We Three Design

Aug 6, 2025
4 min read

Updated: Aug 10

Hand Kirsten Grove and Sam Salinas the same empty house and you will get two houses back.

Grove works toward accumulation. Vintage textiles, layered pattern, color chosen for the way it argues with the color beside it — rooms that read as though a family has been adding to them for forty years. Salinas works toward subtraction. A narrow band of textured neutrals, natural forms left deliberately imperfect, the wabi-sabi conviction that a room settles once you stop putting things in it.

They founded a studio together anyway. The work that comes out of We Three Design belongs to neither aesthetic on its own, and that is the entire proposition.

Where the Name Comes From

The three in We Three counts two designers and one client. Grove and Salinas hold two chairs at the table. The third belongs to the homeowner, the restaurateur, or the business owner who called them, and the studio structures every engagement around that arrangement.

It explains a policy most firms in a growth market would find inconvenient. We Three declines standalone styling work. A client who wants a room rearranged and photographed has come to the wrong studio. They take projects they can carry from planning through installation, and they say so on their services page.

What the Studio Actually Does

Residential work runs from powder bath renovations to new construction. When a client arrives with an architect already engaged, the studio works in tandem with them on the space plan, arguing about how a family moves through a floor plan before anyone opens a finish binder.

The commercial side is where the scope surprises people. We Three takes commercial projects from vision leadership through construction documentation and administration. They draw the set the contractor builds from, and they stay on the job while it goes up. Their commercial experience runs from large corporations to local retailers and restaurants.

Around that core sit custom furniture design, art consulting that draws on artists working locally and abroad, interior brand consulting for companies whose spaces need to say something specific about them, and Zoom consultations sold in one- and two-hour blocks for clients who want direction without a full engagement.

Red Aspen and Commercial Interiors

The clearest illustration of the studio’s commercial thinking lies in Meridian.

Red Aspen, the social-selling beauty company three Boise women founded in 2017, grew fast enough to land on the Inc. 5000 and break ground on a 30,000-square-foot headquarters roughly triple the size of the office it left. The company made an unusual budget decision on the way in: a large share of the interior money went to the areas where people gather, and the building carries far more glass than a typical office-and-warehouse hybrid.

We Three designed into that brief. Inside the space the company calls The Treehouse, the studio designed a custom magnetic wall display for the beauty lounge, built to hold and present the company’s Nail Dashes line. The piece works as merchandising, as an art installation, and as a part of the brand a visitor can walk up to and put a hand on.

That is interior brand consulting doing its actual job — a company’s stated values converted into millwork.

The Platform Behind the Studio

Grove came to the partnership with a readership already built. She started the blog Simply Grove in 2008, back when blogs were the whole of the design internet, and she has been publishing without interruption since. Across her platforms, she reaches something on the order of a quarter million readers a day.

Her work has appeared in Architectural Digest, Domino, Gray, Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, and Martha Stewart Online. She has worked with Macy’s, Target, West Elm, Sherwin-Williams, and Benjamin Moore. Her book, Simply Styling, rests on a single argument: a person can transform a room using what they already own.

That argument runs underneath the studio’s work. Grove has held the same line for close to two decades — a beautiful home should not depend on the size of the budget behind it.

The Training Underneath

Salinas is a certified interior designer holding a degree in interior design with a minor in architecture from the University of Idaho, with additional study at the University of Minnesota and in London.

The bench behind the founders is deeper than the studio’s name suggests. Bernadette Lindstrom, raised in Washington, took her degree in interior architecture and design from the University of Idaho. Megan Cosdon is a certified interior designer with a bachelor of interior design and an architecture minor, also from Idaho.

Three of the four studied at the same school. In a market where the word designer stretches to cover everyone from a licensed professional to a weekend stager, that concentration of formal training is worth naming out loud.

Why It Lands in Boise

Boise’s design market has thickened considerably in the last decade. Firms have multiplied, national attention has arrived, and a great deal of the new work looks like whatever photographed well eighteen months ago.

We Three keeps trends at arm’s length as a matter of stated policy, structuring the work around authenticity and the particular needs of the client in front of them. The studio uses Boise as its base while running projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, allowing the practice to absorb what those markets are doing without importing it wholesale into the Treasure Valley.

The portfolio bears it out. Sunny Ridge, Soft Landing, Lion House, 17th Street, Certified Bakery, Barber Junction, Fancy Pants — the projects share no signature palette, no repeating motif, no house look a reader could pick out of a lineup. What they share is a process, and two designers who keep talking each other out of the easy answer.