Photo by Brad Rumble Photography
When she’s not up to her eyeballs in clauses, contracts, and closings, a successful White Plains real estate broker helps homeowners design the dens of their dreams.
As the daughter of a Detroit-area house-flipper and someone who lived in the properties her father was flipping, Laura Lulgjuraj learned to love homes at an early age. It’s no surprise that she’d grow up to find herself working as a real estate agent with Gino Bello Homes in White Plains, one of Houlihan Lawrence’s top-performing real estate sales teams. “It doesn’t feel like work to me,” she says.
Lulgjuraj thrives on helping house hunters see a home’s potential and envision themselves in the space, yet she also gets down and dirty with property negotiations and transactions, contracts, and real estate legalese, as all agents do. “It’s a lot of detail, rules, and structure,” she explains, “but I’m a big ‘feeling’ person too.”
She taps into those feelings by releasing her “artsy side,” as an interior designer, in her downtime. “It’s my therapy,” she laughs.
Lulgjuraj discovered she had a knack for design when she renovated and flipped her own condo in her early 20s while redoing a friend’s bathroom. She made it official two years ago, achieving certification as an interior designer by the New York Institute of Art and Design. “I love designing anything, but I love kitchens and baths. And powder rooms are fun because you can get crazy with wallpaper, depending on the client.”
“When you love what you do, it’s a hobby, not so much a job.”
— Laura Lulgjuraj
She knows the aesthetic that tickles her fancy may not crack a smile in others, so Lulgjuraj approaches each project and client from the stance of “How can I make you go ‘WOW!’” Her mission remains the same, whether she’s completely renovating a bathroom or just zhuzhing up a client’s office: “I test every boundary and do what feels good in the space,” she explains. “I mix modern with rustic; I don’t like rules.”
A recurring theme these days is the desire for a feeling of Zen in a space, but “everyone’s Zen is different,” she acknowledges. She plans to become feng shui-certified over the next year. Farther down the road, Lulgjuraj dreams of launching her own homebuilding company.
Between now and then, though, she’ll keep following her bliss as a Houlihan Lawrence Gold Award winner — an accolade that recognizes the top 25% of more than 1,000 sales associates. She also plans to keep “recharging my battery” with interior design, because, as she puts it: “When you love what you do, it’s a hobby, not so much a job.” At the end of the day, that beats working for a living in anyone’s book.
