The Design Holy Trio: Personality, Sentimentality, Functionality
A perfect recipe for successful design and maybe for a lemon tart, too. I wouldn’t know. I cannot bake.
I told myself I wouldn’t write about negative client experiences anywhere because I didn’t want clients (both prospective, current and past) to be nervous about being put on display via working with me.
SO I’ll preface by saying this blog post is not that, and also it wasn’t a negative one… but it was really insightful, and I thought it was worth writing about.
I had a prospective client call the other day, and it was a genuinely wonderful conversation. I’m going to call her Candy (mostly because my daughter is watching Wreck It Ralph right now which I STRONGLY recommend anyone and everyone watch).
Anyways, Candy had never hired a designer before. She had a ton of really great questions - she wanted to know about my process, she had a ton of tiny things she wanted to update but didn’t know how she’d go about it. Where was she supposed to start? What was she supposed to expect?
And at one point, I told her that my most successful projects are ones where clients '“want to work with me”. Not “needed a designer”, not “wanted me to execute their own vision”.
Candy’s response was “wow, sounds like you’ve been burned before”. And sure, I have in the sense that projects or partnerships didn’t turn out the way I dreamed they would. BUT I told her that the biggest thing for me is that design is incredibly personal.
Wanting to work “with me” means that there’s a collaboration required.
You have to trust me to ask you the right questions, to advocate for you, to push you - but also, you have to be in it with me. You have to help me understand what’s important to you, what makes you happy. I can typically bridge the gap between you knowing what you like and not knowing how to get there - but you have to want to feel good about your space, just as much (but probably more) than me. And we gotta work TOGETHER to do it!
And that’s where my Provincetown project comes in.
I remember thinking the other week (as I sat in their CKCO-designed back room with one of their 90lb retrievers draped across my entire being, a movie was on, and I had a cup of warm cookies in hand)… this partnership works. I mean, that setup would work for a lot of people (the dog, the cookies, the vibe), but the way I work with my Provincetown clients works. And it works because there’s a really healthy mix of personality, sentimentality, and functionality that gets communicated and worked out from their side and mine - plus they’re incredibly kind, funny, smart human beings and that never hurts.
I already feel like this post is longer than I wanted it to be, but I have a point. I swear!
THE PERSONALITY:
Without going down a long, dark, wet… wait.. what?
Without going down a deep rabbit hole - identifying the personality for your space is just figuring out how you want it to feel. It’s that simple. (It’s actually not that simple, but that’s the long and short of it.)
And for this space, we knew it needed to be moody. We wanted to honor the Cape Cod style of the house, and we wanted to honor organic elements that you’d find in the Cape Cod ecosystem… BUT… above everything else, we decided it needed to feel different. It needed to feel a little moodier than the traditional white-washed shiplap. It needed to be unexpected, and warm, and comforting.
So that’s what we set out to achieve. It starts with the conversation, then the mood boards, then the renderings, then more conversation, then more renderings, then alcohol, then more conversations, then Tea Dance, then Gary’s gallery for a drunken (but happy) purchase of Carola Doll’s Barbie coloring book, then to bed. Repeat.
The Functionality:
This conversation/discovery is happening at the same time as the personality discovery - and it is just as important. The functionality piece is understand what actually works - and how you design the space to accommodate those needs.
For this room there were definite set parameters:
Seating - my clients host a ton, so the space needed to handle 10 guests without feeling like a 10-person room every day. Most of the time, it’s just the two of them (and their regal pups).
Durability - dogs + sand + nature walks = you need to have furniture that can handle the dogs + sand + stuff brought back in from said nature walks
Navigability - people needed to move easily from room to room, the patio couch needed a clear shot at the TV, and we still had to fit enough seating for the aforementioned party needs.
The Sentimentality:
And this shit right here… this is what makes a house a mutha fu*kin HOMMMEEEEE. It’s the stuff that you bring into your house that makes you happy. It’s the art you hang. The trinkets you buy on vacation. Your grandma’s rug. Pictures in frames of people you love. A lamp you got off FB Marketplace just because you liked it. A plant your children have lovingly named “leafy” that is anything but “leafy” and has to actually be replaced soon because it has officially been declared dead.
Sentimentality is the part that my Provincetown loves bring in abundance.
So for Candy, prospective clients, or people who are interested in sprucing up their home on their own - I pray the Design Holy Trio finds you because once it does…. man, does it feel good.
