Creating scaled drawings was a skill Jenny Barker learned as a young girl from watching her grandfather, a retired engineer, work at his kitchen table. It required discipline and creativity, two qualities she admired and understood. Drawing houses, complete with floor plans, perfecting them often late into the night, became a favoritepastime of hers from then on.
Undoubtedly, being raised on a farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore peninsula gave Jenny an early sense of adventure along with the paradoxical curiosity to see the larger world. Whether she was en point inballet class, riding horses down deer paths, or designing and sewing her own dresses, her creativity and energy became her trademarks among her family and friends.
Upon graduating from Mary Baldwin College at the age of 21, she moved to an apartment in New York’s West Village with a job as assistant to the Editor-in-Chiefof Notorious Magazine which was owned by internationally known rapper and fashion mogul, Puff Daddy. Her eye for scale and proportion and her uninhibited ability to share her perspective became valuable assets to her career. She later worked in the creative departments at Butterick- Vogue and Redbook.
After taking a hiatus from publishing, she found herself sitting at her own kitchen table, this time, in New York City, drawing scaled floor plans for an apartment she had purchased on the Upper East Side.She had found her niche. With encouragement from her architect and building contractor, she went back to school and earned a second degree from the New York School of Interior Design. In 2004, she launched her own design firm and began working on high- end residential projects in Manhattan, Chicago and later in Virginia. Her reputation for being honest, pragmatic, and versatile has followed her in her career.
Now with two teen-aged boys, Jenny has moved back to her family's farm on the Eastern Shore with the same passion to see people living well in their homes. Her interest in creating comfortable environments has grown to incorporate the total process: whether it is buying, designing, building or selling the perfect house; creating a tailor-made lifestyle is what lead her to serving you through Long & Foster.