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Mostly Cloudy "Mind Body Home: Growing Into Health" explores making a house a holistic home
A TV show reconceptualizes interior design
What makes a house a home? On her TV show, Joannie Accolla of Sea Cliff explores this question along with how to live a healthy and happy life in one’s home through a holistic lens.
Accolla, 56, grew up in Sea Cliff, coming from “a family of designers, architects and engineers,” which helped shape her early ideas of what a home should look like. After studying at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology, which she said provided her with a solid artistic foundation, she immediately began working in the interior design business.
“I’ve always been in the interior design industry,” Accolla said. “It was just something that was asked of me, you know? I just love the idea of interior design.”
However, while going through a divorce in 2005, Accolla suddenly found the industry she had spent so long in had lost some of its luster. Having moved back to Sea Cliff from Queens, she said she struggled with clients who demanded too much of her and who “were a little too needy for what I had to offer.”
Accolla decided to study holistic health at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which provides training for health counselors and life coaches. According to its website, the institute focuses on providing attendees “with the tools and knowledge they need to transform their own personal health, as well as the health of their clients and communities around the world.”
Accolla said the experience studying there changed how she viewed the relationship between people and their homes, and she began remodeling her work in interior design around a holistic approach. Rather than just finding a couch to fill a room per se, she instead began to focus on finding furniture or layouts that would help them feel emotionally and spiritually fulfilled.
“I designed my new business model around helping people not just with their home but with themselves, because they’re searching for something and it’s not a thing,” Accolla added. “I found that most people are really disconnected from their home, and they’re seeking other people to help them connect with it.”
Accolla launched her new interior design business, Mind Body Home, in 2010. Since then she has worked with dozens of people in and around Sea Cliff, helping them fill their homes not just with objects, but with pieces that help fit the larger puzzle of who they are and what they want out of a home.
One satisfied customer who she worked with was also her friend, Cathy Virgilio, a fellow Sea Cliff resident. Virgilio explained that following her husband’s sudden death from a stroke, she decided to sell her old house and start fresh, and that Accolla helped her every step of the way.
“She doesn’t just have a designer’s mind and vision,” Virgilio said. “She also has a creativity level that’s beyond any designer that I’ve ever known.”
While running her business she also created Healing Headbands, a nonprofit that promotes healing through laughter and art.
While running Healing Headbands, Accolla was invited to an Annual Celebration of World Art Day, an event hosted by North Shore TV, a nonprofit organization which seeks to provide a wide range of educational and cultural programs on television stations on Long Island’s North Shore. At the event she met Erica Bradley, North Shore’s executive director, who wrote in a statement that Accolla’s enthusiasm for her work and her vision immediately impressed her.
“She has so much energy and passion that is impossible to not get sucked into her world,” Bradley said. “Joannie finds the connection between her customers’ energy and the energy in their space.”
Accolla and Bradley worked together to create a show for the network, titled “Mind Body Home: Growing Into Health,” which premiered Sept. 30 last year. It has nine episodes and focuses on the journey to finding a place people can call home and live with intention.
Accolla added that the show is still working to find sponsors, and that anyone interested in being on the show or helping to sponsor it can contact her at growingintohealth@gmail.com. She also said that being able to bring her vision and experience to a wider audience has been “transformative,” and that she looks forward to continuing to expand her holistic community.
“Making decisions, not because you have to but because it’s a necessary decision that’s affecting your health is important,” Accolla said. “Every decision you make for your home, for your environment, affects your health.”
