Foundation 01— Practice Changes the Practitioner

As a green designer first starting my studio, I initially thought that my job was to make rooms and homes beautiful. I thought it meant things like specifying the furniture and its placement in a room. I thought it meant choosing finishes. 

Helping people create spaces they loved. 

Making their home feel like theirs. 

It’s not necessarily wrong… but isn’t that pretty much what every other designer on the planet says? I don’t mean that in a negative way because it’s all still incredibly valid.

What I hold issue with is that it’s only part of the picture.

There was this strange liminal zone between starting my studio and landing my first construction project. It was a strange place to inhabit.

It was doing any kind of design related work I could get my hands on. From helping design and construct soundproofing panels for office and meeting spaces, to refinishing furniture for people.

As a designer, I should have no business doing that. 

Landing the first big construction project changed everything. Not because construction is difficult, but because reality shines a light on how many invisible decisions and hiccups exist beyond aesthetics. 

The work is much broader and deeper than making beautiful spaces. 

As time went on, for any subsequent project, there was a certain level of knowledge with which I arrived. 

You don’t know what you don’t know until you know.

One thing was certain. I knew I was entering with knowledge. I also knew I was the one with the most knowledge in the room on this particular subject matter.  But as I moved through each project, I came out the other side with a whole slew of corrections for what I hadn’t realized were just assumptions. 

Project after project, we emerged stronger as a studio.

The change wasn’t always dramatic. Often it was incremental. 

And what I found to be the most beautiful thing was that the practice didn’t just add knowledge, it corrected false certainty. 

It’s the type of priceless education gained while running your business that can’t be learned in school, or even by working under someone else. 

In the beginning, I saw beauty.

I was a beautician of homes, so to speak. I always knew there was a deeper layer, I just hadn’t gotten there yet. If I squinted, I could make out the fuzzy outline of what I now know to be integral. 

Only after heavy steeping and plenty of trial and error did the fog covering each moving piece begin to lift. 

The client.

The contractor.

The cabinet maker.

The electrician.

The integrator.

The future homeowner.

Each became a separate lens I viewed the project through.

As a result, our drawings became stronger. But the real change was hidden within me.

My field of vision e x p a n d e d while my focus sharpened.

What now became painfully evident is that good design no longer meant something was beautiful. It now meant clarity, anticipation, coordination, documentation, and thinking through the gaps. 

Of course beauty still matters… this is design for fuck’s sake. But beauty alone is not enough. 

An evolution in our philosophy. 

The types of questions I was asking began to change. 

Questions I asked myself, 

questions I asked my clients, 

and questions I asked my contractors. 

I began to notice and proactively account for future problems. 

The most recent example, albeit a small one, was a pair of towel bars. Originally we had them tentatively mounted on the walls to the right and left of two cabinet towers sitting atop a counter. The towel rod was in the process of being specified and once we did, it became evident to me that we weren’t able to simply scoot the placement outside the cabinet door’s swing. There was an opening for a pocket door which made that impossible. And due to several project constraints, I wasn’t able to find a towel bar with a slim enough depth so it wouldn’t interfere with the door upon opening.

All I could imagine was this cabinet door repeatedly banging into the towel rod. 

Endless denting.

Client frustration mounting. 

After all, they paid good money for these cabinets, and for someone to think through things like this.

We had issued the construction documents already, but I made the decision to relocate the towel bar and re-issue a new set.

I couldn’t rely on the hope that my clients would be perpetually mindful of the interference. That’s not a fair assumption to make. We all forget things and occasionally open a cabinet with too much sauce.

I knew if I left them in the original position, all it would take was one good hit to ruin everything. 

Over the years, it became painfully evident that it wasn’t about things like towel bars anymore. 

Mentally living in a space as I design it leads me from one iteration to the next. Several futures can exist at once.

Method design, if you will. 

I started honing my ability to live further into the future. 

An invaluable trait in my profession.

I now walk through museums differently. 

Hotels differently. 

Restaurants.

Airports.

Theaters differently.

I no longer experience places, I reverse-engineer them. 

When I see a space, I imagine the detailed drawings that must’ve been provided to get the design intent just right. How many renderings? How many supplemental 3D files?

It’s involuntary at this point. Exhausting at times, yes,  but most often inspiring and exhilarating.

I’ve become incapable of experiencing things any other way. 

The work has changed my eyes. Which is interesting because it’s my eyes that brought me to the work in the first place. 

Both my mother and father practiced massage therapy for a very long time. But my father often repeated this anecdote about a client who asked him how he remembered all the massage techniques, and the correct order in which to do them. His answer was that he just “couldn’t forget.” Now, of course, this was told in Russian, so it surely loses some of its charm in translation.

But I feel much the same way about design.

The same sentiment is shared by anyone devoted to a passionate pursuit. We find ourselves continually honing our craft. 

The carpenter, the chef, the musician. Anyone with a highly skilled or creative pursuit are of one tribe in my eyes.

A therapist might receive a conversation everyone else in the room viewed as completely normal, as something altogether different. 

The practice doesn’t only produce expertise, it produces perception. It reshapes the practitioner. 

The reshaping is ever changing, and everlasting.