Let me say the quiet part first. When a designer's eyes light up at a whole-home project, everyone assumes they know why. Bigger scope, bigger budget, bigger fee. And for some designers, honestly, that's the whole story.

You can learn what a sight line is in an afternoon. Scale, proportion, program, negative space. The internet has made the vocabulary of design available to anyone with a phone and a little curiosity, and I think that's mostly good. Information used to be the barrier. It isn't anymore.

One of the objects I loved most, visiting friends, was the collection of sentimental menus framed in their kitchen. Something I wish I’d thought of myself. There were menus from their honeymoon, their first date, occasions I never fully learned the story behind.

One of them had no monetary value. It wasn’t signed. It was from a dinner in Venice that ran long, the kind of evening where nobody wants to be the one who stands up first, and at some point the menu came home with them, and at some later point it went into a frame, and now it hangs where they see it most days. It is, by any appraiser’s measure, paper. It’s also the most successful object in the room.