Julie Landrum: Paul Pierce’s Ex-Wife and the Interior Designer Behind the Name

Most people first hear the name Julie Landrum in the same sentence as Paul Pierce, the Boston Celtics legend known to basketball fans as “The Truth”. Yet the woman behind that name built a career of her own long before the wedding, and she has kept it going long after the marriage ended. Among the many celebrity stories that begin with a famous husband, hers is different, because Julie Landrum was already an award-winning interior designer when she married one of the NBA’s biggest stars.

Julie Landrum is an American interior designer and philanthropist from St. Louis, Missouri, best known as the former wife of NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce. The two were married for thirteen years, from 2010 to 2023, and raised three children together. Before and after that marriage, Julie Landrum built a design business that earned her a place on Elle Décor’s A-List and a spot on the design team of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Julie Landrum Quick Facts

• Full name: Julie Patricia Landrum (later Julie Pierce)
• Born: 24 February 1983, St. Louis, Missouri, United States (reported; see Common Confusions)
• Age: 43 years old in 2026
• Known for: Interior designer; former wife of NBA legend Paul Pierce
• Parents: Terry “Tito” Landrum, former MLB outfielder, and Teresa Landrum
• Siblings: Older sister Melissa Landrum
• Education: Fashion Institute of Technology; New York School of Interior Design (BA, 2005); Rhode Island School of Design (MFA in Furniture Design, 2007)
• Career: Founded her own interior design business in 2009; Elle Décor A-List Designer; Traditional Home Top-20 Design Icon
• Television: Design team member on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2010)
• Marriage: Paul Pierce (17 July 2010 – divorce finalised 2023)
• Children: Prianna Lee (born 2008), Adrian Tanya (born 2011), Prince Paul (born 2013)
• Public profile: Very private; no verified public social media presence

Who Is Julie Landrum?

Julie Landrum is an American interior designer and philanthropist, born in St. Louis, Missouri, and best known to the public as the former wife of Paul Pierce, the former Boston Celtics star who played nineteen seasons in the NBA. Her own career, however, has nothing to do with basketball. She designs homes, and she has done so at a level that earned her national recognition before she ever appeared on a red carpet beside her husband.

Julie Landrum grew up in a household where design was already a family trade. Her mother, Teresa Landrum, was an interior designer, and Julie first learned the work as her mother’s apprentice before becoming a senior designer in the family business. When her mother retired, Julie took over the firm, Landrum LLC, and built it into a practice that worked on homes across the United States and Canada for athletes, entertainers and politicians.

Early Life in St. Louis

Julie Landrum was born on 24 February 1983 in St. Louis, Missouri, according to the biography sites that cover her, as Julie Patricia Landrum. She is the younger of two daughters born to Terry “Tito” Landrum and Teresa Landrum. Her older sister is Melissa. The family lived in St. Louis, a city where her father had played baseball for the Cardinals, and where her mother was already working in interior design.

St. Louis shaped Julie Landrum in two ways that mattered later. First, it put her inside a professional sports family from birth: her father was a Major League outfielder, and the routines of a sporting household, with its travel, its public attention and its discipline, were normal to her long before she married an athlete. Second, it put her inside a design household, where fabric, furniture and floor plans were everyday conversation. She attended Parkway Central High School in the suburb of Chesterfield, and little else is publicly known about her school years.

A Baseball Family: The Tito Landrum Connection

One detail about Julie Landrum’s family causes more confusion than any other, and it is worth sorting out early. Her father is Terry Lee Landrum, better known by his nickname “Tito” Landrum, a former Major League Baseball outfielder who played nine seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers between 1980 and 1988. He won two World Series rings, with the 1983 Orioles and the 1985 Cardinals, and was a League Championship Series hero for both clubs.

That is why some sources call her father “Terry Landrum” and others call him “Tito Landrum”. They are the same person: Terry Lee Landrum, known in baseball as Tito. The Society for American Baseball Research records that he married Teresa Sweet in October 1972, that the couple’s first daughter Melissa was born shortly before spring training in 1981, and that a second daughter, Julie, arrived before the 1982 season. That last detail does not sit neatly with the 24 February 1983 birth date given by the celebrity biography sites, and the discrepancy is noted in the Common Confusions section below.

Education: Fashion, Interiors and Furniture Design

Julie Landrum’s education took her through three schools and three related disciplines, and the sequence says a lot about how seriously she took the craft. She began at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where she earned a two-year degree in fashion buying and merchandising. Fashion was her first formal training, and it gave her an eye for fabric, colour and proportion that she would carry into interiors.

From there she moved to the New York School of Interior Design, one of the oldest and most respected design schools in the United States, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in interior design in 2005. The degree gave her the technical grounding she needed: space planning, lighting, building codes and the business of running a design practice. In 2007 she earned a Master of Fine Arts in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the most selective art schools in the country. For Julie Landrum, it rounded out an education that moved from fashion to interiors to the furniture itself, and it gave her a range of skills that few interior designers hold all at once.

Building a Design Career

Julie Landrum began her professional life working alongside her mother. She started as an apprentice in Teresa Landrum’s practice and worked her way up to senior designer, learning the trade the old-fashioned way: on real projects, with real clients, under a mentor who happened to be her mother. When Teresa retired, Julie became the owner of the business, Landrum LLC, and took its client list with her.

In 2009, the year she is generally said to have founded her own interior design business, her practice was already working on residential projects across the United States and Canada. Her client list, according to the profiles that cover her, has included athletes, entertainers and politicians, and the work has been largely residential: family homes and apartments that needed to live well rather than simply photograph well. Her work earned her two honours that are widely repeated in every profile of her: she was named a Traditional Home Top-20 Design Icon, and she was named an Elle Décor A-List Designer. Both are peer-level honours, and both were earned on the strength of her design work, not her marriage. By the time she married Paul Pierce in 2010, Julie Landrum was already an established name in her own field.

Elle Décor, Extreme Makeover and National Attention

The year 2010 was a turning point for Julie Landrum in two directions at once. In July she married Paul Pierce, and in the same year she was named one of three new design team members for ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the popular reality series that rebuilt homes for families in need. The show was a natural fit for her: it combined design skill with charity work, both of which she had already been doing for years, and it put her work in front of a national television audience.

She did not chase that attention. Unlike many television designers, she did not build a product line, a book or a social media brand out of the show. She went back to running her practice, and the show remains a single line in her career rather than the whole story of it. That restraint fits the rest of her public life: she has never been active on social media in any verified public way, and she has given almost no interviews about herself.

Meeting Paul Pierce

Julie Landrum met Paul Pierce during the 2005 NBA All-Star Weekend in Houston, Texas, according to the most widely repeated accounts, and the two began dating shortly afterwards. Pierce was then the star of the Boston Celtics, the team he had joined as the tenth overall pick in the 1998 NBA Draft out of the University of Kansas. He was twenty-seven, already one of the best scorers in the league, and three years away from the championship season that would define his career.

The meeting has become one of the most retold parts of their story, and like most such stories it has more than one version. Some sources say they began dating in 2006 rather than 2005. The 2005 date is the one carried by the majority of the longer profiles, and this article uses it while noting the alternative. Before Paul Pierce, Julie Landrum had a relationship with another NBA player, Larry Hughes, and that part of her story is repeated in several profiles. According to those accounts, Hughes was married to Carrie Hughes at the time, and Julie ended the relationship when she learned about the marriage, having not known about it. The episode is reported rather than confirmed by either party, and it is worth stating it that way.

Marriage and Three Children

Julie Landrum and Paul Pierce married on 17 July 2010 at The Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast, California, in an elegant ocean-view ceremony. Their eldest daughter, Prianna Lee, who had been born on 4 April 2008, served as the flower girl. The wedding came two years after Pierce had won his first NBA championship with the Celtics, beating the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2008 Finals and taking the Finals MVP award, and it came at the height of his fame.

The couple went on to have three children together. Prianna Lee Pierce was born in 2008, before the wedding. Their second daughter, Adrian Tanya Pierce, was born in 2011, and their son, Prince Paul Pierce, was born on 2 April 2013. The three children grew up in the years when Pierce was finishing his playing career: he left Boston in 2013 for the Brooklyn Nets, then played for the Washington Wizards and the Los Angeles Clippers before retiring in 2017 after nineteen seasons in the NBA. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021.

The family also included a stepdaughter, Janaiya Lynn Pierce, the daughter of Paul Pierce and his first wife, actress Dana Davis, to whom he had been married from 2000 to 2004. Julie Landrum became a stepmother to Janaiya as well as a mother to her own three children, and the blended family was part of the couple’s life together for the whole of their marriage.

Philanthropy and Community Work

If there is one part of Julie Landrum’s life that the profiles agree on, it is her charity work. She and Paul Pierce worked together on a long list of community projects in Boston and beyond, and her name appears on many of them as an organiser rather than simply as a donor. The work began during the marriage and has continued in her own name since.

She helped serve Thanksgiving meals to less fortunate families in New England, and she was involved in the “Christmas With Pierce and Children of Our Future” programme, which brought holiday cheer to underprivileged children. She also helped organise the “Paul Pierce Presents Home Strong Celebrity Gala” and the “Welcome Home” Veteran’s Day ceremony in Boston, both of which supported American troops and veterans, a cause she has spoken about with particular commitment because members of her own family have served in the military. With the Safe Space Organisation, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Celtics, she co-sponsored an annual domestic violence awareness walk and expo. The charity work is the part of her public life that says the most about her values, and it explains why the word “philanthropist” appears beside “interior designer” in almost every profile of Julie Landrum.

Divorce in 2023 and Life After

After thirteen years of marriage, Julie Landrum and Paul Pierce finalised their divorce in 2023. Pierce announced the split himself in early 2023 with a short post on social media that read, in full, “I’m single, what’s up.” Neither of them has gone into detail about the reasons, and the settlement, including any financial terms or custody arrangements, has remained private. That silence is worth respecting: the public record tells us the marriage ended, and it tells us almost nothing about why.

Since the divorce, Julie Landrum has kept the same low profile she kept during the marriage. She has not given interviews about the split, and she has not used the attention around it to build a public career. The former couple continue to co-parent their three children, and the reports that follow them describe that arrangement as private and handled between the two of them. Her life since the divorce has been, as far as the public record shows, a return to the work she was doing before the marriage made her famous. She continues to run her design practice, and she continues to be described in the design world by her professional honours rather than by her former husband’s name.

Common Confusions About Julie Landrum

Because Julie Landrum keeps such a low profile, and because so much of what is written about her comes from biography sites that copy each other, several errors and mix-ups keep appearing online. The most common ones are worth clearing up.

When was Julie Landrum born? Most biography sites give 24 February 1983, in St. Louis, Missouri. The Society for American Baseball Research, however, records that her father Tito Landrum’s second daughter Julie was born before the 1982 baseball season, which would put her birth in late 1981 or early 1982. The 1983 date is the one almost every celebrity profile uses, and this article follows it, but the SABR record means the date should be treated as reported rather than settled.

Is her father Terry or Tito Landrum? Both. Her father’s full name is Terry Lee Landrum, and “Tito” is the nickname he played under in Major League Baseball. Sources that say “Terry Landrum” and sources that say “Tito Landrum” are describing the same man, which is why the two names appear interchangeably in profiles of his daughter.

When did Julie Landrum marry Paul Pierce? The wedding took place on 17 July 2010 at The Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast, California. At least one biography site gives 17 July 2012 instead, which appears to be an error: the couple’s daughter Prianna served as flower girl at the wedding, and she was born in 2008, and the 2010 date is carried by the great majority of sources.

When did she meet Paul Pierce? Most accounts say they met during the 2005 NBA All-Star Weekend in Houston and began dating shortly afterwards. A smaller group of profiles gives 2006 as the year they began dating. The 2005 date is better supported, and this article uses it.

How tall is she, and what is she worth? Biography sites commonly say she is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 63 kg, and one site claims a combined net worth of $70 million for her and her husband. None of those figures comes from a credible source, and the better reporting says plainly that her exact net worth is not publicly confirmed. No figure should be quoted as fact.

Is she still married to Paul Pierce? No. The couple finalised their divorce in 2023 after thirteen years of marriage. Some older profiles still describe her as his wife, because they were written before the divorce or were never updated. She is now described in current reporting as his ex-wife.

Frequently Asked Questions About Julie Landrum

Who is Julie Landrum?

Julie Landrum is an American interior designer and philanthropist from St. Louis, Missouri, best known as the former wife of NBA legend Paul Pierce. She founded her own interior design business in 2009, was named an Elle Décor A-List Designer, and worked on the design team of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

How old is Julie Landrum?

She was born on 24 February 1983, according to most biography sites, which makes her 43 years old in 2026. A baseball research record suggests her birth may have been in late 1981 or early 1982, so the date should be treated as reported rather than fully settled.

Who are Julie Landrum’s parents?

Her father is Terry Lee “Tito” Landrum, a former Major League Baseball outfielder who played for the St. Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers and won two World Series rings. Her mother is Teresa Landrum, an interior designer whose practice Julie first worked in as an apprentice.

What does Julie Landrum do for a living?

She is an interior designer. She trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the New York School of Interior Design and the Rhode Island School of Design, worked her way up from apprentice to senior designer in her mother’s practice, and took over the firm, Landrum LLC, when her mother retired.

When did Julie Landrum marry Paul Pierce?

Julie Landrum married Paul Pierce on 17 July 2010 at The Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast, California. Their eldest daughter Prianna, born in 2008, served as the flower girl. The couple finalised their divorce in 2023 after thirteen years of marriage.

How many children do Julie Landrum and Paul Pierce have?

They have three children together: daughters Prianna Lee, born in 2008, and Adrian Tanya, born in 2011, and a son, Prince Paul, born in 2013. Paul Pierce also has a daughter, Janaiya Lynn, from his earlier marriage to actress Dana Davis, and Julie became her stepmother.

Is Julie Landrum still married to Paul Pierce?

No. Julie Landrum and Paul Pierce finalised their divorce in 2023. Pierce announced the split on social media in early 2023, and the two now co-parent their three children privately. Julie Landrum has not spoken publicly about the divorce.

Conclusion

Julie Landrum has lived a life that looks, from the outside, like two different stories joined together. The first is the story of a designer’s daughter from St. Louis who trained at three schools, worked her way up from apprentice to owner of her own firm, and earned a place on Elle Décor’s A-List and on national television. The second is the story of a woman who married one of the greatest players in Boston Celtics history, raised three children in the middle of his fame, and then, when the marriage ended in 2023, stepped back into the quieter life she had always preferred.

The interesting thing about Julie Landrum is that the first story was already complete before the second one began, and it is still going after the second one ended. She did not become a designer because she married a basketball player, and she did not stop being one when the marriage ended. She built her career in the years before the wedding, kept it through thirteen years of marriage, and continues it now, privately and on her own terms. That is a steadier kind of success than fame, and it is the part of her story that deserves to be remembered. For readers who want to check the basic facts about the people and places in her life, a general reference is a good place to start.