Shawn Henderson

eBay Design Director Shawn Henderson knew that home design was his passion as soon as he was big enough to push his parents’ furniture around the house. Which he did, quite often. Henderson founded his design firm, Shawn Henderson Interior Design/New York, in 2003 and has applied his artful eye to some of the finest homes in New York and Paris.

In 2004, Henderson was one of eight interior designers selected to design a room in the eBay Showhouse, a four-story New York City brownstone decorated entirely with eBay finds. Henderson took advantage of the vast variety of treasures available on eBay in his design of the breakfast room, which he transformed into a swanky party nook by mixing traditional pieces, such as a tufted suede sofa, with clean-lined contemporary finds such as a midcentury game table and chairs and boxy club chairs. He has since "adopted" the club chairs for his upstate New York weekend home.

Henderson is a longtime eBay user. He first logged on to eBay about five years ago, on the advice of friends, and quickly used his vast knowledge of fine furniture, antiques and collectibles to unearth incredible, high-design treasures. Now, his firm shops on eBay almost daily, to snap up items for client projects or pieces that they simply fall in love with. Henderson’s design studio is filled with vignettes of his eBay finds, which he updates all the time to incorporate his latest purchases.

Henderson believes that interiors should be a true reflection of how a person lives. And, he says, architecture is a huge influence on his interiors, citing Tadao Ando, Richard Neutra, Greene & Greene, Louis Kahn and Edwin Lutyens as influences. He loves their mastery of organizing spaces that evoke feeling, which is something he strives to achieve in his interiors.

House Beautiful selected Henderson as one of its Top 25 Young Designers in September 2003, and Gotham magazine named him one of its Top 100 Designers in March 2004. He has appeared as a guest expert on NBC’s "Today" show and has contributed design advice to CBS, ABC, A&E, and Fine Living networks; photos of his work have appeared in The New York Times as well as on ABC and A&E. He also was a panelist at the 2006 Montecito Design Leadership Summit. A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Henderson began his professional career with the Manhattan firm Birch Coffey and also worked with designer Thad Hayes.

Henderson blogs about design on his eBay blog, “What I Love”.