Jane Pauley is back for her ninth year hosting CBS Sunday Morning’s annual By Design episode, and this year the trip takes viewers to Philadelphia on May 17. The broadcast is being anchored in the city in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary, with Pauley guiding the show through some of the region’s most storied spaces.

For Pauley, the assignment is as much about access as it is about architecture. “Mostly, I get to go past the velvet ropes,” she said of the role, a job that puts her inside places many people only see from a distance. In this year’s episode, that means Ardrossan, a 38,000-square-foot Gilded Age mansion that remains a private home and inspired the classic film The Philadelphia Story, and Chanticleer, a 48-acre pleasure garden on the Main Line established a century ago.

Pauley’s comfort with design has been shaped as much by her own life as by television. She said she enjoys moving into a new place and transforming it. “I absolutely do,” she said, adding, “I enjoy the process of imagining and ideating.” She and her husband, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, have been married since 1980, after being introduced by Tom Brokaw, and she said home renovations have given both of them plenty to handle over the years.

“The things that Garry and I put up with during our renovations!” Pauley said. When a contractor joked that the chaos of living through renovations might explain her interest in the field, she answered, “There might be some truth to that.” She also recalled once rearranging a sofa, chairs and an entire living room layout before heading to the airport in Pittsburgh, the kind of story that makes her role on the show feel less like a detour than a natural extension of how she lives.

Pauley spent thirteen years as a cohost of the Today Show before joining CBS News as a contributing anchor in 2014, and the design special has become one of the recurring assignments that fits her style. What gives this year’s edition added weight is the setting: Philadelphia’s landmark homes and gardens are being framed not just as pretty backdrops, but as part of the larger story of a city tied to the nation’s semiquincentennial.

The episode lands as Pauley’s own perspective on design remains personal and practical. She has said she recognizes the power of a well-designed space to make people feel welcome and at home. That is the thread running through this year’s By Design stop in Philadelphia, where history, private life and public taste meet in the same frame.