Amazing Grace Design Seeks to Help Palisadians Revive and Thrive

Debra Parr

By Laurel Busby

News & Information Editor

Debra Parr doesn’t advertise her interior design and event planning company Amazing Grace. She’s never needed to do so.

Instead, Amazing Grace has grown via word of mouth. People who try her services tend to return again and again and again.

“I’ve had long time relationships with clients where I’ve done a baby shower, the child’s first birthday, the bat mitzvah, and then the wedding,” Parr said. “The families trust me with these memories that are going to last a lifetime.”

Canyon residents Michael Duggan and Karey Burke are one such family. They have requested Parr’s assistance for renovation work, interior design projects, such as their movie room, and numerous special events, including birthday parties, graduation celebrations, and a memorial service.

“We adore her,” Duggan said. “She’s top-notch, excellent, unflappable. She has amazing taste. Her team is ridiculously good. She’s a real treasure.”

Burke agreed. “She takes the time to tailor her work to the individual in terms of design taste and budget. She’s very intuitive and sensitive with clients about meeting them where they’re at. We think the world of her. We would highly recommend her for anything.”

Part of Parr’s approach when working with clients is to build an understanding of who they are and what they believe. For example, she was planning a Buddhist wedding and studied both the mandala and the words to be used in the ceremony.

“The client may not know that I take a deep dive into that, but I think by understanding the guests and their background, we can better weave the fabric of their lives into the event,” Parr said.

Parr’s own background includes a mix of cultures. Part of a blue-collar family in Quebec, she grew up speaking French and English because her father’s family was French while her mother’s was Irish. At 18, she moved to the United States on a work visa.

She modeled for J.Crew swimwear and other brands and also applied to UCLA, where she studied art history and architecture.

“I grew up in a household where I had to read the dictionary because there weren’t any other books,” Parr said. “I’d never heard classical music or gone to a museum. At UCLA, the world opened up to me…. Art and art history lit me up.”

After graduating in 1986, Parr married her husband, Robert, a baseball player and fitness trainer who graduated from PaliHi, and she also enrolled in UCLA’s graduate program in architecture. However, life changed her career trajectory when she became pregnant with their first child, Jordan, now 35, and a few years later had twins, Hunter and Chandler, now 31.

Then a Brentwood resident with her own interior design company, Debra Parr & Associates, she needed to take a step back from school and work to focus on child-rearing. In 1995, the young family moved to the Canyon, and about five years later, when the children were in elementary school, she started Amazing Grace Design.

She chose the company name for many reasons, including both her sense of faith, which is inclusive and inviting, and the grace with which she planned to conduct her business. On the wall, she installed a quote from Philippians to encapsulate her goal to do “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.”

“That’s the lane we want to stay in,” she said. “Our mission is to build bridges toward our creative aesthetic and toward our business relationships…. I want to connect people to joyful things in their lives by creating an environment for a family to thrive in … and events that celebrate all that’s good in life.”

Like other businesses in the Canyon, Amazin Grace suffered losses due to the Jan. 7 fire, which forced numerous clients to cancel upcoming events and projects. Since then, Parr has been working to help not only Amazing Grace and its staff manage the fall out, but also to help the entire Canyon business community revive.

She has stepped up as the interim president of the newly formed Canyon Business Association and spoke about the organization at the May 31 Back to the Canyon 2 event. Business owners gathered last week to consider topics such as ways to improve the neighborhood, aid the residents, organize local events, find common concerns, advocate to government officials, and promote both the community and the hardest hit businesses.

“I want to be a conduit and a support for a constructive, creative assembly,” she said. “How do we showcase what an amazing little gem the Canyon is? It has so many wonderful assets that not everybody knows about.” She added, “I weathered covid, which was really tough, so that gave me some resilience and a can-do attitude. I’d love to help people rebuild their homes and businesses after the fire too. We’ve been here for 20 years serving the neighborhood, and we’re still here to serve everyone.”

Amazing Grace Design Photo: Levi Langen