You Don't Have to Know What You Want Before We Begin

Jul 17

On four hundred saved screenshots, three completely different lives, and why the phone is the problem, not the plan.

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.

She apologized for not having a clear vision. She had the opposite problem. She had too many visions, all borrowed, none of them hers.

This happens far more often than the blank slate. The client with nothing at all is rare. The client with a phone full of other people's rooms, assembled over six months of scrolling at 11pm, is not. It feels like preparation. It isn't. It's noise wearing the costume of clarity.

The problem with four hundred screenshots

Here's what nobody tells you about the four hundred screenshots: they don't narrow anything down. They widen it. Every image is a vote for a different life. The London living room wants a couple who entertains formally. The candle-brand kitchen wants an open floor plan and a family of four. The Tulum bedroom wants you to be on vacation permanently. You cannot build one house for all three of those people, and trying to is exactly how someone ends up with a room that looks expensive and feels like nothing.

So I don't start with the screenshots. I start with the same questions I'd ask someone who arrived with nothing. Where do you actually drink your coffee. What room have you quietly stopped using. What's true about how you live that none of those four hundred images bothered to ask.

The pins aren't wasted, they're just not the starting point

The pins aren't wasted. They're just not the starting point. They're data, not direction. My job is the same either way, whether you arrive empty-handed or with a phone that needs an intervention: take what's real about your life and turn it into a room.

What curation actually means

Curation isn't about having taste. Most of my clients have excellent taste already. It's about choosing one thing over another and living with the consequences of that choice, which an algorithm will never do for you and an influencer has no incentive to.

You don't need a vision before we talk. You need to put the phone down for an hour and tell me the truth about the life the room actually has to hold.

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