Brooklyn intuition

This past week I travelled to Brooklyn to put the finishing touches on a historic townhome renovation in Crown Heights.

View from the photographer's laptop, so excited to share!

On the first day, we placed all the art and decor. Then we capped it off with a day of photography. It was an exhausting but very rewarding trip. Working with happy and generous clients is an incredible blessing that I don't take for granted.

Since the beginning of the project, I've received photo and video updates along the way as well as travelled to the property several times.

But every time, every project, especially when you don't live there, it's always unnerving to walk into room after room where you made the vast majority of aesthetic decisions and hope that it works.

The last 5% of a project - where the property is clean, construction is done, and the place gets decorated - is really where you get to see your decisions take shape.

It worked. I was really happy with almost everything we did to the property.

If I think about why I made specific decisions - whether that's plates on a wall, or a pink paint color, or type of tile, a lot of that is subconscious gut decision making. I chose it because it "feels" right.

So how can I be confident in my gut? And how can you?

The truth is, what we call "gut instinct" is really the culmination of thousands of hours of observation, experience, and learning. It's pattern recognition operating at a deep level that can't always be articulated - we just know it when we see it.

Every design mag I've looked through, every beautiful and not beautiful space I've lived in, memories of grandparents and relatives homes, every color combination that's been of interest on the journey - these experiences form an invisible library of reference points that inform our decisions.

A truly good designer does not get hired to just make something look "designed." Really, that person gets hired more as an artist for their taste. To inject their preferences and desires and feelings into someone else's home or apartment or hotel. That's no commodity. It's somebody's taste and you can't buy it anywhere else.

So if you are trying to make decisions about a room or design a home, remember that it's less about making the "right" choices. There are thousands, maybe millions, of "right" choices.

Rather, it's choosing things you like and then being able to constrain your choices so that they fit under a cohesive umbrella throughout the entire space.

I've found that in consulting clients about their homes, I'm often just affirming their choices. They usually know what they like. They need someone to tell them it will look good or that it's "cool." Many other designers I've spoken with have told me the same thing.

If you are reading this, there's zero chance you don't already have specific taste. You like things, you have aesthetic preferences, colors, patterns, architecture, and furniture styles. You have memories of how certain spaces made you feel and you probably even have specific items in mind from those spaces. If someone showed you two chairs, you'd be able to choose one that you liked better.

You have taste.

If you want to be more confident in using that taste, there are a couple things you can do:

First, dissect rooms. Look at photographs of great rooms and figure out what's going on. What's the color palette? It's usually around 3 colors. Do the woods match? Are there similar shapes? What kind of lamps or lighting are being used? Is everything from the same time period or is it more eclectic? Do they have shelving? Is there a lot of contrast or is it a more muted monochrome space? Are there window treatments? Do they have a pattern? Is everything smooth or is there a lot of texture? Is the floor wood or tile or carpet?

Next, mock up hypothetical rooms. Take a google doc and paste a bunch of screenshots of furniture, lights, art, rugs, walls, floors & decorative objects in there. Move it around, swap things out. Do this until you make something that looks good. If you're having a hard time, do the previous room dissection exercise until you start to have a formula (pattern recognition) for why certain rooms look good.

Get a sounding board. There are too many decisions in these projects to make by yourself. My wife was a huge help on the Brooklyn project (and on every project). I would create mockups of rooms and she gave me feedback. "This works, this doesn't. You need more color." Etc.

While you may not have a design oriented spouse, you probably could find a friend who loves design. Maybe it's just a friend who is really good at picking outfits and has a great wardrobe. That person probably has enough taste to give you feedback.

Lay out and follow a theme. Pick 5 or so colors, textures, metals, design periods that govern the feel of the entire project. A wood tone, chrome, art deco, medium blue, dusty pink. That's your palette. Now make sure that one or two of those choices make it into each room. That's it. Not heavy handed, but just enough direction that each room doesn't feel frankenstein, but a chapter of a larger story.

Remember, be true to what resonates with you while maintaining a coherent vision. My Brooklyn project wasn't successful because every decision was objectively "correct," but I did try to both take chances and follow a theme throughout.

Trust that the visual memories you've collected throughout your life – from your grandparents' basement to that wine bar in Berlin in 2014 – have already laid the groundwork for your personal style. Your taste isn't something you need to find or create; it's already there, waiting to be recognized and refined.

This was my station where I was winging floral arrangements. Never really done it before and they turned out great, so you can do this too.

Design is ultimately about creating spaces that evoke feeling, that make people want to linger, that tell a story. And nobody else can tell your story quite the way you can.

So start small, study what you love, find your sounding board, and most importantly – trust yourself. In the end, the most compelling spaces aren't the ones that follow all the rules – they're the ones that feel authentically, undeniably you.