There is a particular hour in New York when the city seems to design itself. Late afternoon light slips between the towers of Midtown, catching the glass and the stone and the steam rising from the streets. Crowds move in long, patterned waves. Somewhere a saxophone plays in a subway station, and somewhere else a crane swings a steel beam into place. For most people, this is simply the texture of a busy day. For Rachana Rao, it is something closer to a living drawing, a place where light, material, and movement are forever rearranging themselves into new compositions.
Rachana Rao is a passionate interior designer and architect with a keen eye for detail, guided by an innate sense of craftsmanship and a lifelong love of expressive spaces. She has spent years learning how cities shape the people who live in them, and how people, in turn, shape the spaces around them. Today she works as a designer at O’Neil Langan Architects, where she contributes to retail projects for nationally recognized brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Faherty. Yet ask her about New York, and she will not start with her resume. She will start with the way the city looks at dusk.
“New York is the most beautiful classroom I have ever had,” Rachana Rao says. “You cannot walk a single block without learning something about proportion, light, or rhythm. The city teaches you constantly, whether you want it to or not.”
That sense of wonder did not come automatically. Like many ambitious professionals, Rachana Rao arrived in New York full of energy and uncertainty. She had already built a foundation in design across two continents, working on residential and hospitality projects in Bangalore before moving to the United States. Still, the leap to New York was its own kind of education. The city is famously demanding. It rewards talent, but it also rewards persistence, curiosity, and the ability to stay open when everything feels overwhelming and uncertain.
What sustained her through those early, uncertain months was the sheer beauty of the place. New York, Rachana Rao points out, is a city that wears its history on its surfaces. A single street can hold a nineteenth-century cast iron facade, a sleek glass tower, and a hand-painted sign fading on a brick wall. The architecture argues, overlaps, and somehow harmonizes. For a designer trained to notice such things, the effect is intoxicating. Rachana Rao describes mornings when the low sun turned an entire avenue to gold, and evenings when the lit windows of the skyline looked like a vast circuit board glowing against the dark. Beauty, she realized, was not a reward for surviving the city. It was the daily fuel that made survival worthwhile.
Over time, Rachana Rao developed a philosophy for thriving in the city without losing herself in it. What follows are five tips, drawn from a long conversation about beauty, ambition, and the strange, exhilarating business of building a creative career in one of the most competitive cities on earth.
Tip One: Let the City Be Your Teacher
For Rachana Rao, the first rule of professional life in New York is also the simplest. Pay attention. The city is a vast and free education for anyone willing to look closely, and for a designer, it is almost an embarrassment of riches.
“When I first arrived, I treated every walk as research,” she explains. “I would notice how a hotel lobby welcomed me, how a restaurant controlled its lighting, how a shop guided me through its space. New York is a museum that never closes, and the exhibits are everywhere.”
This habit of attentive looking shaped her work in profound ways. As a designer who cares deeply about how people experience space, Rachana Rao learned to read the city as a series of lessons in atmosphere and detail. A worn marble stair taught her about durability and grace. A narrow café taught her how to make a small footprint feel generous. A grand old bank lobby taught her about light, scale, and the quiet authority of good proportion.
The beauty of New York, she insists, is not only in its famous landmarks. It lives in the ordinary corners too. It lives in cast iron facades in SoHo, in the rhythm of brownstone stoops in Brooklyn, and in the way the harbor light changes the color of the whole downtown skyline. For Rachana Rao, learning to find beauty in those everyday moments became a professional superpower.
Increasingly, she has also come to see the city’s layered surfaces and textures as raw material that can be abstracted and translated directly into interior design. The richness of New York, she points out, is not defined solely by its architecture. It comes just as much from its fashion, its food, and the remarkable diversity of its people. The drape of a coat on a stranger in the crowd, the sheen of a glazed pastry in a bakery window, the mingled colors, voices, and aromas of a busy market: together, these everyday experiences form a living tapestry of textures, colors, and materials. That tapestry continually inspires designers like Rachana Rao and shapes how she approaches the interiors she creates. A street’s layered character might be distilled into a material palette, a pattern of contrasts, or a particular play of light within a room. In her hands, the city is not just a backdrop to be admired but a source to be sampled, abstracted, and reinterpreted in space.
Her advice to younger professionals is direct. Slow down and observe, even when the city pushes you to rush. “Your eyes are your most important tool,” she says. “If you train them in a place as rich as New York, you will carry that education into every project for the rest of your career.”
Tip Two: Build Real Relationships, Not Just a Network
New York runs on relationships, and Rachana Rao learned early that the word “networking” can be misleading. The city is full of events, introductions, and business card exchanges. Yet the connections that mattered most to her career were never really transactional. They grew slowly, through shared work and genuine respect.
“Design is never a solo act,” Rachana Rao says. “On almost every project, I work with consultants, contractors, and teammates. The people who help you grow are the ones who trust you, and trust takes time to build.”
She traces this belief back to her earliest professional experiences, including a two-person team in Bangalore where she and a colleague shared every decision on a single project. That intimacy taught her how much faster good work moves when people listen to one another. When she arrived in New York, she carried the same instinct into a much larger and faster environment.
In a city of millions, Rachana Rao argues, the temptation is to chase contacts rather than cultivate friendships. She believes that it is a mistake. The most valuable professional relationships, in her experience, are built on honesty, reliability, and curiosity about other people’s work. She makes a point of remembering what her collaborators care about, of crediting their contributions, and of staying in touch long after a project ends.
This approach has a quiet beauty of its own. New York can feel impersonal, even lonely, especially for newcomers. By treating colleagues as full human beings rather than rungs on a ladder, Rachana Rao found a way to make the enormous city feel intimate. “The city becomes warmer,” she says, “when you fill it with people who genuinely wish you well.”
Her tip is to invest in fewer, deeper relationships rather than collecting acquaintances. Show up for people. Listen more than you speak. Over the course of a career, those bonds become both a support system and a source of joy.
Tip Three: Master the Craft, and Make Peace With the Details
If the first two tips are about openness, the third is about discipline. New York is a city of extraordinary creativity, but it is also a city of codes, deadlines, budgets, and exacting clients. Rachana Rao believes that lasting success depends on mastering the unglamorous side of the work as thoroughly as the inspiring side.
“Vision matters, yet execution makes it real,” she says. “In New York, the standards are high and the pace is relentless. If you want your ideas to survive, you have to know the technical craft cold.”
Her current role demands exactly that kind of rigor. At O’Neil Langan Architects, Rachana Rao handles permit documentation, millwork detailing, shop drawing review, consultant coordination, and code compliance. Retail design for major national brands leaves no room for sloppiness. Every dimension, every material, and every deadline carries real consequences.
Rather than resenting these constraints, Rachana Rao has learned to embrace them. She describes regulations and tight budgets not as enemies of creativity but as part of the puzzle. A difficult limit, she says, often pushes her toward a smarter and more elegant solution. When the rules are fixed, the imagination simply has to work harder.
This mindset took time to develop. Early in her career, she wanted total creative freedom. Eventually, she realized that buildings live in the real world, where codes protect people, budgets shape decisions, and timelines focus the mind. Now she almost welcomes those pressures, because they keep her work grounded and honest.
There is beauty in this discipline too. A perfectly resolved detail, a drawing set that leaves nothing to chance, a project delivered on time and within budget: these are their own form of artistry. For Rachana Rao, technical excellence is not the opposite of beauty. It is the foundation that allows beauty to stand.
Her advice is unambiguous. Learn the drawings, the codes, and the standards without apology. In a city as demanding as New York, craftsmanship is not optional. It is the price of admission and the path to creative freedom.
Tip Four: Bring Your Whole Self to the Work
One of the most personal themes in any conversation with Rachana Rao is the value of authenticity. In a competitive city, the pressure to fit in can be intense. Rachana Rao argues that the opposite instinct is far more powerful. Your background, your memories, and your particular way of seeing the world are not liabilities to hide. They are your greatest professional assets.
“Your experience is unique, so your perspective is unique too,” she says. “Bring your full self into the studio. Often the most personal work turns out to be the most universal.”
Rachana Rao speaks from experience. Raised in a Mangalorean family in Bangalore, she grew up with a rich and complicated relationship to her own heritage, shaped by sensory memories of food, ritual, atmosphere, and place. Rather than setting those memories aside in a global city like New York, she made them central to her creative identity. Her thinking about culture, belonging, and the way spaces hold memory grew directly out of her own story.
This authenticity has become a signature of her work. Rachana Rao is known for a perspective on cultural identity that goes beyond surface decoration. She believes belonging is built through atmosphere, ritual, sound, smell, and food rather than through visual symbols alone. That distinctive viewpoint, rooted in her personal history, is precisely what makes her voice stand out in a crowded field.
New York, for all its competitiveness, is also one of the most diverse cities on earth. Rachana Rao sees that diversity as part of the city’s beauty. Walk through a single neighborhood and you encounter dozens of cultures sharing the same street. In such a place, she argues, your individuality is an advantage rather than a risk.
Her tip for professionals, especially those who feel like outsiders, is to trust their own memories and perspectives. The city does not need another imitation. It needs your honest, specific, unrepeatable perspective.
Tip Five: Protect the Practice That Restores You
The final tip may be the most important, and it is the one professionals most often ignore. New York can consume you. The hours are long, the ambition is contagious, and the city never seems to rest. Rachana Rao believes that sustaining a long creative career requires deliberately protecting what restores you.
For her, that anchor is art. Alongside her professional work, Rachana Rao maintains an active pen-and-ink practice, exploring the relationship between natural landscapes and human intervention. Her drawings recently earned an honorable mention in the Shared Ground Online exhibition hosted by Rexhibit. More than an accolade, the practice is a refuge.
“Drawing answers to no client and no code, so it stays completely personal,” she explains. “It is a space where curiosity can wander freely, and I always come back to my projects with fresh eyes and renewed energy.”
This is not a distraction from her professional life. It is part of what makes that life sustainable. The sensitivity to composition, light, and mood that Rachana Rao develops while drawing feeds directly back into her design work. The sketchbook becomes a kind of laboratory, a place to test feelings and ideas before committing them to a room.
The lesson extends well beyond art. Whatever restores you, whether it is running along the Hudson, cooking, music, or simply walking through a quiet park, Rachana Rao urges professionals to treat it as essential rather than optional. Burnout is real, and a beautiful city offers little comfort to someone too exhausted to enjoy it.
There is wisdom here about balance and longevity. A career is a long endeavor, and the people who last are the ones who care for themselves along the way. By guarding her creative practice, Rachana Rao keeps her curiosity alive, and curiosity, she says, is the true engine of a creative life.
A Beautiful City, A Thoughtful Career
As our conversation drew to a close, Rachana Rao returned, almost inevitably, to the beauty of New York. She spoke about the way the seasons transform the city, about the first snow softening the streets and the spring light returning to the parks. She spoke about the harbor, the bridges, and the endless interplay of old and new architecture. For her, working in such a place is a daily privilege.
“There is so much beauty here, and it never stops surprising me,” Rachana Rao says. “Working in a city like this is a gift. It pushes you, but it also feeds you. Every day I see something that reminds me why I fell in love with design in the first place.”
Her five tips, taken together, form a kind of quiet manifesto. Pay attention to the city around you. Build real relationships. Master your craft. Bring your whole self to the work. Protect the practice that restores you. None of these ideas are complicated. Yet, lived consistently over the years, they add up to a thoughtful and durable career.
What ties the five tips together, in the end, is attention. Rachana Rao pays attention to the city, to the people in it, to the smallest details of her drawings, to her own history, and to her own wellbeing. In a metropolis that constantly competes for your focus, that kind of deliberate attention becomes both a professional discipline and a way of embodying the human experience. It is also, not coincidentally, the same quality that makes her a fine designer. The eye that notices a perfect proportion on a building facade is the same eye that notices when a colleague needs encouragement or when her own energy is running low.
Perhaps that is the deepest lesson that she can offer. A great city does not simply demand things from you. If you approach it with curiosity, generosity, and care, it gives a great deal in return. New York shaped Rachana Rao, and in her own modest way, through every space she designs, she is helping to shape New York. In a city built on beauty and ambition, that exchange feels exactly right.
Rachana Rao BIO: She is a passionate interior designer and architect with a keen eye for detail, guided by an innate sense of artistry and a lifelong love for beautiful, expressive spaces. Based in New York, she currently serves as an assistant project manager at O’Neil Langan Architects, where she contributes to retail projects for nationally recognized brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Faherty. Her responsibilities span permit documentation, millwork detailing, shop drawing review, consultant coordination, and code compliance.
Rachana’s career spans two continents and multiple sectors, including residential and hospitality work in Bangalore and workplace and hospitality projects at Perkins Eastman in New York. This breadth has shaped a versatile design approach grounded in how people truly experience space. She is known for a distinctive perspective on cultural identity, arguing that belonging is built through atmosphere, ritual, memory, and the senses rather than visual symbols alone.
Alongside her design work, Rachana maintains an active artistic practice in pen and ink, exploring the relationship between natural landscapes and human intervention. Her work recently earned an honorable mention in the Shared Ground exhibition hosted by Rexhibit. Her portfolio is available at rrao3.myportfolio.com.
