Design Dominoes
Why one change can alter everything
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I was a cheerleader in high school. Not because I was athletic (they put me at the bottom of the pyramid) but because cheering for people is simply who I am. As a kid, I was always trying to help my friends. Fortunately, as a hardwired problem-solver, I found a profession in which I do this daily.
Because of this, I have a rule that might surprise you: I don’t give design advice to friends.
Not without alllllll the information. Design is like dominoes. One change can alter EVERYthing.
I’ve been working with a client I adore for the past year and a half on a full gut renovation of her legacy home. Her staircase was in the center of the house, limiting the interior sightlines of her beautiful views and creating awkward traffic patterns and segmented rooms.
The renovation opened everything up, and now she has an open-concept floor plan with the living room, dining room, and kitchen connected to the beautiful Vermont landscape captured through every window.
All was going as planned until one day my client stopped at a flooring showroom and wandered to the back. Instantly, she fell in love with a quartzite slab and immediately texted me a photo. It is stunning: complicated, busy, a rainbow of earthy colors.
The universe, it seemed, had led my client to the back of this showroom. Not only was this a one-of-a-kind quartzite, a jumbo slab (a requirement to eliminate seams), but it also worked with our three cabinet finishes. The stars had aligned, and when a client falls in love with something, I lean into it!
Here’s what that ONE DECISION changed:
The pendant lights over the island → gone. These were statement pendants, and two divas cannot exist in the same space.
The carpet in the living room & coordinating fabrics → wrong color palette.
The bar stools → reselected.
The wallpaper in the dining room → now it’s too busy.
The dining room chair fabric → nope.
ONE alteration to the design and suddenly nothing worked.
This exemplifies my design dominoes theory.
When an element changes, everything must be re-evaluated.
Design does not happen in a vacuum. It’s an organic, collaborative process. When the project I described is finished, sometime around the holidays, it will have been two years in the making. Good design takes time.
Have a well-designed day,
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