It’s the weekend and Galey Alix Gravenstein pulls up to the South Florida home she is charged with renovating over the next 72 hours before she has to be back at her finance job on Monday morning. Weeks and weeks of planning and preparation have led to this moment when Galey and her tight-knit, eight-person crew finally take the keys to their clients’ home and surprise them with a stunning remodel.
Overhead a drone is capturing aerial shots for her new show, Home in a Heartbeat, which aired its first eight-episode season on HGTV in April 2023 and is now streaming on Max. But with her first step out of the car, Galey is already wincing from the bone bruises on the bottom of her feet from standing on ladders and working “all day long, all night long until the sun came up,” she says. It’s the start of a new day and Galey should be rested. Instead, she can’t help but think, Oh, this is not going to go well for me.
Though Galey is no stranger to cameras documenting her and her design work — her Instagram account has more than 1.7 million followers — filming the show’s first season forced her team to expedite their schedule from doing one weekend remodel every six weeks to one every three weeks. (Like Galey, everyone on her team has a full-time job during the week, too.)
“There was no rest period. My feet were in a lot of pain because they didn’t have enough time to heal,” Galey explains. “Not sleeping, standing on your feet for three days straight during construction is really, really hard. We were dying.”
Each episode of Home in a Heartbeat emphasizes how Galey juggles her career as the vice president and regional director for Goldman Sachs with her self-taught interior design work on the weekends. During the 42-minute episodes and two-minute Instagram reels, there are time-lapse construction clips, her sophisticated designs and tear-jerking reveals to clients — and yet the chaos and exhaustion that comes with balancing these two careers are rarely chronicled on-screen.
But Galey isn’t ashamed or afraid to admit her battle with perfectionism and how in her desire to make others happy, she often struggles to acknowledge her own needs. As she celebrates the first season of Home in a Heartbeat and a blossoming relationship with Bachelorette alum Dale Moss, Galey decided it was time to make a big change, one that honored her well-being: A few months ago, she resigned from her Goldman Sachs position to pursue design full-time. While she can’t reveal all her exciting plans yet, Galey says she appreciates the slower pace of life as she writes her first design coffee-table book during the week and continues her demanding but extremely gratifying weekend renovations.
“To walk away from something that I spent so many years building and making successful and has a very comfortable income that’s consistent and predictable to become an entrepreneur and just bet on yourself is really, really scary,” Galey says. “But some jobs feed your mortgage and other jobs feed your soul. My finance job was feeding my mortgage but I was ready to feed my soul.”
Ever since she was a little girl, Galey says, rooms would speak to her. She can walk into a space and immediately feel if the design is “balanced and calm”; if it isn’t, it will be “screaming at [her]” to make a change. It started with her mother’s kitchen while growing up in Gainesville. She’d spot the bread tray open on the counter and immediately close it. (“We don’t need to see the loaf of bread sitting there,” she says.) Then she’d shuffle items from one side of the stove to the other until she felt peace.
Her mother, however, might be her only design client to date who came home and wasn’t pleased with Galey’s design surprises. “We’d get into a huge argument,” Galey recalls. “She’d say, ‘This is my kitchen; this is my house. One day, you can move your stuff wherever you want it but for now, this is my home.’”
At sixth-grade sleepovers, Galey says, she would help her friends move heavy furniture across their rooms just to angle their beds against a certain window. “I would trick my friends into playing this fun redecorating game until the space was finally calm,” Galey says. “I really just wanted to redecorate the room and make it look better.”
Galey, who majored in public relations at the University of Florida, never imagined that her design instincts could be anything more than a hobby. But she had an uncanny way of swiftly conquering any challenge she encountered. In college, Galey ran every morning before class and walked onto the Division 1 track team after the coach noticed her at a campus 5K race. Suddenly, she was competing in the conference finals alongside elite state champions who were nationally ranked in high school. Though Galey didn’t study finance, after graduating she hustled and taught herself how the markets worked, studied the regulations and acquired the necessary licenses that eventually landed her the Goldman Sachs job 10 years ago.
“I don’t know how these things happen,” Galey says.
She made it all look easy: blonde and lithe with a successful career and engaged with a new home in Connecticut. When she couldn’t find workers to come to the house when she was in town on the weekends, she decided to decorate the 10,000-square-foot home by herself. It was grueling work, but it was the blank canvas she had craved since childhood. Galey found that she especially enjoyed filming her fiance’s shocked reaction to each room after she finished decorating and then would upload the clips on social media.
From the outside, her life seemed solid. But, internally, it was fracturing as she grappled with mental health issues and commuting each week between Florida and the Northeast. When she sought treatment for an eating disorder, her fiance broke up with her and she moved out of the Connecticut home she had so lovingly designed.
Galey was devastated. Positive feedback on social media about her designs and followers’ constant requests to redo their spaces, too, inspired her to continue. Even though she had never taken a design class or even subscribed to an interior design magazine, she began to offer her design services to others across South Florida. Slowly, her following on social media grew and she emerged from one of the darkest chapters of her life with a greater sense of purpose.
“If I’m going to go on a morning run, it’s going to put me on a team. If I’m going to start an Instagram account of me designing, I’m going to end up getting a TV show,” Galey jokes. “I’m an extremist. There’s no gray in my life.”
For Galey, it’s about pouring energy into her projects, working hard and never cutting corners. “I genuinely care about doing a good job, whatever it is I’m doing,” she says. “I just want to make people happy whether it’s my boss, my coach or somebody on Instagram asking me to surprise them while designing their home.”
But, she says, her perfectionism can be both “a blessing and a curse,” simultaneously demanding her best efforts but also never allowing her to feel completely satisfied.
“It’s a very difficult headspace to live in,” Galey says. “No matter how much money I made or how fast I ran, I will find a way to pick that apart and still not feel good enough — and then thinking I could’ve made more money, run faster or made even more episodes.”
Sometimes Galey will scroll through her Instagram and shake her head at some of the earlier designs she posted years ago. “I’d be lying if I said there weren’t photos that I look back at and wonder if anyone is going to notice if I delete [them] from the ‘Gram because I don’t want my name associated with that living room,” Galey says. But she always resists, proud of the many iterations of her style (and self) maturing.
“My style has absolutely evolved,” Galey says, explaining how she has transitioned away from coastal blues to deep greens and metallic tones. “My main principles have remained the same but if you’re not evolving, what are you doing?”
Galey still vows to never incorporate red, orange or yellow hues in her work and to never make a space feel cluttered because she couldn’t self-edit. But now she can look back and appreciate how, in just a few years, she and her crew have not only taken bigger risks but grown more efficient, tackling more rooms in the same allotment of weekend time.
She’s proud of all she’s achieved. But between managing two careers, taking care of herself and two dogs, Charlye and Patch, and setting aside quality time for her friends and relationship, she knew something had to give: her stable, profitable position at Goldman Sachs.
“I want people to get inspired by the idea of a side hustle and working really hard for your dreams,” Galey says. “But just make sure that you’re in tune and listening to yourself while doing the hustle.”
Galey’s not entirely sure what’s next — but she’s OK with not knowing.
“My dad always said that really successful, driven people reinvent themselves every decade because they’ve either made it in that area or are complacent and need a new challenge. I hit my 10 years and I’m really itching for something new,” she says. “So in 10 years, I might not be doing design anymore. I might be running a farm in Wellington rescuing dogs. I have no idea.”
