Meet the Curbed Young Guns Semifinalists: Sally Breer

Curbed Young Guns, now in its first year, aims to identify promising up-and-coming talent (35 and under) in the fields of architecture, interior design, and urban development. For the next few weeks, Curbed National will run individual stories on each semifinalist; the inaugural class of Young Guns will be announced in mid August. In the mean time, though, here's a look at a semifinalist based in L.A.:

Unlike many of the 2013 Young Guns semifinalists, Los Angeles-based decorator Sally Breer doesn't have years of formal training or any official degrees to hang on her wall. In fact, until pretty recently, she was skeptical that interior design was truly her calling. "I didn't know that there could be meaning or depth or thought behind it," she says. "It wasn't something I ever planned to do."

Yet Breer has managed to turn her passion for "junking"—a catchall term referring to her love of flea markets, vintage furnishings, and the buzzy high of a good find—into a full-fledged career that's split between Comminglehome, her fledgling interiors firm (it doesn't hurt that her first client was actor Justin Long, a close friend, and that her perch in L.A. has allowed her to connect with other showbiz clients) and Shop Class, a vintage furnishings store and workshop space that opened this February. "I think the biggest thing, if I'm lucky—if I really get to do what I like to do—is incorporating vintage character," she says. "I like a little quirk to a space, I like a little character that connects with the individual. That's the throughline: to incorporate some whimsy and some character."

The journey from Point A to 25-year-old business owner wasn't so straightforward, though, and Breer admits that she's "had this very weird, patchy experience."

A closer look at how she's gotten to where she is today, right this way. >>