I try to go over this at the beginning of a project-at the contract. I know towards the end of the project, clients can have fatigue. But, the best part is coming. And to make the best possible experience, you need to go.

It feels odd to make this request-ok demand to clients. After a long construction and renovation, they are anxious to get moved in already. I get it. But, there are some really practical reasons that we do this. First up, it’s a bit like seeing sausage made.

Good taste is one of the most valuable things a person can bring to an interior design project. The ability to recognize quality, discern proportion, and know instinctively when something is right — these are not small gifts. But they are not enough on their own. And understanding why is one of the most useful things a homeowner can do before beginning any significant design project.

There's a moment in almost every first conversation with a builder, and sometimes with a client, when I say I'd like to be involved before the plans are final — and I can see the thought land: ah, one of those. A designer who wants to run everything.

The first thing she did after “Hello”. It was open her phone.

Four hundred and something screenshots deep into her camera roll. A living room from a designer in London. A kitchen from an account that mostly sells candles. A bedroom that turned out to be a hotel in Tulum. Somewhere in the middle of all that scrolling, three completely different lives were fighting over the same four walls.

I have a thing about old doors. Not decorative doors — the kind you find in Madrid, enormous and centuries old, worn smooth in the places a thousand hands have touched them. Behind one of those doors, on a trip I still think about, was an apartment that stopped me completely. I’ve been trying to understand why ever since — and what it has to do with the homes I help people build.

The walls are where they are. The plumbing is where it is. The ceiling height, the window placement, the electrical — set. And if something feels off, you will spend the next several years walking past it, adjusting to it, or eventually paying someone to redo it.

Renovation regret is almost never about bad craftsmanship.

It’s about sequence.

There is a room in almost every home I visit that nobody talks about anymore.

Not because it isn’t there. It is very much there. It shows up in the tour — the one where the homeowner walks me through the house pointing out what works and what doesn’t, what’s finished and what isn’t, what she loves and what she has quietly made her peace with.

At some point in the last twenty years, someone decided that walls were the enemy.

I am not entirely sure when it happened. One decade we had rooms — actual rooms, with doors and purpose and the quiet understanding that different activities deserved different environments.