Good friends team up to make interior design a pal of environment

Allyson Buck and Sarah Heinbaugh are taking an Earth-friendly approach to interior design.

The friends-turned-business- partners are the owners of Interi-Life, which opened in January at 301 E. Pikes Peak Ave., on the eastern edge of downtown. The store sells sustainable, eco-friendly interior finishes such as cork and bamboo flooring, recycled glass countertops and Mythic paint, a nontoxic, low-odor paint.

“We’re the only dealer in the Colorado Springs area that has this paint,” Heinbaugh said.

InteriLife also offers services including interior design and custom millwork, and Buck and Heinbaugh are planning to offer workshops.

Buck is an interior designer, while Heinbaugh is an artist. The two are from Texas, but they didn’t meet until they came to Colorado. In one of those it’s-a-small-world stories, it turned out that their husbands attended high school together in Texas.

Among InteriLife’s lines is American Clay, a natural-earth veneer plaster — and a product that started Buck down the path to creating InteriLife with Heinbaugh.

Buck learned about American Clay from Deborah Hall of Hall’s Walls, a distributor for the product.

“I really liked the product,” Buck said. And in delving into it, Buck also got to know Hall.

It was Hall who had the idea for the new business.

“She distributes to different dealers in Colorado, and a lot of them have a focus on green,” Buck said. “So she thought it would be a great opportunity for somebody to do that in Colorado Springs. She thought of me, and I thought it was a great idea, and I thought of Sarah, and we just did it.”

The showroom is located inside what was formerly part of Hall’s Walls. Buck and Heinbaugh rent the space. Hall is not part of the business.

The two relied on savings to get the business going. As befitting a green business, they took a green approach. Their cabinets, for example, came from ReSTORE, which sells recycled building materials.

Heinbaugh sees a demand for green products. The challenge, she said, is “we just need people to know that we’re here.”

She and Buck acknowledged that they had qualms about starting a business in a down economy.

But it’s spring — a time when homeowners think about home projects, they said.

And, Buck said, “We’ve got no way to go but up.”

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Contact the writer at 636-0272.

INTERILIFE DETAILS

Address: 301 E. Pikes Peak Ave.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays.

Phone: 219-9855

Online: www.interilife.com