23 Biggest Interior Design Regrets, According to Influencers and Tastemakers
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Photo: Kyle Knodell
We are all flawed, but social media has a way of making you think that some people—celebrities and influencers to be specific—just woke up to a perfectly curated life. But everybody makes mistakes along the way, including them! Besides, you can’t distinguish a green flag from a red flag without a little trial and error.
While I don’t have too many design regrets, there are a few impulsive purchases from recent memory that I probably should have thought twice about before swiping my card. For instance, a fake Murano mushroom lamp (ignorance is bliss), a postmodern lacquer laminate waterfall credenza (I was going through a PoMo phase), a vintage Eames shell chair (midcentury modern just isn’t my style), miscellaneous pink depression glass (I grew out of this very quickly), and a pair of vintage brass dining chairs (I’m a chrome purist). Most of these items have since been rehomed, but some are collecting dust in the garage of my childhood home in New Jersey.
Obviously, I’m not the only one. So, I spoke with 18 design influencers, tastemakers, and creators about all the mistakes they’ve made in the process of finding their groove in the realm of interiors. Unsurprisingly, their most common regret is not buying certain vintage pieces when they had the chance, but there are much bigger lessons to be learned.
There’s no substitute for good lighting
Lighting is everything. According to design researcher Alyse Archer-Coité, “there is no shortcut to getting lighting correct.” Shannon Maldonado, creative director and founder of Yowie, admits that this is her greatest weakness in terms of execution and logistics. “Lighting has to be right whether it’s natural or whether you’re installing lighting [fixtures],” she insists. “There’s no substitute for good lighting—even an ugly room can be well lit and look good.” Lighting has been a crash course for Dani Klarić too. The Miami-based interior decorator and content creator does not tread lightly about the fact that “the lighting in your space will make or break your decor.” Lately, she’s been enjoying experimenting with ambient lighting and swears that she’ll only consider overhead lighting if “all the lightbulbs have been changed to 2700K.”
Curating with no real vision, just vibes
For some, it might be hard to believe that Orion Carloto has ever been influenced by outside forces because her personal aesthetic is so strong. But the Los Angeles-based writer, poet, and curator won’t deny the impact that Tumblr had on her as a teenager while living in a small town in Georgia. “At the time, I was seeing these beautiful spaces online and wanting to almost replicate them,” she says. When the time came to move from her parents’ house to Atlanta with roommates, Carloto was inspired to paint a black accent wall that would eventually become a gallery wall. “I’ve looked back at those photos since and I wouldn’t necessarily do things the same way, but all of these moments of me that still exist would exist in a different form [today],” she says.
Shea McGee remembers how she and her husband would spend their weekends thrifting and crafting everything in the small one-bedroom apartment they shared in Southern California. “We didn’t have a lot of money to spend but I did the best I could by repurposing, refinishing, and getting creative,” she says. “Looking back, some of the choices I made are comical, but the process of making a house a home with very little budget was one of my first major design lessons.” Vivid Wu recalls how she and her husband made a series of mistakes when they first moved into their San Francisco loft because they lacked “a clear vision and aesthetic for our home”—the most glaring might be how overboard she went with the wiggle trend, not that the content creator regrets buying her Curvy mirror (as seen in the homes of Olivia Rodrigo, Demi Lovato, Maxine Wylde, and more).
So what is your POV? Reese Blutstein, a Georgia-based content creator, notes that being “very, very specific with your vision” is especially important when working with contractors on home renovation projects. “Most contractors are just going to assume things because that’s how they’ve always done it,” she explains in an email. “You have to be very communicative with exactly what you want.”
AD100 designer Jake Arnold can’t stress this enough, noting that “every single thing, you have to make sure that you clarify because you’ll leave so much up to interpretation” but also “with time you get the benefit of working with people who understand what your expectations are.” Portland-based interior designer Tiffany Thompson also emphasizes the importance of figuring out your why and doing what works best for you. “Embrace the value of uniqueness and having a distinct perspective—it holds more worth than blending in with the crowd,” she writes in an email. “Lean into your individuality and welcome diversity in design.”
Not having a sense of scale
In a world where girl math reigns supreme, the chances of getting your measurements wrong are high. Archer-Coité is guilty of making countless purchases without taking measurements beforehand. For example, she once bought a shovel as an art piece and after driving “all the way to the end of the earth in New Jersey” to collect her prize, it was almost too big to fit into the car. Now, the wall space in Archer-Coité’s office is solely dedicated to the shovel because “it cannot stand upright in the whole house.” (The shed in her yard is now home for all of her “failed interior design choices and missed measurements” like a dining table and two chairs that were the wrong size and a rug that was too short.)
Klarić agrees that precise measurements are integral to the success of any interior design project. “Even one inch can have a significant impact on the overall layout and functionality of a space,” she writes in an email. Nothing feels worse than ordering an item that can’t be returned and realizing your measurements were off by a few inches after it arrives.
When New York-based interior designer Madelynn Hudson was renovating her previous apartment in LA, she bought a chandelier on Etsy that was supposed to be the perfect statement piece for her dining room. “I was like, This is going to be so beautiful,” she recalls. “It arrived, I had an electrician come install it, I hung up all the little glass beads that go on the chandelier, and I was like, Shit, it’s way too small for this room. And it was just because I didn’t take into account proportion and I didn’t measure.”
Arnold points out that “scale is a very visual thing,” so it’s easy for anyone to mess up no matter their level of design experience. “There’s something about being able to see a measurement, and then in your mind getting a feel for what that is at a human scale,” Archer-Coité adds.
Opting out of testing paint swatches
Without a doubt, one of the worst mistakes you can make is getting a bad paint job. There was a monthslong period where Hudson was living with paint swatches on the walls of her house. “I want to make sure that I really love the colors I’m picking and see them through a season,” she says. Arnold can’t stress the importance of understanding paint enough. “My biggest mistake is I’ve painted my whole space white thinking it was a bright white, and it ends up being a pinky peachy tone because the light changed so much during the day,” he explains. “I’ve done that for a whole house before, where you think that you are committing to something that’s so neutral and then these white walls end up looking blue or pink or yellow. Paint is one of the hardest things to master.” Eny Lee Parker has also fumbled with paint in the past. “One time I painted a wall in random brush strokes and that was awful,” she adds. “I lived with that for so long because I didn’t want to paint it black… It’s not my proudest moment.”
Beware of bouclé
Remember the surge of bouclé during the pandemic? Or perhaps you’re trying to claim temporary amnesia and forget that it ever happened. Arnold claims that white bouclé furniture is probably the trendiest thing he’s ever done. “When that trend started, it was something people felt was that one unique thing they had in the space that did feel a little more custom—until it became so generic, then I was like, ‘I have to get rid of this,’” he says. “I’ll still use bouclé, but it’s just the [white] color—we can’t cancel the whole of bouclé, there’s many variations of it!”
Maldonado is so put off by bouclé in general that she vows to never use it again (unless a client absolutely insists). “It loves denim, in a bad way,” she explains. “Anyone with jeans sitting on a bouclé piece we’ve used in the past, it instantly gets stained... It is definitely not my first choice in fabrication.” So if you must, do a bouclé blanket but maybe skip the bouclé couch.
Replica overload
You’re often advised to fake it ‘til you make it, but that’s never a good principle to live by in the design world. Now that we seemingly feed into a culture that supports the production of dupes, knockoffs, and fast furniture, there’s never been a more critical time to take a step back and reassess your why. “Sometimes, you want a couch to just be a really good couch, and it doesn’t have to be the statement sofa,” says Madelynn Hudson. “It can just be a really comfortable, really great sofa that stays clean.” Bethany Brill of Teddy Studio admits that it’s still hard for her to spend money on expensive things, but anytime she’s tried to make a knockoff work it simply hasn’t. “Sometimes it’s just better to wait until you can get the exact thing you want instead of buying two or three cheap things trying to get it to ‘work,’” she says.
Some items look so good when styled in a photo but don’t always have the same effect once you see them in person. If there’s an opportunity to try something before you buy it, Maldonado highly recommends ordering product samples to avoid spending missteps. Carloto has also fallen victim to being influenced to want what other people have, especially in her early 20s when she moved to LA. “For a very long time, a lot of it was just me replicating things until I had to outgrow the want to do that,” she explains. “Because then you’re left with this sterile cookie cutter space—in the online world it’s like, ‘Okay, you and everyone else has that.’”
Trying to be trendy
In this day and age, trends are seemingly unavoidable. Like anyone who is chronically online, Molly Blutstein finds a lot of inspiration on the internet (along with design books). The Georgia-based content creator deeply regrets buying things that are too “trendy”—from her curved sofa in a bouclé fabric to the burl wood pieces and “a small chrome lamp that felt too cold for what I wanted to achieve,” she’s got a pretty long list of regrets. “Don’t try to subscribe to a trend or try to follow just one specific style,” Molly writes in an email. “Lead with your full heart on each decision. Think about what really makes you happy and what things you deeply love, and more often than not, you wont regret it.”
Kellie Brown, host of Home Decor Homies, notes that trends are cyclical so “something in your house is bound to become a trend and that doesn’t make it bad—but if you’re looking at a trend and trying to cut and paste that into your home, that’s when it kind of goes south.” A good rule of thumb for Carloto is waiting to see if a design trend gets picked up by DIYers and is suddenly all over TikTok, which urges her to “stay as far away from that.” She adds, “I don’t want to downplay the beauty of a trend, but I also don’t want to be a victim of following every trend.”
McGee admits that there was a time in her career where she used “trend-focused pieces,” but now she tries to “choose more classic pieces that will get better with age.” Now that Reese is older, she finds herself more interested in classic design elements—she’s particularly intrigued by Shaker style. “Overall, I am trying not to source things that I know are just in style right now, because that’s how you end up selling all your furniture when you’re ready to move.” Speaking of reselling things, this is exactly what happened to Vivid Wu when she desperately needed dining chairs—the creative consultant opted for the popular Cesca chair, but once the vintage set that she ordered arrived it just wasn’t a match. “We really love them, but they just didn’t work out in our home,” she adds.
Focusing on the wrong features
Carloto currently lives in a midcentury modern—style home with bones that are very angular so she’s been trying to consider shapes that will make more sense in the space. “I feel like the space has to do the talking and then you do the listening,” she says while reflecting on pieces she previously bought that don’t seem to be working now. Arnold sees many people fall into the trap of trying to recreate something that is completely different from what actually works for a space. His advice for solving this design dilemma? “Work with what you’ve got and make it the best you can.” When given the option as a renter, he prefers older historic buildings because they’re often easier to furnish. “Sometimes when you’re stuck with such specific ceiling heights, materials… That has definitely informed the direction that I went in [when house/apartment hunting],” he adds.
Brown is also happy to preach the gospel of renter-friendly solutions. “You do have to pay attention to the actual space,” she explains. “There are tricks and tips that you can do to get a space to bend to your will, but you do have to acknowledge what the space is and what it’s doing, and let it dictate what’s going on.” Hudson views being influenced by the architecture in a space as a good thing. “It’s that evolution of trends and your taste, but also where you live,” she says. “A brick-wall wood-floored loft space in Minneapolis is going to feel very different than a midcentury house in upstate New York.” This is something that Parker has also been having fun with now that she lives between an apartment in Brooklyn and an 1870s farmhouse in Connecticut. “It’s a completely different vibe,” she says. “I wouldn’t have the same stuff in both spaces; it’s a very different context.”
Choosing beauty over comfort
When Kurt Vonnegut came up with the line “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt,” he was most definitely not thinking about furniture. “The idea of living in a space where I have to be precious about everything I touch stresses me out,” says Carloto. “I want to lay on my couch and be able to eat something on it. And that being said, obviously there are some pieces in here that are precious, but not everything has to be.” Archer-Coité admits that she’s always struggled with choosing beauty over comfort when it comes to the seating in her home. “I tend to go for [furniture where] everything is hard, small, and tightly woven,” she explains. “I chose things that I found really beautiful and that are not comfortable or practical. They might be nice to sit on for a bit, but you couldn’t sleep over on that. I used to say that was because I didn’t want people staying so long and getting too comfortable, but honestly, it’s just because I have bad taste in furniture.”
Although her natural instinct is thrift shopping, Camille Nichelini, co-owner of Resident Objects, acknowledges that it’s not necessarily the best option for certain pieces of furniture. “I tried to do vintage couches, but my last one was not comfy,” she says. “I finally got a modern sofa that I’m going to keep for years and years and years.” This is why Nichelini now believes in prioritizing functionality over everything. “In some of the earlier places I lived, I sacrificed functionality for the design aspect and it was obnoxious,” she says. For example, the content creator once placed a floor mirror in front of a light switch that she needed to use daily. “I had to prop up the mirror every time to use the light switch, now I’m just like, ‘Girl, that’s so stupid.’”
Being too fixated on aesthetics
Orion Carloto recalls the many iterations of self that she went through while initially getting settled in Los Angeles, a period that saw her experimenting with a number of design styles. As she continues to decorate the home she now shares with her partner, Carloto claims that she’s finally “broken through the aesthetic change that I was locked in for so long.” As she further explains, “I’m able to have the freedom to hang up silly photos on the wall. Bringing out this teenage version of myself that’s finally able to do what I want to do and not follow this sort of guidebook is the new way to look at interiors for me.”
Kai Avent-deLeon cringes at the memory of leaning way too hard into MCM—a design aesthetic she respects and appreciates, but also views as extremely generic and masculine—for her Brooklyn brownstone during the early stages of her design journey. “I had the [arc] lamp and the leather [Eames lounge] chair that everyone had at one point…. Looking back, I hate it,” she confesses. “I think it’s a cheat code because everything goes together and it’s so readily and easily available… I was such a newcomer when it came to really knowing and understanding design.” Now that Avent-deLeon is “so far from that type of style,” her base-line is working with natural elements and neutral colors. (The entrepreneur’s upstate house is a prime example with its modern Shaker sensibilities.) “Not looking online so much actually helped with my design aesthetic,” Avent-deLeon adds. “I don’t like anything to look too manufactured or too much effort put into it.”
Right now, AD100 designer Jeremiah Brent is most inspired by contrast and “landing somewhere in the middle between design styles and periods.” This has been a major breakthrough for Arnold as well, who used to have a very “all or nothing” approach every time he decorated his own place. Now he’s trained his eye to know exactly what to look for from vintage and antiques to contemporary. “It’s so nice to be able to cherry-pick based on context, like what is the space that you’re living in, and how do you make it feel good?” Arnold’s biggest takeaway from working for Estee Stanley early on in his career was learning how to decorate with flow instead of structure and figuring out what you love. “Learning the idea behind making decisions versus coming up with a specific design aesthetic was really important,” he adds.
Not giving yourself space to evolve
During the decade that Bethany Brill lived in New York City, she was committed to making each apartment her own. “It’s always felt integral to my identity that my surroundings reflect something that feels like me at the moment in time,” she explains in an email. “Sometimes it was angsty, sometimes it was feminine and homey—with each little stage of life, it’s been part of settling in for me.” When McGee reflects on the humble beginnings of her design practice, she can’t help but notice how it is “characterized by spaces dominated by white.” While she still appreciates a bright and airy aesthetic, the interior designer now finds herself gravitating toward “rich, earthy tones, a deep sense of nostalgia, and maybe even a little bit of whimsy” these days. “It is this evolution of expression and inspiration that keeps me loving what I do,” she adds.
Michigan-based designer Sarah Sherman Samuel will never ever forget the “unfortunate shade of green” that she painted on the walls of her first solo apartment in Miami, but without all that color testing over the years she wouldn’t have honed in on the warm and modern aesthetic that she prefers now. “Every ‘mistake’ is a chance to learn,” she adds. Hudson firmly believes that by allowing herself to have space to play and change, her taste levels have adapted over time. “After maybe the first few apartments in my early 20s, I learned pretty quickly,” she says. “I learned [how to use] tools like Photoshop and started really easily rendering spaces or putting furniture together so I could really understand what I was doing and take my time to make decisions.”
Not working with the floor plan
When Tiffany Thompson moved into her first apartment in Miami as an undergrad student at Barry University in the mid-2000s, she was working with a very small budget. Stuck in a long and narrow bedroom with a challenging floor plan, Tiffany was still determined to make the space feel like a reflection of her personality. At the time, she had a vibrant vision of Miami on her mind. “In hindsight, I did a horrible job with the floor plan, you had to step over the bed to get to the seating area,” she admits. “I painted it a warm orange color and paired it with my white IKEA furniture, and a cream couch and desk that I thrifted locally.” Hudson points out how the basic rules of design always come into play whether or not you want to follow them. “How to lay out a room, and things that you need to have in a room, or certain colors for different rooms—those [rules] are all actually really valid and valuable in terms of a living room layout,” she explains. “I find that those can be really helpful in terms of understanding and creating a home and a space for yourself.”
Rug fever
When you find yourself with a garage full of rolled up rugs, you probably have a big problem on your hands. This is the reality for Alyse Archer-Coité, who purchased one too many rugs on a whim that didn’t end up working in the way she hoped. “I have always had a real and enduring fear of rugs and choosing the wrong one because they are a pain in the ass to return and they’re expensive,” she explains. “I tend to miscalculate the size of the room to the rug. Almost every time it comes and I’m like, ‘It’s taller than I thought,’ or ‘The orientation is different than I thought,’ or it’s way too big. I have yet to strike gold when it comes to rug sizing.”
This is a triggering topic for Camille Nichelini, who only has herself (and her cats) to blame for ruining one too many rugs. “I was never a pet owner before, and I was really optimistic about the things I thought my cats could handle, and they absolutely could not,” she says. “There goes $1,200. That was a big mistake. I have gone through an embarrassing amount of rugs since I got cats for the first time, and I’ve only just now figured out the only thing that works for them is a shag rug where if they tear pieces out of it, you can’t notice. If you scroll back through my feed, you can count all the rugs and be like, ‘Where did those go?’ They’re destroyed, they’re gone, not salvageable.”
Not believing bad reviews
At the age of 24, Dani Klarić doesn’t have too many regrets just yet. “I’ve come to appreciate every item and trendy style I’ve tried or purchased along my design journey,” she explains. “Each piece has helped me understand different aesthetics, and also played a vital role in shaping and refining my personal style.” But if she’s being one hundred percent honest, any pangs of buyer’s remorse have stemmed from items that she “didn’t do enough research on and probably ignored the few bad reviews.” It’s a hard lesson to learn, but Klarić can’t stress this enough: “ALWAYS listen to the reviews, these people are not lying!”
Lack of impulse control
Hudson views the value of restraint and “taking a pause before making a decision” as a huge lesson to learn, especially regarding purchases. “I love restraint,” she insists. “Restraint and patience is a way of life that is reflected in the way you dress, in the way you parent, and in the way you design your home.” Archer-Coité points out that we currently live in a world where “we have an obsession with purchasing and getting things quickly” which often leads to remorse on the road to resell hell. “I see something online and I’m like, ‘That’s it, that’s what I have to have.’ And then I never do the due diligence,” Archer-Coité says. “I have a block when it comes to LiveAuctioneers, I get the high off of the platform and I make dumb decisions.”
This is also a weakness for Brown who is an impulsive shopper. “I’m a Sagittarrius, so sometimes I have to express a thing,” she adds. Molly views herself as the type of buyer who “makes a decision with my whole being,” meaning she gets an “overwhelming urge and almost panic to buy it because I love it so much,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it happens right away. “Sometimes that panic and desire stays for a long time and sometimes it’s just a fleeting moment, especially if it’s clouded by a trend of some sort,” she says.
Failing the grout game
For Sherman Samuel, not understanding the importance of making good “grout choices” cost her big time. “I selected a much too-dark grout on a lighter floor, which looked awful,” she remembers. “You could only see the grout lines, not the tile itself. The tile was throughout the entire house, and I couldn’t live with it, so I had the tile setters essentially dremel out all of the grout throughout and redo it. Not an inexpensive mistake.” Arnold has also suffered at the hands of grout in the past. “I was like, This is possibly the worst shower I’ve ever seen because it doesn’t make sense,” he recalls of a total design disaster. It’s always best to tread carefully when it comes to grout.
Playing with plaster
Last year, you couldn’t go anywhere without running into plaster walls—they were taking over staircases, living rooms, and bathrooms worldwide. But when asked about her biggest regret, Reese doesn’t hesitate to call out the one time she tried a plaster shower. “The contractor I used pretty much just put a concrete shower in my bathroom and it isn’t smooth; it’s more chunky so lots of texture,” she admits. “I really wish I would have just done tile.” Molly also regrets the one time she bought an ’80s-era lamp with a plaster base and a pleated lampshade, which she resold a few months later. “I had to get rid of it,” she says. “It no longer brought me joy in my space, it just felt redundant after seeing it so often.”
Leaning too hard into a theme
When you’re young, it’s easy to fall into the trap of decorating with a theme in mind. Carloto points out how the very idea of a themed bedroom was so prominent in the early 2000s, but now it’s a bit cringe. Nichelini was a college student during the Tumblr era so the walls of her bedroom were covered with string lights, tapestries, and a clothing hanger with sunglasses as decor. Brown remembers how she wanted her first apartment in New York City to be the antithesis of chic, so most of the purchases made at the time were motivated by what she perceived to be cool, edgy, and rebellious. The result was a full MidMod moment that featured an orange sofa and the corner of a diner booth that she found abandoned on the street. “I don’t know what I was going for, I just wanted it to look a little bit feral and it very much did,” she laughs.
Klarić remembers how during the peak of the pandemic, her Miami apartment became a canvas for thrifted and secondhand finds due to her very limited budget. Since she was stuck in lockdown (and doomscrolling on Instagram), her main prerogative was making the space feel warm, colorful, and happy. “The main wall had a super fun squiggle pattern all across the entire wall, on the far left corner there was a giant pastel rainbow, that my roomie absolutely did not like, and to top off all this craziness I spent hours hand painting cow print polka dots all over my wall,” she recalls. “But I will give myself some credit considering we did so much with no funds.” Evidently, it’s always better to follow your instincts, not a theme.
Not giving yourself permission to let go of things
When Kellie Brown moved to Los Angeles in 2019, she had just come out of a relationship and felt compelled to have her big “me” moment. Driven by what was aesthetically pleasing to her eyes only, she bought a pink velvet couch, a plaster dining table, and postmodern sculptural lamps from the ’80s. “I had this thought, I needed to see and execute it, and it was cute,” she says. “It was a moment and then I started to see everybody going that direction so I made a sharp left turn.” As someone who has always been extremely experimental with their style, she thinks it’s OK to get rid of things that no longer suit you. “Furniture isn’t a tattoo, it’s not permanent,” Brown argues. “Some things you get and you know you’ll love it forever—like my 1940s Italian parchment vanity. You’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands, I’m never getting rid of it.”
Similarly, Carloto can acknowledge the beauty of a piece while also owning up to the fact that it no longer serves her or her space. “There are some objects I’ve kept along the way and made my own, but others that I had to willfully let go and just be like, ‘What was I thinking? I don’t know if I like this, actually.’” Molly has a long list of items that she bought and almost immediately sold, including a pair of beige Wassily chairs that “felt so cold and took up the space in a way I just didn’t connect with.” Nothing has to stay with you forever—it’s okay to rehome furniture and move on with your life! As McGee reminds us, “you can’t take everything home with you and if you keep looking, another perfect piece always shows up.”
Rushing to fill a room instead of finding comfort in emptiness
For many of us, the pressure to finish designing a new space as quickly as possible can be the biggest mistake of all. But when a sped-up timeline takes precedence over enjoying the process, you lose your ability to lead with intention and sharpen your focus. Archer-Coité argues that it’s important to be comfortable in an empty room because “if you are hurrying to fill a room you will end up with a garage on your property full of rejected furniture.”
“Being able to walk by a dining room, or a living room, or a bedroom, and saying, ‘This room isn’t done yet because the pieces haven’t found me yet,’ is the most powerful thing to be able to do, especially when you have a big project,” she continues. “Your house is a forever project. My house will never be done, I will always be looking for ways to add or to change or rethink the space. Accepting that has given me a lot of peace and has also made the whole process a lot more fun.”
If this sounds like your current situation, Reese warns against buying items that are intended for temporary use. “Never buy temporary things because you’ll end up years later with a coffee table you never liked but now you’re just used to it,” she says. “Just wait on it until you can afford it, or until it’s in stock, and then get exactly what you want.” Her sister Molly fully agrees, continuing “There is nothing more rewarding than sitting in your space, looking around and seeing all the things that you love and connect with. Anytime I’ve rushed a decision or I was a bit unsure about the design choice I was making is usually the time I regret it.”
Arnold actually prefers to live with less stuff because “it helps me think and get creative.” Thompson uses sensory design when she’s curating a space for both herself and her clients. “I’m a believer in things having purpose,” she explains. “How things relate to one another, the why for a space, and the story of who is dwelling in the space. Visually, that can look vastly different.”
Not being honest with yourself about what is or isn’t working
Sometimes, you get used to the way things are. But no matter where you fall on the spectrum of spirituality, vibe checks apply to our interior spaces too! “It’s good to check in with your space and see what is or isn’t working anymore,” Molly explains. “For me, it can take a toll on my emotions when my space doesn’t feel like a well balanced and thought-out reflection of myself.” She thinks that moving things around, repainting the walls, and living with different layouts is another great way to refine your vision. “It’s so easy to stop seeing your space fully because you get used to the way it is,” she adds. “It’s important to step away and really look at what aspects are working and which aren't anymore. It’s a fun, ever evolving game.”
Maldonado agrees that this is an important part of the process. “There’s a lot of pressure for things to be perfect in general, and the reality is it’s nice to add things, take things away, and refresh,” she says. “I’m constantly moving things in and out depending on my mood, changing how we want to display things, or what I want to feel when I get home.” Carloto views this shift in mindset as unlocking a new era where it’s no longer about making your space beautiful for other people. As she further explains, “it’s [about] making a space that feels like you and makes sense to you so that when people blindly walk into your house, they know whose house they’re going into.”
Not challenging yourself
Even though Carloto is frustrated by some of her home’s shortcomings, she views every obstacle as a learning exercise. “I have tin ceilings and there’s only so much that you can do with that, but it’s a great way to challenge yourself,” she explains, noting that she was able to pour some of that creativity into her exhibition, “A Room of One’s Own.” “I’ve never lived in a space with black hardwood floors so learning how to work with that—especially with rugs—is a challenge, but it’s a good one.” Even if you’re in a temporary living situation, Brown insists that there are solutions for your design problems. “As a renter, whether you’re there for a one year lease or many years, you deserve to like it,” she says. “It’s not a waste of time, money, energy, or effort because you live there.”
Not leaving room for course-correcting your setbacks
These days, Brill is of the mindset that “everything is an experiment,” but she was once held back by the fear of messing up. “When I put in this very expensive, very wrong tile into our entryway and paid (what felt like) a ton of money to get it installed and hated it, the amount of shame I felt was overwhelming,” she recalls. “I was ready to replan my entire design to just make this tile work. My husband talked through it with me as I was spiraling and really gave me permission to hate it and also to change it, even if it would set us back in all those different ways. That was a massive turning point for me…. Although I much prefer being ‘right’ and loving all of my decisions, it’s actually okay if it doesn’t work out.” So they ripped out the marble tile, and even though it hurt her ego, it taught Brill “a very important lesson in sunk cost and the freedom to treat creative projects as an experiment.”
Thompson isn’t embarrassed by any of the design decisions from her past. “Errors can lead to better systems and protocols, if you are able to step back and be honest about mistakes and problem solve for them in the future,” she says. “There is nothing that I regret trying. Design is fluid. It takes time to develop your style and that’s okay... Look for inspiration everywhere, be open to new ideas, and try new things.” Brent is also perfectly fine with failing and learning in the process. “There is no ego,” he says. “I know that I’ve made a million mistakes and will keep making them, but my heart is in the right place, and I’ll never make the same mistake twice.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
