Why I Start With the Person, Not the Space

The most meaningful homes don't begin with a design style. They begin with understanding the person who will live there.

Most interior design projects begin with the space.  What needs to change? Which rooms are we renovating? What style do you like? What colors are you drawn to? What have you saved on Pinterest?

These are useful questions. I ask them too.  I just don't ask them first.

Before I think about furniture, materials, lighting or finishes, I want to understand the person who will live in the home.

How do you actually live?  What matters to you now? What do you want your home to make easier? What do you want to feel when you walk through the door?

Because without understanding those things, it's surprisingly easy to create a beautiful home that has very little to do with the person living in it.

Style Tells Me Less Than You Might Think

Clients often arrive with images they've saved. Sometimes there are dozens of them.

At first glance, it can seem like my job is to find the common aesthetic thread: warm woods, sculptural furniture, neutral colors, a particular kind of stone.   But that's rarely the most interesting information.

What I really want to know is why you stopped on that image.

It may have nothing to do with the sofa.  Perhaps it was the light coming through the windows. The openness of the room. The absence of clutter. The way people could gather around the table. Or simply something about the space that felt calm.

Two people can show me exactly the same room and be responding to completely different things.  That's why inspiration images are useful, but they aren't instructions.

They're clues.

The Questions Before the Design Questions

Over the years, I've become much more interested in what happens before we talk about aesthetics.   I want to understand how someone moves through an ordinary day.

Whether home is where they recharge or where everyone gathers.   Whether they entertain twenty people regularly or would much rather have dinner with four close friends.  Whether the formal dining room they've had for fifteen years is actually important to them, or simply something they assumed a home like theirs was supposed to have.

I want to know what has changed.

Children grow up. Careers evolve. People travel differently. They begin working from home. They entertain differently. They discover new interests. Sometimes they simply reach a point where they know they want their surroundings to feel different, even if they can't yet explain why.

Those things tell me far more about what a home should become than a style label ever could.

From Inspiration to Intention

This is where design becomes much more interesting.  Once we understand what the home needs to support, individual decisions have something to answer to.

Should this room be more open, or should it feel protected? 

Do we need more places to gather, or more opportunities to retreat?

Does the beautiful guest room that gets used twice a year deserve that much space, or could it become somewhere you use every day?

Should we choose something because it's impressive, or because it contributes to the way you want the room to feel?

The answers aren't universal.  That's precisely the point.  A decision that is right for one client may be completely wrong for another, even in two nearly identical homes.

Design becomes intentional when there is a reason behind the choices.

Beauty Is Still Part of the Equation

Starting with the person doesn't mean aesthetics matter less.  They matter enormously.

I believe a home should be beautiful. I care deeply about proportion, materiality, light, craftsmanship, art and the relationship between objects in a room.  But beauty becomes more meaningful when it is connected to something.

The walnut isn't there simply because walnut is beautiful. The lighting isn't layered because that's what sophisticated interiors are supposed to have. The furniture isn't arranged a certain way because that's how the room photographs best.

Each choice is contributing to a larger idea about how this particular home should feel and function for this particular person.   The aesthetics come from that idea rather than replacing it.

Design From Within

Eventually, I realized that this way of working had become a methodology of its own.

I call it Design From Within™.

It begins with identity: understanding the person rather than defining a style.

Then comes narrative: understanding the life the home needs to support now and where that life may be going.

And finally, intentionality: making design decisions that consistently connect back to those first two things.

It changes the order of the process. Instead of beginning outside - with trends, references and ideas about what a beautiful home should look like - we begin inside.   And then we work outward.

By the time we're selecting furniture or stone or deciding where a wall should go, we're no longer making isolated choices.   We have a direction.

The Question Beneath All the Others

There is one question I come back to throughout a project:

Does this feel true to how you live?

Not: Is it fashionable?

Not: Will everyone else like it?

Not even: Is it beautiful?

Beauty matters. But beauty alone isn't enough.   A home can be beautifully designed, filled with extraordinary things and executed impeccably—and still feel strangely disconnected from the person who lives there.

The homes that stay with us tend to have something else.  They feel inevitable somehow. As though the rooms, objects, materials and light could belong to no one else. That isn't something you find by choosing a design style.  It comes from understanding the person first.  And allowing the home to follow.

A conversation coming soon

I've been exploring these ideas here in the Journal over the past few weeks because they're at the heart of how I think about design.

Very soon, I'll be joining Zulmarie Padín on Activate Your Power for a conversation about my approach to design, how it developed, and why I believe understanding the person has to come before designing the space.

I look forward to sharing it with you.