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.

There is a particular kind of room that stops me every time.

Not the disastrous ones — those are easy. Anyone can see what’s wrong with a room that never had a chance. I mean the ones that almost worked. The ones where someone tried, and spent real money, and made considered choices, and still ended up with a space that feels like it’s missing something nobody can quite put their finger on.

There is a moment — and if you are in it, you know exactly what I mean — when you walk through your own home and feel like a guest.

Not because it isn't beautiful. It may well be. The kitchen was renovated six years ago. The living room has good bones and furniture you paid real money for. There are fresh flowers on the table because you always have fresh flowers on the table.

I've been to enough design events to know what Salone is supposed to feel like. The scale. The spectacle. The sense that the entire design industry has gathered in one city to show you what's next. And it was all of those things. But the moments I'm still thinking about weeks later were none of those things.

Carrara is a magnificent stone. Ancient, luminous, the material of Michelangelo and centuries of Italian craft — I’ve driven through those mountains and seen the abundance of it, white stone as far as the eye can reach. It is also everywhere. And we have, if I’m being honest, Instagrammed the shit out of it. When every house flipper, DIY designer, and spec home builder uses it on every surface, it loses its luster. When everyone has access to the same material, the material loses its power to say anything specific about the person who chose it.