Laplante Photographer Zooms in on Luxury Interiors
Photographer Marina Porl rarely has a person in front of her camera lens.
She doesn’t photograph weddings, families, or even newborns. Her passion is shooting interior rooms to capture a home’s essence. Textiles, patterns. Walls drenched in color. She can’t get enough of it all.
“You can get the full story of a house when you photograph it from all the different angles,” explains Marina, of Walpole. “I get to be in that space, and I want other people to experience it, too. That what it’s about for me.”
Marina has been photographing our luxury homes since our design coordinator, Brooke Vartanian, discovered her on Instagram in 2024.
Marina has photographed four Laplante houses, each one of them different—one on the Cape and three in Western Massachusetts. She remembers each home as if they were people—the modern one with the mountain view. The unique home with the massive walk-in closet and whimsical kid’s playroom.
“They’re all so different,” she says. “And they’re all amazing.”
Self-taught professional
Marina didn’t study photography. Her father was a photographer with an artistic eye, and she got the genes.
In high school, she loved art, and she painted and drew. This led her to enroll in a fashion program at Mount Ida College, but she learned quickly that fashion design wasn’t her thing. She liked the marketing aspect behind it, though, and earned her bachelor’s degree in marketing.
Several years after graduation, Marina began working as a social media marketer for a family-owned carpet supplier in Needham. The business was small but also high end, and she had the pleasure of photographing carpets and stair runners from big-name companies like Stark and Prestige Mills, all in high-end homes.
Her job was to pair the images with posts online. “They gave me the freedom to be creative,” she says.
Interior designers saw her photographs and recommended Marina’s talents to their homeowners when it was time to photograph their homes. “That’s how it started,” Marina says.
She started small, on the weekends, and says her reputation has grown incredibly fast. In the last six months, Marina’s work has been published in print publications about six to 10 times—once on the cover of Cape Cod Home for a story on a Laplante house.
“It’s clients like Laplante who are trusting me to get them seen who are building my business,” she says. “We’re telling a whole story with photos. It’s amazing and fun.”
Magazine readers taking in Marina’s stunning, crisp images can fully imagine the rooms she shoots without ever stepping foot in them. They love what they see—the decisions and the planning and creativity that went into each small nook or grand space she captures.
Marina Porl Photography
When Marina launched her business full time in 2023, the owners of the carpet store referred clients to her, as did interior designers. She built relationships and still shoots for almost all her original customers.
In addition to magazines, her photographs get seen on social media and websites, and she suspects, in marketing pieces such as real estate postcards and brochures that she doesn’t even know about.
Some of her inspiration comes from the many seasoned New England photographers she admires. “We all have different eyes. We’re all seeing something different,” she says.
Marina says she is learning how not to overshoot. She adds, “At the end of the day, I have so many photos with a dozen or more angles from each room. There are cute things going on. Paint colors, crown molding, gigantic windows.”
Capturing a Laplante home
Marina begins her work on a Laplante photo shoot long before that day arrives.
In advance, Brooke texts her photos so Marina can begin to imagine her many subjects and get inspired. “I get a sense of the vibe—is it rural? Seaside?” she says.
More recently, Marina has also driven to a home before the shoot. “That helps me figure out what angles we’re going to do before I get there, so I’m not going in blind the day of.”
Marina’s work also helps Brooke present the home’s best self.
On the day of a photo shoot, Marina says, “I love to start with the wider angles. I like having the whole room photographed first. You get the full idea of the whole room and move to tighter vignettes.”
Mutual trust
Our collaboration with Marina is steeped in mutual trust and respect.
We know she’ll deliver photographs we can use on our websites, social media platforms, and advertising, and we are certain long in advance that those shots will be stellar and will easily communicate the quality of our work.
“I love that Laplante trusts me with these huge projects. It is so special that they allow me to come in and tell the story of this project that they finished,” Marina says. “It tells me they appreciate my work and the way I’m telling the story of their work.”
