About Rita

I believe resilience is how we move through the hard chapters, transformation is who we become because of them, and intentional living is our choice to live differently because of the lessons we have learned. And these beliefs have shaped my life.

I began my career in corporate consulting, spending a decade working with Fortune 500 companies before motherhood and a life-threatening breast cancer diagnosis changed the direction of my life. After having two children and surviving cancer, I left the corporate world to pursue a long-time passion. I returned to school to study interior design—bringing together my engineering background, creativity, and belief that our spaces can profoundly shape the way we live.

Today, as the founder and creative director of Rita Naffas Design, I approach design through the lens of intentional living. My work has evolved beyond designing individual spaces to curating ideas, environments, and inspiration that explore how our homes can support the lives we want to create—from rooms designed for restoration and connection to everyday rituals that make ordinary moments feel more meaningful.

But my interest in transformation has never been limited to the spaces around us.

As a breast cancer survivor and longtime women’s empowerment advocate, I created Journey With Rita to inform, empower, and inspire women navigating life’s difficult chapters. Years later, I was faced with another profound turning point when a serious illness left me unable to move and forced me to relearn how to stand, walk, and move through the world.

That experience deepened the questions at the center of my work: How do we navigate the chapters we never planned for? What helps us rebuild? And how can the hardest seasons of our lives change not only what we do, but who we become?

Those questions now shape the Journey With Rita Podcast, where I sit down with everyday people, thought leaders, and experts to explore resilience in all its forms—from health and motherhood to identity, career, relationships, purpose, and reinvention.

Through my writing and speaking, I continue that exploration, sharing personal stories, research that has helped me on my journey, reflections, wisdom, and practical ideas about resilience, transformation, intentional living, and the often-unnoticed process of becoming.

Across everything I create—design, writing, speaking, and podcasting—one philosophy connects it all: Just as a home can be redesigned with purpose and beauty, so can a life.

My design expertise and philosophy have been featured in Forbes, Real Simple, Living Etc., and Authority Magazine. I have also served on executive boards and councils for several nonprofit and community organizations throughout Los Angeles and have spent years advocating for and supporting women through challenging seasons of life.

I live in Los Angeles with my husband and two children, who are at the heart of everything I do and my greatest source of inspiration, where I continue to host my podcast, speak, write, and curate designs.