I love field trips with clients. On some level everything in design for us is about surfaces: tile, countertops, plumbing fixtures, the tactile decisions that slowly become a room.

On our most recent outing, a client admitted, half sheepish, half delighted, that she is forever circling back to red, blue, and yellow. Her own private trinity. It was a surprisingly vivid confession. Those are colors that usually announce themselves loudly: modern and playful, or bohemian in the intentionally careless way people practice

carelessness very carefully. But she spoke about them with embarrassment, as though she’d discovered some incriminating pattern in herself.

And then came that cinematic moment where the camera cuts rapidly between scenes and suddenly the audience understands everything. We started mentally flipping through her rooms and realized the faint Ronald McDonald specter had been haunting her interiors all along. Not in any literal sense, nothing remotely fluorescent or fast-food tragic. It is the opposite, she has an instinct for threading her favorite colors into spaces so subtly that you only notice the pattern once it has already worked on you; cleverness disguised as coincidence.

For this project the challenge is that we are  strategically deconstructing a shower, and floor, but leaving most of the remaining and tragically bland bathroom intact, thus we’re throwing an explosion of color into the space but still have to anchor it to the neutral surroundings and make the two harmonious. 

Over the last five years, clients have become increasingly brave, or perhaps increasingly exhausted by restraint. Neutrality has lost some of its moral authority. People are taking enormous swings with color and material and personality, and the old rules about timelessness are beginning to sound less like wisdom and more like social conditioning. Wealthy people, of course, have always enjoyed the privilege of decorating according to instinct. When it fails, we call it gaudy. When it succeeds, we call it visionary. Often the difference is simply whether the designer understood the assignment deeply enough to shape desire into narrative.

Because that is really the trick of interiors: not taste, exactly, but coherence. The ability to make disparate longings feel inevitable together is key. 

In truth, the old order has been quietly dismantling itself for years. Now you can do almost anything you want in a space. The challenge is no longer permission, but discernment. You need the resources, yes, but also the nuance to make boldness feel lasting instead of merely loud. And, perhaps most dangerously, you need the self-awareness to understand the difference between being ahead of a trend or alone in your opinion, neither are right ways of thinking, but both can be wrong.