Sex and the City’ set decorator Susanna Goulder follows a spiritual path that brings her back to Cleveland

By Martha Neff- Cleveland.com

March 13, 2009, 8:03PM

Susanna Goulder worked her aesthetic magic in Manhattan, on the sets of movies and television shows. It was an 18-hour-a-day world of building up, filling in, tearing down, then building the sets up again — selecting every piece of fabric and placing every stick of furniture.

Today, she uses her creativity on a different kind of interior — nothing less than the soul.

Goulder, who grew up in Shaker Heights, went on to live in Manhattan for almost 20 years, and ended up back in Ohio, which she never could have imagined.

But life can be funny like that.

“Sometimes things happen in a way that shows you, ‘You’ve got to let go of this,’ ” says Goulder, 48. “Something else is on its way for you.”

It’s the kind of situation many people face, perhaps these days more than ever. An all-consuming, well-loved career suddenly comes to a halt. A relationship falters. A home is lost.

And so it was for Goulder, who reached what she considers her professional pinnacle — as set decorator for the debut season of “Sex and the City.” Yet after season one, there were budget disagreements between the art department and producers. And Goulder wasn’t asked to return.

Losing the “Sex and the City” gig meant missing out on being part of a pop-culture juggernaut, which would have brought further professional acclaim, not to mention personal pride. Around this same time, she lost the Chelsea neighborhood apartment she’d lived in for years. Then her long-term romantic relationship came to an end.

“Everything in my life just started not working,” she says.

Some people give up, falter into depression, or worse. Others, like Goulder, stop and take the more difficult route — a look inside herself, one that meant asking a lot of painful questions, a route without easy answers.

It’s a long way from “Sex and the City” to giving sermons.

But that’s what Goulder does now, at a fairly new Unity-inspired church called Renaissance Spiritual Community in Bedford Heights. There she assists the Rev. Dana Cummings. She gives sermons on some Sundays at Renaissance as well as at other churches, does spiritual mentoring and performs wedding ceremonies.

But she wouldn’t change any element of her journey — even the darkest hours.

“My life shifted,” she says. “And that’s what happens. The world conspires to raise our consciousness. If I’d kept on decorating sets for movies and TV, I wouldn’t be here now.
“And I love my life so much.”
From Northeast Ohio to Manhattan

Goulder was raised in an environment of creative energy and business smarts. Her father, George Goulder, made ready-to-assemble plastic tables, desks and dinnerware in the 1960s, which were exhibited at trade fairs alongside such iconic pieces as the Eames and Saarinen chairs. Her mother, Joan Luntz, co-owned a housewares design business called Designs by Joan Luntz Inc.

Though the family was culturally Jewish, Goulder says, the extent of their religious practice was going to synagogue on High Holy Days.

Not long after graduating from Shaker Heights High School, she visited a friend in South Florida, a location where a lot of commercials and movies were being shot, and eventually began assisting on sets.

One gig led to another, and then someone she knew had a job for her in New York. She began styling sets for commercials — including the iconic 1994 Diet Coke ad with the sexy bare-chested construction worker — and a number of movies, with stars such as Wesley Snipes, Kevin Bacon and Christian Slater.

She also co-owned a prop shop that supplied pieces for TV shows and films. But it was creating the sets for “Sex and the City” that really excited her. She had a small budget, so she scoured flea markets and secondhand stores, Goulder says.

“When I told people the name of the show and that it would be on HBO, they thought it was a porn thing,” she says.

But she pulled it off, creating apartments for each of the distinctive characters: Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte and Mr. Big. The entire first season was shot before the show debuted in 1998 to popular acclaim.

Learning to fill her ‘heart and soul’

After things fell apart, Goulder looked at two friends, also set decorators, for inspiration. One was a Buddhist, the other a fundamentalist Christian. She noticed that even when things went wrong for them, everything always seemed to work out for the best.

“They would both ride the head winds,” she says. “I would get sliced and diced.”
What the women both had, she saw, was a fulfilling spiritual path, and Goulder realized that’s what she was missing. She began meditating, praying, signing up for retreats, journaling and asking for answers.

“I realized that while I loved my glamorous career, it never filled my heart and soul,” she says. “I asked God, ‘Show me how to connect with you because I don’t know how.’ And I began to look at myself with honesty — because our world is a mirror of who we are.”

Soon, she was asked to lead retreats, beginning with Julia Cameron’s the Artist’s Way. Goulder began volunteering, moved to a more peaceful town in upstate New York — though she commuted to Manhattan to study at a seminary (she was ordained as a minister in 2004) — and began doing healing work with cancer and AIDS patients.

While visiting Shaker Heights for a weekend retreat, she met David Bradford, who became a friend. They stayed in touch for a couple of years while she lived in New York and he in Cleveland. Their friendship deepened, though Goulder didn’t know what to do about it since she had no plans to move.

“Then one day, it was like something was telling me to move back to Cleveland,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Cleveland?’ ”

She moved back, and in 2006 she and Bradford married. They started going to the new Renaissance Spiritual Community in Bedford Heights. After several visits, she introduced herself to Cummings, and they clicked. Soon, Goulder began working with him, occasionally giving sermons.

Goulder now uses her creative and visual experience to make her sermons even more compelling. For a recent one, she showed a YouTube video of famed violinist Joshua Bell playing anonymously in a Washington, D.C., subway. Only one person out of many hundreds who passed him noticed that a virtuoso was playing. Goulder then shared stories about how life shows us many profound things — of beauty and significance — that we are too busy to notice.

“The biggest challenge we all have is to have the courage to trust in something,” she says, meaning the spirit she calls God. “If you face your demons and do that, everything will open up to you.”

But why do some people take that path while others give up?

“A hug in the morning on the way to work and a kiss before bed doesn’t make for a good marriage, just as a meditation in the morning and a prayer in the evening doesn’t make for a good relationship with the divine substance we call God,” she says. “Any relationship you value must be prioritized.

“Many people on the path want all the perks, but they resist giving the time and attention needed to have a meaningful relationship with God.”

For her, she says, “The pieces of my life came together. Now I’m discovering what it means to have peace, and joy, within me.”