KovichCo Interiors

Aug 4, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Aug 10

Stand at the corner of Myrtle and 13th in downtown Boise and you may find yourself walking under an archway. It is scaled to a person rather than to the buildings around it. Its colors run the range between sunrise and sunset. Etched into it are references to the trails and roads that crossed this ground back when none of it was downtown yet.

KovichCo Interiors designed that archway. The firm wrote a concept statement to accompany it, describing the intersection as the western edge of downtown at a crucial point in time, with the city expanding westward and in every direction at once. The piece went up at Pioneer Crossing, a development that also holds a five-story office building, a Hilton Garden Inn, an 826-space parking garage, and a Panera drive-thru.

An interior design studio whose most public work stands outdoors at a traffic intersection, arguing about civic memory in front of a chain bakery, tells you most of what you need to know about how KovichCo operates. The firm turns ten this year.

The Commissioner

Many designers develop a sense of compassion for old buildings. Jordan Yankovich sat through the meetings with the capacity to dictate their future.

For years, she chaired the Nampa Arts and Historic Preservation Commission, the body that meets in public session and decides which parts of a city’s built record are protected and which are not. That work runs on documentation, precedent, and argument made out loud in front of people who disagree. Yankovich carried the habit into her own studio, and it shows in what KovichCo has taken on across its first decade.

She founded the firm on a proposition that sounds modest and turns out to be demanding — the client goes first. Her stated philosophy is to seek first to understand, and then design. The sequence carries the whole argument. Understanding becomes a phase with deliverables attached rather than a courtesy at the front end of a project.

Her credentials point in the same direction. She holds two bachelor’s degrees, from the Art Institute of Colorado and Northwest Nazarene University. She is NCIDQ-certified, the national qualification that separates a licensed interior designer from someone who selects finishes, and a LEED Green Associate. She is a member of both ASID and IIDA. In 2016, the Women’s and Children’s Alliance honored her with a Tribute to Women in Industry.

What Turnkey Actually Means Here

KovichCo runs a project from schematic design through construction administration. The studio draws the documents the contractor builds from, then stays on the job while it goes up, fielding the questions and conditions that no drawing set fully anticipates.

Procurement runs in parallel: furniture, art, lighting, and accessories, sourced through a network of suppliers, artists, and manufacturers that reaches from Boise workshops to makers overseas. A client hands over a scope and receives a finished, furnished, functioning space. Very few firms of this size carry both halves of that.

The clearest test of the approach came in a building two hours east.

The Historic Elks Lodge in Twin Falls was built in 1922. Its renovation took the Idaho Business Review’s Top Project of the Year in 2019, the highest honor in a program that recognized more than twenty projects across the state, and won the People’s Choice award in the renovation category the same evening.

Getting there meant establishing the record before touching the structure. The general contractor tracked down the original hand-drawn plans, dating to the early 1900s and held at the local library, so the team could identify the building's actual structural performance and reconcile a century-old design with current code. That is the preservation commission habit applied to a paying job — find out what a building is before proposing what it becomes.

Closer to home, KovichCo took on a Boise Foothills residence carrying more than five decades of accumulated remodels and additions. It was the kind of house where each round of improvements quietly buried a little more of the original architecture.

The studio answered with subtraction ahead of addition. Instead of layering a new design language on top of the existing confusion, the team worked to uncover the home’s original mid-century intent and clear a path back to it. Material selections stayed inside the era’s vocabulary: stone, terra cotta, wood, concrete, and hand-applied plaster. New interventions held the low horizontal profile and the indoor-outdoor continuity that postwar residential design was organized around.

The result reads as restraint. The house looks like itself again.

The Studio

Four people run KovichCo, and the division of labor is unusually legible.

Tara Garrett, NCIDQ, is a senior interior designer and has been with the firm since 2017, for 9 of its 10 years. She holds a BFA in interior design with an architecture minor from the University of Idaho and came in from hospitality work on branded hotels and restaurants, a background that trains a designer to solve for durability, throughput, and code ahead of anything else. Her specialty is space planning, the least visible and most consequential part of the discipline. Her work across project types has taken multiple awards.

Laurie Engelbreit has run purchasing since 2019. She arrived from real estate and now manages the full procurement chain — sourcing, orders, invoicing, tracking, and delivery. Anyone who has watched a project stall eleven weeks over one backordered sofa understands why this exists as a dedicated role. She also contributes to material selections and keeps the studio in flowers. Her degree is in music, with a vocal emphasis, from Colorado Christian University.

Donna Caldwell joined in 2023 as studio manager, coming from state government. She holds a BS in industrial-organizational psychology and an MBA from the University of Illinois, which is the academic study of how organizations actually function, applied here to a four-person design studio. She oversees operations, time billing, and inventory.

The shape is deliberate. Two designers, one procurement specialist, one operations lead. It explains how a boutique firm can handle construction administration and end-to-end procurement simultaneously without either falling over.

Recognition

The awards have accumulated steadily. ASID Intermountain named KovichCo Best Residential Interior Design in 2018, the year Mountain Living covered the chapter’s Best Overall Residence, and Best Commercial Interior Design for spaces under 15,000 square feet in 2019. Luxe Interiors + Design placed the firm on its Pacific Northwest Gold List in 2021 and featured a Blackhawk Lake residence in its November/December issue.

The portfolio behind that recognition spans high-end residences, boutique hospitality, and public art, and the studio has kept moving — recent and in-progress work includes a vividly saturated residential project the team calls the Color House, a Goldstein’s Bagels location, and a med spa for Tre Bella.

Why It Lands in Boise

Boise is building fast, and speed puts pressure on the buildings that make a city legible. Mid-century foothills houses. Downtown commercial blocks carry an unfashionable date. Structures that pencil out cheaper to replace than to understand.

KovichCo has spent a decade working the other side of that math. Research before alteration, documentation before demolition, and a willingness to make the argument in public when the building cannot make it for itself.

For a client who wants the work to look good, plenty of firms will oblige. For one who wants the building to survive the process, the list gets considerably shorter.