Every design career has a starting point. For Debby Gomulka, it was the furniture and design industry, where she spent about five years before launching her own firm in 2000, according to a 2025 profile published by CEOWORLD.

That early experience gave her a working understanding of how furniture, materials, and spaces come together. When she opened Provenance Lee Interiors, she brought that practical grounding to a practice built around historic preservation and client storytelling.

The profile also notes that she worked as an adjunct professor at Cape Fear Community College from 2015 to 2017. Teaching added another dimension to a career that grew out of the furniture and design industry.

The firm now offers full-service residential interior design, renovation, new construction, and vacation home design. Its interior design services are paired with a line of globally inspired home textiles, reflecting how far the business has grown from its beginnings.

Today she describes herself as a luxury designer with more than 25 years of experience, working on projects that range from historic renovations to contemporary homes. Her LinkedIn page outlines her professional background, while her personal website offers a fuller account of her services and philosophy.

Her website describes work across the Southeast, from historic renovations to contemporary luxury homes, which shows how the practice has widened since its first year.

The story is a reminder that design careers rarely follow a straight line. Experience in one corner of the industry can become the foundation for a broader practice, and her path from furniture to full-service design, preservation, and textiles shows how that can unfold over time. Her story offers a useful reference point for emerging designers weighing whether to join an established firm or strike out independently after years of industry learning.

The through line is consistency. A quarter century on, the same approach that launched the firm still defines it.