Photography: Richard Waite
Early in my career, I designed a primary bedroom I was proud of. It featured a considered palette, beautiful joinery, and a lighting plan I had thought through for weeks. The client moved out of it within a year and converted it into a guest bedroom.
It took me longer than it should have to understand why. I had designed the room I thought a primary bedroom should be, rather than asking enough questions about how this particular person actually slept, woke, and spent the last twenty minutes of their day. The room was correct in every way except the one that mattered.
That mistake changed how I run every brief since. I now spend more time asking about a client's actual habits, the ones they consider too mundane to mention, than I do asking about their taste. “What time do you actually fall asleep?” not “What time do you go to bed?” “Do you read in bed or somewhere else?” “Is the room too warm, too bright, too quiet, or too loud at 6 am?”
None of these questions yield dramatic answers. Most clients are mildly embarrassed by how unglamorous their real routines are. But the answers are the real brief, far more than any mood board ever was.
I do not think this lesson was unique to me or particularly profound on its own. What made it useful was being wrong in a way specific enough to learn from. A vague failure teaches you to be more careful in general, which rarely changes anything. A specific failure, such as a client passing on a bedroom I was proud of, taught me exactly one thing, and I have not made that mistake again.
Twenty years in, I think the designers worth hiring are not the ones who claim never to get it wrong. They are the ones who can tell you exactly which mistake taught them which lesson, and how they do things differently now because of it.
Daniel Kostiuc Interior Design is a luxury interior design studio based in Brisbane, offering residential interior design and interior decoration across Queensland, Australia and internationally. Services include new builds, renovations and complete furnishing projects, with space planning, custom joinery, bespoke furniture, furniture selection, lighting, art and accessories for high-end homes.