A room that can be photographed empty is not yet a room that can be lived in.
Clients do not arrive with a lack of images. They arrive with too many, and with a life that will not match them: shoes at the door, a helper’s route through the kitchen, a cupboard that must actually hold the linen, a living room that is a thoroughfare after school. Designing against those facts in order to match a feed is how interiors become hostile within a month.
The brief is the life. The image is a side effect.
Constraints are the design
Storage that is ugly because it was left to the end. A pale floor that cannot take wet feet from the garden. A sofa that blocks the only path to the dining table. These are not taste failures. They are planning failures dressed as aesthetics. Real-life design starts with how the house is used at the worst hour of the day, then lets the calm arrive if it can.
Closing thought
Pinterest is a library of rooms with the people edited out. A home cannot be.
If it cannot take a wet umbrella, it is not finished.
