An Asbury Park musician-turned-designer orchestrates spectacular homes on the Shore

By Erik Schoning, Phonos By Alex Barreto

It’s no secret – there’s something special about living on the Jersey Shore. For over a decade, designer Nancy Mikulich has made it her mission to bring clients’ dreams to life in Asbury Park and beyond. The founder of Oasis Home Designs, Mikulich’s road to interior design comes by way of an unusual route: music and performance.

A classically trained violinist, performing musician, and former talent agent, Mikulich was living in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California when an act of God changed her career trajectory forever. “One day, a storm came through, and a huge tree fell down and wiped out my house while nobody was home,” Mikulich said. “Through the process of rebuilding that house, I was sort of bitten by the bug of construction and design. I realized I had a talent for it.”

Mikulich relocated to the East Coast and went back to school for interior design, learning the nuts and bolts of the business under an established designer. In 2005, she struck out on her own, and in 2013, she relocated to the Shore. While Oasis Home Designs serves clients across New Jersey, New York, and even Florida, she’s built a reputation as a go-to designer for clients in and around Asbury Park.

The role light takes in interior design is a cornerstone of Mikulich’s work. In her designs, Mikulich is always negotiating the light, whether it’s accentuating the brightness and blue-tinged panorama of the Shore with complementary color palettes and open floor plans or taming the light with window treatments when necessary. Not surprisingly, coastal aesthetics are popular in Asbury Park. But Mikulich pushes her design language beyond the typical seashells, anchors, or sailboats that often connote coastal themes. For her, “coastal” is a matter of texture and color, of artwork and lighting, an extension of what Frank Lloyd Wright termed “organic architecture,” design that embraces its surroundings.

“I take my cues from the client,” Mikulich said. “I understand what their vision is, but my job is to elevate it. I’ve also started embracing bolder choices, pushing the client and pushing myself. It’s a muscle I can flex after doing this for 20 years. You need knowledge and experience for that.” Whether it’s decorative lighting or a pop of color, Mikulich is always looking for ways to turn her projects into works of art, to embrace challenges and turn them to her advantage.

She considers her relationships with clients as a kind of matchmaking, a two-way interview; for that reason, she typically doesn’t charge for her first appointment. She always wants to understand her clients’ goals and tastes before committing to a project. These days, one of Mikulich’s pet projects is bathrooms. Modern bathroom design is often treated as an afterthought, and Mikulich loves reimagining cookie-cutter bathrooms with an artistic eye.

There is also the challenge of working with space, such as with townhomes, which are popular on the Shore and often present a lot of vertical space but limited horizontal square footage, requiring creative solutions to furniture, design, and functionality. For Mikulich, another one of her calling cards is the incorporation of existing objects into her projects. Over the years, she’s had several repeat clients, many of whom own what Mikulich calls legacy or heritage pieces – an inherited credenza, a valuable work of art, or a priceless antique.

While some designers often shy away from working with existing pieces, Mikulich embraces the opportunity to fuse contemporary design with more traditional components. “I was working with one client on her dining room, and she had this fabulous French dining table and an Italian server,” Mikulich said. “They were beautiful, and I knew the room wouldn’t be the same without them. So I worked around them with paint color, lighting, side pieces, updated window treatments, and a brand-new rug. We changed out the dining room chairs, so at the end we had more interesting chairs around a traditional table and server – and the room was completely different.”

Mikulich’s studio on Cookman Avenue is always evolving, a testament to her unflagging commitment to pushing the envelope in design. (“People come in and think we’re a new store all the time,” Mikulich added. “But it’s just me updating things.”) These days, she is on the cutting edge of aging-in-place design, a personal interest that grew from her experience with her parents’ retirement. Aging in place is a growing consideration for older couples and even younger families, who are more frequently looking for homes that maximize liveability for young children and the elderly alike.

It’s an accessibility movement that foregrounds usability, yet for a designer like Mikulich, it can become yet another catalyst for creativity. Mikulich’s career has taken several unexpected turns over the years, but as she reflects on the journey that brought her to Oasis Home Designs, everything suddenly starts to make sense, and a career path that began in the concert hall seems to find its logical continuation in interior design.

“When I went to design school, they were using the same terms to define good design that I had learned as a musician about good composition,” Mikulich said. “It’s about balance. It’s about harmony. It’s about the way something flows. It’s about telling a story. When I design a space, it’s like I’m telling a story visually.” In homes across Asbury Park, up and down the Jersey Shore, and along the Eastern Seaboard, that story is still being told, one room at a time.