The most prominent African-American interior designer in the city, Bridges's career peaked in the 1990s with boldface clients like Diddy and Tom Clancy and a show on the Fine Living channel.

A Philadelphia native, Bridges earned degrees from Brown and Parsons before settling in Harlem in the mid-80s. She founded Sheila Bridges Design Inc. soon after and made a name for herself with prestigious design commissions from Bill Clinton's sprawling offices in Harlem to projects for Princeton and Columbia. Naturally, profiles in magazines like Martha Stewart Living, Elle Decor, Country Living, House & Garden, and Vanity Fair followed, but Bridges boosted her public profile predominantly with television appearances on the Today show and Oprah. Her kernels of design wisdom proved to be so popular that she even landed her own show, Sheila Bridges Designer Living, for four seasons on the Fine Living channel. Like many celeb interior designers, in 2007 she created her own furniture line, Sheila Bridges Home Inc., which is carried at purveyors as diverse as Anthropologie to Bed Bath & Beyond. She even holds the rare honor of having one of her wallpaper patterns, "Harlem Toile De Jouy" in the permanent wallpaper collection—who knew?—at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. [Image via Getty]