What Interior Design Is Really About
Written by Margaret Nubuor
Founder & Interior Designer, Nubuor Designs
At our initial project kickoff meeting, the first question I ask every new client has nothing to do with style or budget. I ask if there are any pieces of furniture or artwork in their home that hold meaning for them, and whether they would like to find a way to bring those pieces into the new design.
I ask it before I propose anything. Before I have seen the space or presented a single idea. Because no matter what direction the design ends up taking, I want to understand what already matters before I start introducing what might.
This comes from somewhere personal. I moved a great deal growing up, and I learned early that certain objects carry more than their physical weight. A chair that belonged to someone you loved. A piece of art bought on a trip that changed you. Something ordinary to everyone else and irreplaceable to you. These are not decorating challenges. They are the things that make a house feel like the particular home of a particular person, and treating them with care is the most important thing a designer can do before the real work begins.
The Room That Holds a Life
A few years into my practice, a client I had been working with for two weeks lost a close family member. They asked me to meet them at that person's home so we could walk through it together and select pieces that might carry forward into the new design we were building. I went.
This is not a design task but human, and that has nothing and everything to do with design. Walking through someone's home after they are gone, looking at what they surrounded themselves with, understanding what the person left behind meant to the person still here: we selected furniture and artwork together. Two upholstered pieces were reupholstered to fit the new space. A set of vintage lights received custom shades. The pieces arrived in the new home transformed but recognizable, and the room was better for them in every sense that matters.
I was moved to be trusted with it, and I still am. What I took from that project, beyond the design itself, is that the most important thing a designer can do is create the conditions for that kind of trust to exist in the first place.
What the Object Actually Holds
Most sentimental pieces are not design problems. A loved chair reupholstered in a fabric that suits the new room, a painting reframed, a piece of furniture refinished: these are straightforward interventions that honor the object and the memory it carries simultaneously. The wabi sabi piece, the one that is imperfect by any conventional design standard but beloved beyond question, often becomes the most interesting thing in the room. The thing guests ask about. The thing that gives the space its particular character and its particular warmth. A room with one beloved imperfect object in it feels lived in. A room without any feels assembled.
The challenge arrives when there are many sentimental pieces. Two, three, four objects with deep meaning are entirely workable and almost always enrich the design. When the number grows beyond that, the conversation shifts. Not away from care but toward honesty, and the question becomes not what the client wants to keep but what the object actually holds for them. Sometimes the attachment is to the object itself. Sometimes it is to the memory the object represents, and once that is understood, there is more flexibility than the client initially imagined. That conversation requires trust and it requires time, and it is entirely worth having.
When There Is Nothing to Keep
Not every client arrives with pieces they want to keep, and that is equally meaningful. Some are starting fresh by choice, building a home that is entirely new rather than one that carries forward from somewhere else. For those clients, the question opens a different conversation: what do you want this home to feel like? When there are no objects to work around, there is complete freedom to build from scratch, and that is when I love bringing in an art consultant. Selecting art a client falls genuinely in love with rather than pieces chosen to coordinate with existing furniture is a very rewarding process on its own. The only requirement is that my client loves it. Not likes it, not finds it appropriate. Loves it.
Why the Relationship Has to Be Tended the Whole Way Through
This is part of why I have always preferred to work directly with clients from start to finish rather than through a larger team. The things a client tells you at the beginning of a project, the pieces that matter, the memories attached to them, the life they are hoping the new home will hold, do not transfer cleanly in a briefing document. Nor should they. They live in the relationship, and are integral to the trust built throughout the design process and how it evolves over time.
I learned this partly by experiencing its absence. I spent a brief period working in commercial design early in my career. The work was interesting and the projects were significant, but something was consistently missing. There were no sentimental chairs. No artwork that meant anything to anyone beyond its scale and its color temperature. I came back to residential design understanding something I had not fully articulated before: the personality of the people living in a space is not a constraint on the design. It is the design.
That is what I try to do. Ask first. Listen carefully. And treat everything that already matters before introducing anything new.
Nubuor Designs is an interior design studio based in Boston’s Beacon Hill, working with homeowners who understand that the best rooms hold more than furniture. If that sounds like the home you want to create, we'd love to hear more about you. Let's Talk.
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