Interior Design Is Really the Design of Experience

I have been thinking a lot lately about experiences—in life and in design.

Think about a great hotel. You may not remember the exact fabric on the sofa or the color painted on the walls, but you remember how you felt there.

You remember walking through the doors. The lighting. The scent. The music. The weight of the materials. The energy of the bar. The feeling of returning to your room and everything becoming a little softer and calmer.

Someone thought about all of that. Someone created that experience.

I think we sometimes misunderstand interior design as the selection of beautiful things.

Furniture. Stone. Lighting. Fabric. Paint.

I love all those things! Give me a beautiful slab of stone and I will be the first person running my hand across it.

I've come to think of those things almost like crayons in a crayon box.

They are the tools we use to create.

When I begin designing a space, I'm thinking about what it's going to be like to experience it.

How will the space feel when you walk into it? How do the clients function within it? Do we want a particular area to feel comforting and grounding, or lively and exciting? Where do people gather? Where do they retreat?

Those questions eventually become design decisions.

Maybe it's the softness of a rug beneath your feet, linen against your skin, the warmth and variation of wood, or the cool solidity of stone.

There is a reason we want to touch certain materials. These tactile moments become part of our physical relationship with a space.

This is the part of interior design I love.

Color, texture, light, material, scale, sound, movement, even negative space—they are all part of our toolbox.

The goal isn't any one of those things individually.

The goal is the experience they create together.

A home is especially interesting because, unlike a hotel, restaurant or beautiful place we visit, we don't experience it for a few hours.

We live inside it.

It becomes the environment surrounding our everyday lives.

It's where we think, create, rest, laugh, argue, cook, work, dream and begin again the next morning.

The longer I work in design, the more interested I become in that relationship.

Not simply:

How do we make this room beautiful?

But:

How does the environment we create around ourselves change the way we experience being alive?

That's a very deep and powerful question, and I don't think there is one answer to it.

In many ways, I feel I'm still exploring it through every project I design. That's why I love this work so much!

Perhaps that's why I no longer think of interior design as simply creating beautiful spaces.

The colors, materials, textures, light and all the other tools in our crayon box help us create the environment.

The real design is the experience we create within it.