From uniforms to interiors: Kelly Reynolds’s winding road to design

Kelly Reynolds admits he still winces when he jaywalks. “I’m very by the book,” he admits. “It kills me to cross the street illegally.”

That instinct for rules and order makes sense when you learn about his background: naval electronics technician, jail constable, flight attendant. Each of those jobs demanded discipline, protocol and structure. Yet today, the 57-year-old runs Falken Reynolds, a leading Vancouver-based interior design studio where flexibility and imagination are core to the work. Decades in, the designer’s career has been less about climbing a ladder and more about learning to loosen his grip.

Reynolds’s adult life began in uniform. At 19, unsure of what to do after leaving a forestry program at Douglas College, he joined the navy as a naval electronics technician. Stationed first in Halifax for a year and then back home in Esquimalt, he describes the experience as “probably one of the best things I’ve ever done.” He’s quick to add that he’s “not pro-war at all,” but he credits those years with instilling in him the evergreen virtues of discipline, teamwork and respect.

When his three-year term in the army ended, Reynolds went back to school for criminology and moved into policing: he worked as a constable in a jail for four years with the Vancouver Police Department. The job armed him with the listening skills he values to this day. “You learn how to talk down a situation, how to listen to people without overreacting,” he reflects. Reynolds inherited his father’s profession—he was also a police officer—and assumed it might stick. But the longer he stayed, the more he realized that the path wasn’t for him.

If the navy drilled discipline and the jail demanded patience, airline work layered on another skill: customer service. A colleague suggested that the then 28-year-old Reynolds interview for a flight attendant job; despite Reynolds lacking the required second language, Canada 3000 (now defunct) snapped him up.

The routes—London, Sydney, New Zealand, Hawaii—were thrilling. “I liked it for four years,” Reynolds says. But as passenger demands grew and the airline struggled to keep pace, the work became harder to enjoy. Eventually, the airline collapsed in the aftermath of 9/11, and Reynolds was once again at a crossroads.

The next pivot felt accidental. Building on his love for the customer service industry, Reynolds joined the opening team at Vancouver’s eclectic Opus Hotel as a night manager. Working in the Robert Bailey–designed property sharpened his eye for interior design, and a colleague who’d seen his home—and been awed by it—urged him to take a course at BCIT. He signed up for one class and was soon “hooked.”

While working shifts as a bellman and studying design at BCIT, Reynolds met Chad Falkenberg, who was then looking into European design schools. Introduced by a mutual friend at the Opus Hotel café, the two hit it off—first over shared interests, then through parallel career paths. Reynolds went on to start his first firm, Fruition Design, and after Falkenberg returned from Barcelona and gained experience at Robert Bailey Interiors, the pair teamed up in 2011 to launch Falken Reynolds.

Interior design demanded something entirely different from his earlier careers: freedom. “All my careers that I had done were very rigid,” Reynolds says. “Allowing myself to be free and be creative—I’m still trying to do that.”

That tension between control and looseness became his steepest learning curve. But starting a business was the hardest leap of all. “I just jumped feet first in and made some mistakes; I did a lot of learning in the first four years,” he recalls. “It was definitely the hardest and most stressful, not knowing if you got paid and when new work would come in.”

Looking back, Reynolds insists his non-linear journey hasn’t been a detour but a foundation. “I was never angry at my past experiences,” he says. “I took them as learning experiences, rather than wasting my time looking poorly at what I had done.”

The navy gave him discipline, policing gave him communication, airline work gave him service instincts. All of it feeds his practice today, where the best part is still the people: learning their stories and building homes that reflect their unique personalities. His curiosity doesn’t stop at the doorstep, though—it takes him to Milan’s annual furniture fair Salone del Mobile, safaris in Africa and bike trails across Vancouver’s surrounding mountains.

And so, the rule-follower became a designer. He still hesitates to jaywalk—but he no longer minds colouring outside the lines.