More often than you might expect, we reach a point in a meeting with a client (especially a female client) when she sighs and says, “I really feel like I should be able to do this myself.”
Of course, she means that somewhere along the line, she’s gotten the message that if she’s really fulfilling every social expectation of her, she should be able to design a home that’s beautiful, functional, and organized—a true reflection of her and her family’s life and personality.
Maybe she has put this pressure on herself. Maybe she’s internalized it from someone else or from all the cultural messages women get about what it means to be accomplished. Maybe she really loves design and wishes she had capacity or time to focus on her home.
Whatever the reason, the reality is that nobody knows how to do all the things.
You don’t go to a restaurant and feel ashamed that you can’t cook French food the way this chef has prepared the beef bourguignon. You don’t walk into a complex legal issue with your business and think, “I really should be able to grasp the intricacies of the law so I don’t have to hire this attorney.” And if you’re a parent, you don’t bemoan sending your kids to school to learn history and calculus, thinking you should really be the one teaching them every element of a full, 13-year curriculum, right?
So what makes interior design different? Nothing.
The truth is that instead of feeling shy or ashamed of needing an interior designer, clients (especially our female clients) should feel triumphant that they know to call in an expert.
There’s a lot of wisdom (and freedom) in hiring an experienced designer to help you create beauty and function in a place where you and your family spend so much of your time.
You’ve probably heard the research—from a university study published in the early 1990s and made popular in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers—that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (that is, not just tinkering around, but focused learning) to master a skill. That’s the equivalent of about five years of full-time work! No single person can be a master of all the things required of her in life, so the smart individual invests in and cultivates her own talents, and then hires experts to support her in the other tasks she needs to accomplish, whether that’s teaching her children to ski or getting medical care.
Or designing her home.
THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DESIGNER-CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS are the ones in which the client acknowledges her need for our expertise; she lets us draw out her unique style and define what’s most important to her.
Then she trusts us to create a home that reflects those distinctives. Almost always, we find ways to push the envelope to create moments of delight and surprise in a space, and the client ends up telling us, “I would never have thought of that, but I love it!”
Just imagine that feeling: You hired an expert to accomplish your goals, and your home is the most comfortable, most beautiful, most functional space you could hope for. And you’re a genius—because you hired the right people to make it happen. That’s success.
Duet Design Group, Denver’s premier luxury interior design firm.
Let the experts help make your vision a reality, reach out today!
