de facto therapist helps organize homes, offices and, sometimes, lives

Jon Siegel, professional organizer & de facto therapist
​The Spatial Guy helps organize homes, offices and, sometimes, lives
BY ANDREW BENDER | PHOTOS COURTESY OF SALOMÉE HERRERA

“For as long as I can remember, I have been organizing,” says Jon Siegel, a.k.a. the Spatial Guy. Inspired by Elsie, his beloved childhood nanny, “I would organize our kitchen, pantry and closets just for fun. I went to friends’ houses and organized theirs on weekends.”

​Later in life, people would often approach him while he was shopping and ask where to find merchandise. “I guess I was putting things back neatly,” he laughs.

Nowadays, he’s turned that skill into a career as a professional organizer, helping clients from Malibu to Whittier declutter and organize their homes and offices — and often their lives.
He calls it “Creating an aesthetic yet functional space puts people at ease.”

Clients give Jon high marks for his naturally calm, caring demeanor, and he's earned respect from his peers too, serving on the board of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association of Productivity and
Organizing Professionals.

“Since each client is unique, I don't believe one method works for everyone,” he says. “It is my job to be my clients’ personal trainer and coach and help them learn how to live a lifestyle that works for them.”

Take one client so concerned with emergency preparedness that her garage overflowed with food and supplies, alongside everything from family heirlooms and long-outdated documents from her retired husband’s business to a random bicycle given to her by a neighbor. “We had to make walkways just to get through decades' worth of stuff,” Jon
recalls.

But when they finished, he says, “It looked like everything belonged where it should. We joked that it was like setting up a grocery store, one section for tin foil and Tupperware, another for beans…”
For other clients, blocks to a less cluttered life can be as much mental as material.

One recent client came to him “ready to clear her space and her mind of clutter,” he says. Through discussions with Jon, she came to see the clutter in her home as representing emotional baggage from her parents. After that breakthrough, “she was ready to clear her space, start fresh and reinvent herself.”
“Connecting those two things is what I do,” he reflects. “It’s kind of like therapy.”

Jon says these “light bulb moments” motivate him. Through decluttering and creating a calmer space, he says, “clients feel a sense of accomplishment and have that weight taken off their backs.”

Jon had his own light bulb moment about 5 years ago. The Denver native had moved to LA in the mid-2000s with a bachelor’s degree in retailing and consumer sciences from the University of Arizona, to
pursue a degree at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and a career in advertising.

That kept him going until 2017, when he suddenly found himself unemployed just when his wife, Danielle, was expecting their first child. “I decided to refocus my talents on what I have always loved most — organizing — and have been doing it professionally since,” he says. As his business has grown, so has his family. Jon and Danielle have since been joined by son Asher and daughter Stella, alongside the family’s poodle mix, named Elsie of course.

And what of life at home as a professional organizer? “When Danielle and I met,” he recalls, “she’d walk into a room and drop everything, and I’d pick it back up and find a place to put it. But over the years we’ve come to a middle ground, and sometimes she’s now the one that points things out to me!”

If it worked for her, perhaps it can work for you too.

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