decade answering one question: What is sanctuary?

In the interior designer’s home, it’s a patio-facing section of her great room, with plush furnishings to help her relax into a book, a swinging chair to ease her into transcendental meditations and a worktable to flesh out ideas. In her Goodlette-Frank Road office, it’s a meditation room for staff. At Youth Haven, Southwest Florida’s only shelter for children, it’s a cottage she renovated for the youngest kids, with soothing paint colors and lighting. 

A prolific designer since moving to Naples in the late-’90s, Lisa has become the go-to for serene spaces that are as in tune with the environment as they are with the people inside. Her work spans Gordon Drive estates, hotel interiors, nonprofit headquarters, and a collection of serene decor with Chelsea Home. “It’s a threefold idea: it’s a physical space to cultivate your inner sanctuary; a life philosophy with a lens to look at the world; and a daily practice, things that fill your vessel, like journaling and meditating,” Lisa says. The brand’s tagline, ‘peace around, peace within,’ is a mantra forged in the crucible of life experience.  

In 2015, Lisa was desperate for peace, as she juggled her eponymous design firm with the care of her teen daughter, Chloe. As a toddler, Chloe was diagnosed with autism and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), a behavioral condition that can lead to anger, inappropriateness, confrontation and disobedience. She had trouble making friends and got kicked out of most schools and organized programs. “I was constantly running interference, thinking, ‘Do I protect Chloe from the world or the world from Chloe?’” Lisa recalls. A lifetime of treatments, specialists, medications and alternative remedies came with mixed results. “I felt hopeless, like I’d failed as a mother,” Lisa says. 

Today, the designer gets teary remembering her daughter’s graduation speech or how she’s thriving now at 25, active with STARability Foundation and looking for a full-time job. Her daughter’s turning point was also a pivotal moment for Lisa. After being told Chloe’s only option would be a residential program, Lisa turned to the Naples mental and behavioral health nonprofit David Lawrence Centers (DLC) for an alternate path. 

For two years, Chloe received near-daily care from a team of five. One day, the therapist suggested creating a toolbox of resources Chloe could tap to work through her feelings. Something clicked. Lisa thought back to a rare moment of clarity six years earlier, when Chloe started having seizures, an issue that persisted for years. The designer was also slogging through The Great Recession and a divorce. On a morning walk, the word ‘sanctuary’ came to her. 

‘What if they created a sanctuary for Chloe?’ she asked. Working with the therapist, Lisa started to see things differently. Her daughter didn’t need to be ‘fixed’—she needed to be seen and accepted as her own person and brought into the solution. She needed a safe space to center herself, recharge and escape from the external stressors that could aggravate her symptoms.

As a designer, this was something Lisa was uniquely equipped to create. She took Chloe’s room and installed injury-proof, plush carpets and low-lying furniture; soft fabrics to soothe; pillows to punch or play with; and a speaker for calming music. “She would come back out as the kinder, gentler version of herself,” Lisa says. The energy in the home shifted immediately. “There was this dawning awareness of the beauty of Chloe and all the wonderful, amazing things that are part of her personality and part of her mind—it was so delightful to discover all these wonderful things inside her,” she adds.  

Inspired by the change, Lisa started looking for ways to reproduce the concept in other parts of her life and solidify the design philosophy she’d been mulling over since her 2010 epiphany. Through reading about sacred spaces, researching the psychology of design and earning a master’s in holistic studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Lisa realized she had been building sanctuaries all along; she just lacked the vocabulary to explain it to herself or her clients.

Her office became a ‘sanctuary lab’ for testing candles, textures, color combinations and layouts to see how they’d affect the energy of a space. She launched a blog to share her findings and reflections and eventually rebranded her brand to Finding Sanctuary by Lisa Kahn Designs in 2022. Over the years, and with support from her COO and husband, Philip Allen, Lisa’s ideas crystallized into a tangible framework.

She taps into color theory (how hues affect mood), environmental psychology (the impact of our surroundings), neuroaesthetics (how our brains respond to art and beauty), and biophilia (humans’ tendency to seek nature) to fill spaces with science-backed mood enhancers, as well as principles from her spiritually driven, integrated studies. Her projects display a trademark use of serene blue hues, decorative foliage, imagery of birds and butterflies, and symmetrical shapes, which are said to be easier to process and soothing. 

She thinks of sanctuaries as toolboxes full of restorative elements. “My job is to identify the things that are symbolic of comfort and well-being for you and then to weave these things into an environment that is deeply, soulfully resonant,” she says. While Chloe’s sanctuary called for soft pillows to “punch when she’s angry and sit on when she’s happy,” Lisa needed writing tools, crystals and favorite books to turn to for an uplifting passage. For one client with a space-loving son on the autism spectrum, Lisa designed a room with a mosaic of planets on a wall, constellation wallpaper and solar system fixtures.

The designer continuously explores the meaning of sanctuary through her work with nonprofits. In 2017, she revamped the Children’s Outpatient Services’ waiting room at DLC. Working with artist Clayton Brown, she installed a giant papier-mâché tree—a grounding moment for patients at the nonprofit that provided solace and direction for the Kahn-Allen family years before. Lisa wanted to pay it forward and amplify the group’s impact. “If this [transformative care] is happening in this environment, imagine what could happen if we put the tenets of sanctuary here,” she recalls thinking.

She’s gone on to work with The Shelter for Abused Women & Children, where Lisa transformed a fluorescent-lit intake room into a refuge with gentle lighting, soft furnishings and art to warm up the windowless room. “We added a little toy box off to the side so the kids could be occupied while their moms were sharing their stories,” she says. Now, the design maven is working with Gulfshore Playhouse, helping bring the outdoors in via an oak statement wall, terrazzo flooring and wallpaper with golden bursts resembling the sun; and she plans to help STARability Foundation with their new campus for adults with disabilities. Through each project, Lisa is intent on sharing the wisdom. “If I hadn’t experienced it myself, seen such profound shift with my family, my kid, my clients, I might say it’s kind of woo,” she says. “But it isn’t; it’s concrete—something I can hang my hat on and know it’ll help.”