Good design choices rise to the top because they feel good.
While we start with a floor plan to determine shapes and sizes of furnishings, most of my design ethic is process-oriented, as opposed to results-oriented. What that means is that I take into account what the client wants, what their taste is, what their budget is, what their lifestyle is, I put it all together in a sieve and it comes out, as opposed to having a preconceived notion of what their house should look like in advance.
Sometimes when I show up with three shopping bags full of fabrics, clients get initially a little bit overwhelmed at first that they’re not going to be able to figure out. It takes 15 minutes to go through all those fabrics and the right ones come to the surface like cream over milk. It’s almost like the right fabric raises its hand and says: “pick me.”
Why do I work this way? Color harmony is not something you can plan in advance. It's not a formula of stripe/plaid/floral/small scale print/texture. Or one of dark tone/light tone/medium tone. The same combinations of fabrics that are fabulous in one space can feel too electric or too dull in another. Because color is so important to my work, I need to be in the space to design.
Here's a story: A client wanted a peaceful living room full of blues like the sea on a cloudy day. Those colors felt totally flat in their space. In the Design Center we ooh'd and aah'd over each soft ocean color we found. But once at home, they looked dull and boring. We determined that we needed to punch the color up a notch. With the second round of fabrics, we choose brighter, cleaner colors and they worked.
