Jessica Helgerson

Jessica Helgerson grew up with one foot in Southern California and the other in France.  With a French mother and an American father, summers in France, school years in Santa Barbara, she developed a love for both countries, both cultures, and both have had a profound impact on her design work.  She briefly worked in an architecture firm after school, but very early in her career felt that there wasn’t an office doing quite the kind of work she wanted to do, and so in 2000 she opened her eponymous design studio.  

Now, twenty years later, the firm has grown into something that is much more than Jessica, though she remains at the heart of its design direction.   Jessica is also a restless dreamer and schemer, and loves imagining new creative avenues for her studio to explore.   Some of those have included Front of House - an installation gallery in the front of the JHID office,  XUXO - a collaborative importing crafts from indigenous communities in Mexico,  The 1% Project  - an effort aimed at supporting non-profits working to end homelessness, and most recently the opening of a Paris branch of JHID which is finally allowing her to bring those two halves of herself together in her design work.

Jessica LOVES to design things, and her favorite project is always the one she’s working on at the moment.