From the halls of Belleville West to our team at HAA, Elle Malacarne brings artistic expertise
With a sign-painting grandfather and a photographer father, our Design Professional Elle Malacarne in some ways grew up with artistry in her DNA, which she further developed through learning to paint.
Family influence and inherent talents are one thing, but Malacarne also honed her craft from childhood, telling us that “throughout my education, I was always in an art class. I graduated high school [Belleville Township–West, in 2021] with an abundance of art and English credits, and the art wing was where you could find me most of the time.” A lifelong inhabitant of Belleville, she also attended Signal Hill elementary and middle schools.
Although Elle’s first love remains midcentury modern design (as in her family home), she’s not at all afraid to step out artistically. After all, she created a conceptual café and coffee bar, with living space above, that drew from both the Art Nouveau movement and more modern minimalist industrial design for her thesis project at Stevens, the Institute of Business & Arts (SIBA), from which she graduated in March 2026. The photograph shows Elle (ABOVE, center) with a couple of her mentors.
Malacarne’s design journey began in downtown St. Louis, at SIBA, in October 2022. While working throughout college, she discovered that she “immediately fell in love with interiors at SIBA; it was everything I loved in so much detail.” Elle said that the design school served up so many positives for her, including the ability “to create mixed-media art that people spent time in, that would impact their experience with the built world.” Plus, had it not been for “a number of industry professionals,” “women who have been in the industry for decades, [who] taught me basics and nuances and let me find my own way and come up with my own solutions,” Elle might not have connected with Henderson Associates Architects (HAA) in a professional capacity.
Her HAA origin story goes something like this. Elle’s father, Chris (a commercial photographer and architecture/design enthusiast), knew Eric Bratzler personally and had contacted Henderson about a garage addition. Eric and his family later attended an eclipse-viewing party at the Malacarne Estate and met Elle. But because she had just started college, Elle said that although she was immediately interested in our firm, intimidation stood in the way. Nevertheless, she persisted. “About a year later I emailed [Eric] to see if they needed an interior designer, and I was delighted when they came back and said that they would make room for one.”
“Historically, Henderson Associates has always had an interiors person on staff. When Elle called, I knew if the fit was right we could add to the talent level of our team and make the company stronger. To my delight, her personality and humor match her knowledge and work ethic. We couldn’t be happier.”
— Eric Bratzler, Henderson Associates Architects Vice President
Fast-forward to July 2026, and Elle has been growing alongside HAA, as we branch out, for well over a year—serving as a guide as we enter a new service realm, that of offering Interior Design to our clients.
For anyone either new to or experienced in using an interior designer, it’s good to know that “as a designer, it is very important to set your preferences aside, not your knowledge, just your preferences, and to justify decisions with such [knowledge]. There are so many options in this world, and interior designers, or at least I, tend to catalog these things and pull them from [a] mental reference library to help clients make the right choice for them.”
Naturally, in the architecture, design, and building trade, Elle’s talent for problem-solving rises on the daily. Yet, each workday at Henderson is different and calls upon her many different skills: “Some days I work on renderings, some days I’m selecting materials and ordering samples, others I’m meeting with clients, sometimes I’m on a site visit or at a showroom looking for a specific material in a specific color, and others I’m scouring the Internet for the latest and greatest product to fulfill a need for a [client’s] project.”
In the very near future, you will see Elle’s work with clients appearing out in the world in our continuing Schulte Supply project (in Edwardsville) and, soon, listed on our website’s services page. We also hope to get her involved further in a favorite niche of hers: food service design, whose “all-consuming” quality makes her “love designing restaurants” all the more.
With what little free time our hard-working colleague Elle Malacarne possesses, she spends drawing or painting, playing music, renovating dollhouses, following true crime stories, or taking her recently adopted Golden Retriever mix, Lux, to experience new things in the world!
Many hearty welcomes to Elle (and good boy Lux) and all the education, enthusiasm, and experience she adds, dovetailing well with those of her HAA colleagues and principals.
