Yana Ivgalenko

A decade of rooms

I started YaDesign in 2014, and in the years since the work has moved between homes, restaurants, offices, and hotels in two cities a continent apart. That range matters: a hospitality fit-out teaches you how a room performs under pressure, and a family home teaches you how it has to feel at seven in the morning. I bring both to every project.

Most of what I design is residential — full renovations, single rooms, and the long-relationship work where a client comes back for the kitchen after the living room. But the commercial and hospitality projects keep the practice honest about budgets, trades, and the unglamorous detail that decides whether a space actually works.

How I work

Every project begins with listening — to the architecture, to the client, to the city. I believe good design is quiet: the most refined spaces reveal themselves slowly, in the play of light, the weight of a material, the rhythm of proportion. From there, every decision, from the joinery to the linen, is made with intention.

I'd rather bring one resolved direction and argue for it than hand you a menu of half-ideas. And I stay on site through delivery, because the gap between a good drawing and a good room is closed by the small things — and the small things set fast.

Toronto and Los Angeles

Working across two cities isn't a tagline — it shapes the design. Toronto light and LA light are different problems; so are a Victorian semi and a mid-century bungalow. Knowing both means I can read a space honestly wherever it is, rather than imposing one house style on every climate and every plan.

Where the training came from

I studied fine arts at Humber College in Toronto, and I have spent the years since running YaDesign alongside work inside the industry rather than only from the outside of it. That second half matters more than it sounds. Design school teaches you composition; it does not teach you what a supplier means by a twelve-week lead time, or which spec quietly fails at the install.

At Chateau Window & Door Systems I work as a designer and project coordinator, which is the unglamorous end of the trade: schedules, site measurements, and the gap between what a drawing says and what a window opening actually is. Before that I was an interior design intern at Truong Ly, and before that I spent time in retail at HBC — which is where you learn what people actually reach for, as opposed to what they say they like.

None of that is the portfolio. It is the reason the portfolio gets built on time. When I tell a client a lead time or push back on a detail, it is because I have watched that specific thing go wrong on someone else's site.