How I Read Your Mind
So, interior design is a bit of magic, but mostly practical knowledge and skills. I’m personally fascinated with psychology and have been since I was small and didn’t know it was called that. I even did a psychology course in high school (and highly enjoyed it, but not being able to separate your work and home life is a VERY bad trait in a therapist or psychologist, being self aware is one of my super powers), and I always love the parts of interior design where psychology mingles with the design principals to create intuitive, thoughtful space.
The discovery phase of the design process is one of those spaces where getting to know you as a client is a bit of magic (only speaking for myself here, I bet there are designers who are less intuition and more pure facts and do just as amazing of a job) and lots of knowledge, research, and experience. As we do our initial consultation to assess if we’ll work together, I’m absorbing things- how you speak about your space, how you react to what you like and don’t like, how you live your life now- how you’d like to live your life.
Before we move into the research phase I give my clients homework that helps me work my magic. Pinterest is a tool I use extensively for my projects (great for sourcing- both collecting the sourcing visually AND having the links to the product handy) and it’s a great tool for getting to know your style and preferences without worrying about you needing to do all the work (after all you ARE hiring me for this aren’t you?). I have each decision maker (yes both the design savvy partner AND the “I don’t care” partner) pull together a pinterest board of things they like. My emphasis is always “don’t worry about pinning what you want your room to look like, just pin things you like”. I love pushing clients past their comfort zone so we can get to the spectacular “oh my god i love it” type of design- and that means getting to the heart of what makes you tick and what sets your heart on fire (so to speak! no one likes heartburn). I also remind them “don’t worry about knowing why you like it, I’ll talk you through it”. This way I come upon little clues and ideas that clients wouldn’t normally have said they loved.
You can find me on Pinterest above (not a sponsor), and see some of the ready-made boards I have for clients to use grouped into basic room types. They’re always welcome to search Pinterest at large (although boy is that a rabbit hole!), and also pin items from a google search easily- which makes it a very flexible tool for me.
So it is a bit of magic and intuition and a bit of good old fact finding. I’m a very visual creature, so using visual tools helps me narrow in on what exactly you love, and is a great compliment to the detailed design interview I do to get every single little detail about the space we’re going to create. At that point, in my professional experience, the spaces create themselves!