A couple days before Christmas, Ursallie Smith stands at the front table of Rococo Designs with two Lena Horne pins fixed to her sweater, adjusting a small stack of glass vessels as customers drift in and out of the shop. The space holds itself in balance, shelves mirroring shelves, arrangements answering one another across the room.
At her side, Ruth, a part-time worker and mentee, strips thorns from rose stems for a holiday bouquet, her hands moving steadily as Smith glances over, then back toward the front. Nearby, Danielle M. Chery moves easily through the store, pausing to speak with Smith before returning to the wall where her work for DMC Original Art is displayed. The collaboration does not announce itself; it settles naturally into the rhythm of the room.
Smith lifts one small glass, then another, placing them gently into waiting hands. Purple Love Luxury Candle from Harlem Candle Company. Lé COCO HAUS Cannabis Santal poured in 100 percent coconut wax. Customers lean in, smelling carefully, sometimes returning to the same one twice. Smith does not rush them or explain much.
When asked about artificial flowers, she shakes her head without hesitation. She never uses them. The reason, she says, is simple. “It adds to the experience.”
Her relationship with design began when she was twelve years old, in her bedroom, a space she shaped intuitively before she had language for what she was doing. That impulse followed her to the Art Institute of Atlanta, where she studied across disciplines, moving between painting, sculpture, and art history, absorbing styles until something clicked.
She remembers being given access to all of it at once, the freedom to explore without narrowing too quickly. “I got addicted,” she says.
It was there that Rococo revealed itself to her. As part of her coursework, she was required to build a store from the ground up. When she thinks back on it now, the line between school and life collapses. “When I think about it,” she says, “I was in college, and nothing’s really changed.” The store followed her. “This is my child.”
After Atlanta, her work carried her across Maryland and Virginia, and later to the Caribbean, where she lived and worked for four years on the Turks and Caicos Islands. The shift forced her to reset. Everything there was wood and ocean color, she remembers, a palette that demanded restraint. The pace was different too.
People were laid back, almost to a fault. “Nobody’s in a rush,” she says. The contrast sharpened her attention to intention and detail. When she returned, she knew exactly what she wanted to hold onto.
Rococo Designs arrived in Bed Stuy in 2012, and Smith has watched the neighborhood change from inside its storefronts. She speaks carefully about development, choosing her words before landing on what bothers her most. It isn’t newness itself. “It’s people who don’t respect history,” she says. “History’s not important to them.” Too often, the people shaping new buildings don’t feel responsible for what came before. History, to them, is incidental.
Still, she doesn’t reject the present. Her approach is relational. “If I had a pre-war building,” she says, “I would do modern furniture.” In a high-rise, she would bring in Rococo forms. “You mix the old and the new,” she explains, “but you have to mix it right.”
She is equally clear-eyed about the current state of interior design. Younger clients rarely hire designers the way they once did. Many come instead of objects, flowers, candles, pieces that can be carried home. Full design work is more often taken on by older clients, people who return again and again over the years. One client has hired her three times over the course of a decade. Smith doesn’t advertise. “Strictly word of mouth,” she says.
Inside the shop, Smith checks Ruth’s work, corrects her, then moves on. She laughs when she describes herself as impatient. “I’m horrible,” she says. “I have no patience.” Ruth disagrees, smiling. Straightforward, she says. Smith nods. That is the point.
Rococo Designs now sits at 409 Lewis Avenue, its most recent home after several moves along the same stretch of Bed Stuy. Smith treats the space as something lived in rather than staged, opening it to other Black women-owned businesses, making room where she can. “Offering space,” she says, “that’s what I want to do.”
The shop is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Smith does not frame her work as nostalgia or revival. She frames it as attention.
“People still want something real”.
