By Lindsay Field Penticuff
Jessica Duce has moved her business three times in the more than two decades she’s been in business, and she’s thriving in the fastest-growing design category in the world – vacation rentals.
“What I think drives us and others in the Vacation Rental Collective is that residential design is awesome, but you don’t always get to stretch your design muscle, because you have to make sure you’re keeping rue to your design client,” says Duce, who is Owner and Principal Designer of JDuce Design and Co-Founder of Vacation Rental Designers, the VRD Summit and Vacation Rental Collective. “But in vacation rental design, you’re encouraged to stretch your design muscles, and how great is that!”
Duce, who has operated her business in California, Nebraska, Colorado, and now Texas, didn’t originally think interior design was her calling. Her mother was a single mom who worked as an interior designer specializing in kitchen and bath design.
“It was a very hard business, so I knew I was never going to do that,” she says. “I went to college knowing that I didn’t want to be a designer like her because it looked really hard, and I ended up studying business and working for a bank.”
However, while working at the bank, the manager asked Duce to help redesign an office space, which led to her doing the same for others in the bank, and—within about a year—she found herself designing lobbies for Wells Fargo bank locations in her area.
“My mom called me one day and asked if I had realized that I had a design business inside a bank,” Duce says. “That was an epiphany, so I quit my job and started my own little company.”
While Duce does do residential design, the majority of her business today focuses on vacation rental design, a niche she discovered was a good fit for her in 2015.
“It’s a completely different process for residential design and vacation rental design,” she explains. “If I’m doing a residential project, it’s a more intimate process, and maybe we need to incorporate a very specific chair or recliner, or a specific look the client is looking for, because we are creating a home where they are going to live in and one that feels like them. Our job is to make them love their home the way they want to live in it. For a vacation rental, I’m designing for a guest we’ll never meet.”
That’s why the design process for a vacation rental starts with data.
“Once we’re hired, we run a report and we work with a great company called Data Led Designs, and they do a very involved report for us of the competition over three years, positive and negative reviews, what our competition is making annually, what their losses are, what amenities they have,” she says.
This process allows Duce and her team to dig deep and determine what will make a potential guest “stop the scroll.”
“If you scroll through a lot of vacation rentals in Galveston, Texas, for example, there are a lot of pale blue walls, white shiplap, very coastal, throw in some seashells, and it’s just picture after picture of that,” she says. “What we say is that our job is to stop the scroll. If a potential guest is looking for a place to rent, you want them to stop when they scroll past your option, so I’m never going to say we’re going to do what your competition is doing. We are going to do the opposite.”
In 2020, about five years after her design focus shifted from just residential projects to residential and vacation rental design projects, Duce says she realized how differently she sources products. But nobody was talking about it.
While attending High Point Market in High Point, North Carolina, in March 2020, Duce was determined to start the conversation about vacation rental design.
“Nobody was talking about it back then, and I couldn’t find people who wanted to talk to me,” she recalls. “I didn’t know how to find them. I knew that brands needed to hear a different message, though.”
She approached Jane Dagmi, who had just left Designers Today Magazine to launch High Point x Design, a nonprofit organization that promotes, unites, and builds upon the city’s unique creative ecosystem. She pitched her idea of creating a summit to help bring together short-term rental designers like herself.
“It morphed from there. We did our first summit together and got High Point Market to sponsor us, and all these brands came in,” Duce says.
One week later, the Vacation Rental Collective was formed; a resource for interior designers in the short-term rental market that provides education, insight and community for practitioners, as well as an abundance of product discounts from VRD sponsors.
“I am extremely passionate about collaboration. It’s why I started the collective and why there’s a summit,” she says. “I truly believe your success comes from rising tides, meaning we all work together, and that goes for brands, too.”
The next summit—Vacation Rental Design Summit: Summer Escape 2025 Presented by High Point X Design—is June 23-27 in High Point, N.C. Registration is now open. Tickets are on sale, and prices will increase on June 1.
Be sure to keep up with Jessica and VRD on socials!
