While there, she received a first place annual IIDA Nevada-Arizona chapter award for a Boulder City vacation home, and her work was featured in the Las Vegan magazine.
Her husband’s career change brought Rhonda to Minneapolis-St. Paul in 1981, where she began building a new clientele with Gabberts Design Studio. She developed their interior design seminar program, and became a popular public speaker on interior design topics in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She served on the John H. Stevens’ House Restoration committee for the Minneapolis Junior League, a committee that relocated and made a museum of the first house built in 1846 in Minneapolis, and Rhonda was selected to write the text for the docents’ museum manual from the Stevens’ family letters of the 1800’s. During her nine-year career in the Minneapolis area, she was featured numerous times in local magazines and newspapers, and had a client’s home featured in the March 1992 Traditional Home and subsequent Bed and Bath magazines by Meredith Publishing.
With her husband’s career moving them, ironically, back to Las Vegas in 1989, Rhonda joined Collins Interiors in Las Vegas, a newly formed design studio and showroom, and rebuilt her clientele for the next fourteen years. While there, she received a first place annual IIDA Nevada-Arizona chapter award for a Boulder City vacation home, and her work was featured in the Las Vegan magazine.
Returning to her home state and settling in Iowa City was a life-long ambition, finally realized in 2003. She started Rhonda Staley Design in 2004, travelling frequently to Nevada to serve her Las Vegas clientele. Her downtown Iowa City office and showroom was where she gave popular seminars on interior design topics and began building a client base in Eastern Iowa. In 2009 she became associated with The Mansion in Iowa City, and continues to office there and work on her clients’ projects.
