By Iris Winston
The home video focuses on a happy three-year-old having a wonderful time dyeing Easter eggs. It paints a clear picture of just how early Tiffany Pratt enjoyed playing with colour. Those possibilities have remained an important part of her life and work ever since.
“I have always thought that colour is magical and I knew it made me happy,” says the multi-disciplinary designer, who is universally renowned for her creativity. “Before you have words, you have different colours and materials. I was never interested in playing with dolls as a child. I wanted to colour and cut things, to staple and glue them. From a very early age, I loved the idea of making things.”
That creative urge continues. Tiffany has built a life around her love of making her surroundings beautiful and lively. She is also committed to re-purposing the materials and artifacts she uses in her designs.
Above all, a vibrant colour palette is her artistic signature in a multi-faceted career. Not only is Tiffany a commercial and residential designer and renovator, she is a T.V. personality, having appeared on numerous home shows. She is also an author, speaker, teacher and very much an artist.
“My very first design project was an accident,” she recalls. “My then-fiancé bought a beautiful 5,000 square-foot colonial house in Connecticut—a fixer-upper. That’s how I got involved in interiors. While we were on the project, we ran out of money. I started looking at what we had, rather than buying new pieces, refinishing rather than replacing. I also realized that when everything in a space is brand new, you rip the soul out. That’s why it’s really important to me to retain and re-use. It helps to tell the story of why my style is very eclectic.”
For example, as the creative director of the 2026 National Home Show in Toronto in the spring, she used some of the shipping crates bringing in exhibits for a very successful design highlighting pink, red, chartreuse and teal.
Her original approach in any of her design projects almost always breaks design rules at some point. “To me, doing something different is part of the play,” says Tiffany. “If something makes no sense or is different or curious, it expresses your personality. It’s part of what makes your house your own.”
Certainly this is so in her apartment in the Beaches, the Toronto neighbourhood where she has lived for the last 18 years. “I love the location,” she says. “It’s very quiet and just 30 steps from Lake Ontario. I see birds and trees every morning. I have a great relationship with the neighbourhood and my neighbours. It’s a really precious spot for me.”
As well as being her home, the apartment—named Glitter Suite—has served as a canvas for some of her design ideas.
“I love a white wall and keeping a neutral floor,” she says, “but everything else is up for grabs. I play with my trim and ceiling colours.”
At this moment, she has pink-and-white striped walls and a light lilac ceiling in the living room with every colour of art on the walls. A coloured ceiling tints the room and sets its mood, she explains. And because a can of paint is relatively inexpensive, it’s easy to change the mood by changing the tone.
“Also,” she emphasizes. “Colour has a healing energy. It’s the cheapest way for people to find joy.” Since moving into the apartment and especially since the arrival of Poppy, her dachshund, the joy quotient has risen. “As soon as Poppy came into my life, nothing but good has followed,” she smiles. “I swear she even picked my husband. When she was a puppy, she kept sitting on his parents’ driveway. That’s how I met his mother and she introduced us.”
“Colour has a healing energy. It’s the cheapest way for people to find joy.”
Tiffany and financial consultant Zachary Webster married in the summer of 2021. Shortly before their wedding, the apartment next to Tiffany’s became vacant. The newlyweds rented and renovated it and doubled their living space without Tiffany having to leave the apartment she loved.
“It became available just when we needed it. It worked out perfectly,” she says.
“Beauty in design and the life that you want are sitting at your fingertips,” she adds. “You can create that life. I can inspire people because I really want to help them do what they want to do.”
As she spreads the joy that she has found in every aspect of her design work, life seems to get even better for her, and her brand becomes even more popular.
“When I do larger projects, I’m able to activate all the things I’ve ever done and learned and put them together,” she says. “My philosophy in how I work is constantly reapplying ideas: using what we have; always injecting colour; making sure things look handmade and that there are elements of play. When you do what you like and love, everything comes together.”
Tiffany has touched many people in her stellar career. From 2008 to 2011 at the Glitter Pie studio she founded in Toronto, she taught all ages the joys of design and crafting. Then her book, This Can Be Beautiful: A Manifesto of Sort-Ofs, Maybes, and Other Things Without Labels (published by Penguin Random House in 2016) showed readers “ways to use what they had in all parts of their lives and to take artistic licence to do things their way.”
Thanks to her high-profile presence on television and social media, the vivacious Queen of Colour is a household name in design circles. Tiffany has appeared on HGTV Canada’s Buy It, Fix It, Sell It, Home to Win and Family Home Overhaul, as co-host of Food Network Canada’s Project Bakeover and on various podcasts and YouTube series. Along with that, assorted residential and commercial design projects all bear her special signature of colour, joy and a touch of quirkiness. If you check out her website, tiffanypratt.com, you’ll see that she brings vibrant new life and style to people’s living space.
What comes next? Tiffany is ready for a new project but, she says, “One of the things I’ve learned is not to take anything that comes my way, but to take the right thing for me. I want to translate any project into a worthwhile venture.”
