Taking in one last deep breath, he stands confidently in the brightly-lit room, with his hands grasped in a firm fashion, beginning to speak with confidence and personality to the audience about his team’s design for a therapy center. At this moment, senior Camden Michalek was ready to take home a state champion medal for the FCCLA Interior Design Competition. 

When it comes to Michalek, there’s two words: Interior and design. Serving as the FCCLA president since he was a sophomore, his passion for furnishing has led him to a lot of opportunities, such as his internship at Mohan Interiors, a design firm that does primarily luxury residential projects around the country.

“I’ve always had a passion for designing homes and designing buildings,” Michalek said. “I always wanted to be an architect, and then in high school, I saw that interior design was an option, so I took the class and I fell in love with it and started competing, and then that just grew my passion for design even more.”

Michalek began competing in the annual FCCLA Interior Design Competition three years ago, where all students are given the same prompt and have to design both a furniture and layout plan that they present to the judges who act as clients, judging participants based on a rubric. 

“It was really tough,” Michalek said. “I have been competing for three years now and every year I have learned a little bit more and a little more, and it’s a really secretive kind of competition. There’s not a lot of information on it, so it’s always been kind of a shot in the dark, and I finally sort of figured out what we needed to do, so Cary Evans and I were competing together and we worked super hard, like tirelessly since October, every single day working to just make the project as detailed and amazing as possible.”

Michalek and Evans placed in the Top 5 at Regionals and advanced to State, receiving a perfect score and placed first, qualifying for Nationals, which will take place in Denver, Colorado in July, competing against 30 other teams from all over the country.  

“We are going to start rehearsing our presentation every single day,” Michalek said. “At State, we got a perfect score, so there’s not big room for improvement, just little bitty details about our presentation and our speech that we’re going to perfect and just hopefully have it perfectly memorized for nationals.”

Beyond his achievement of being a perfect-score state champion, Michalek also had a huge involvement in the redesign of the CPHS News Broadcast Studio, where he and Broadcast Advisor Anthony Garcia collaborated and came up with a bunch of ideas in order to expand upon the set starting back in the winter of 2021. 

“It was a really drawn out process,” Michalek said. “We started with just a few ideas and we actually talked to KVUE news to get tips from them on how to design a broadcast set, and from there we worked together to just kind of talk about what he was looking for in the set.” 

After a lot of different renderings and design concepts, the new studio was finished constructing back in January. 

“I love seeing all the new colors and the different greens,” Michalek said. “The TV screens on the wall are also really cool to look at.”

In the fall, Michalek will attend the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, where he will major in Architecture and possibly minor in Interior Design.

“I’m really looking forward to just honing my skills in the industry and also meeting new people and just getting outside of Austin,” Michalek said. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’m ready to see the world and see where I can go from here.”

According to Michalek, one of his biggest inspirations is artist Ken Fulk, an interior designer known for his unique style. 

“He doesn’t adhere to trends or adhere to what the industry says to do,” Michalek said. “He just does whatever he finds fun and whatever he likes and I think that’s really inspiring to know that you don’t have to follow what everyone says. You can try to do your own thing and you’ll still succeed at that.”

Michalek aspires to have his own design firm someday that does both architecture and interior design. 

“One of my favorite pieces of advice is look for a career that you love and enjoy because you’ll be motivated to go farther with it,” Michalek said. “Design is my passion and it’s what I enjoy doing in my free time, and so being able to know that I can make a whole career out of this and make a living and it’s incredible and it’s so inspiring and like, I never think of it as a job or as a payments always just been a joy, and so learning how I can sort of monetize that and just constantly be doing what I love, it’s been great advice for me.”