Why Great Interior Design Starts with How You Live
Okay, before we start with any new client – before we talk about a single piece of furniture, a paint color, or a tile section – we always ask: how do you live? Tell us about your life.
Not what you like. Not what you have been saving on Pinterest. Not the aesthetic you are going for. All that comes just a smidge later. But I want to know how you really live in your home. Do you cook every night or does the kitchen mostly see coffee cups and takeout containers? Do your kids do homework at the kitchen island? Do you work from home and need the living room to double as a place where you can think? Do you entertain a lot, or is your home mostly a sanctuary for the people who already live in it?
These are the questions that shape everything. And y'all, they are the questions most people have never been asked before they start making design decisions. I know…gasp.
Why Decoration and Design Are Not the Same Thing
This one is a doozy. Decoration and design often get tossed around like a salad and used interchangeably as if they are one and the same. Spoiler alert: they’re not.
Decoration is about making a space look a certain way. Design is about making a space work a certain way – and look great while doing it. Naturally.
A room can be beautifully decorated and still feel wrong to live in. It happens more than you would think. The sofa is stunning, but nobody wants to sit on it. The dining table is exactly the right aesthetic, but it seats six in a room where you regularly host twelve. The home office looks clean and minimal but there is nowhere to put anything, so everything ends up on the floor anyway.
That’s decoration without design. And it’s the most common reason people end up back at square one, wondering why a room that looks right in photos does not feel quite right in real life.
The Questions We Ask Before We Do Anything Else
When we start a new project at KJI, the first thing we do is ask a lot of questions. Not about style - that comes later. About life.
Who lives here, and how? A home with young kids has different needs than a home where the kids are grown and gone. A household where two people work from home needs something different than one where everyone is out the door by 8am. We want to understand the actual population of the house and what each person needs from it.
What is not working right now? This one is…illuminating. Most clients have a real handle on what is frustrating them about their current space, even if they cannot always articulate why. The living room feels chaotic. The kitchen feels dark. The primary bedroom is where everything ends up but it never feels restful. Those frustrations are weaving a story, and they tell us exactly where to start.
How do you want the space to feel? Not look, not yet…but feel. There is a difference. "I want it to feel calm" is a direction. "I want it to look like that kitchen I saw on Instagram" is a jumping off point for a conversation. Our goal is to always find what’s driving you to like that kitchen in the first place. Is it the airiness? The colors that feel soothing? Or do you like the moody statement that makes it feel intriguing? Once we get to the root of what you’re drawn to, we can start to design from there.
What does your life really look like in this space? Morning routines. Homework. Movie nights. Sunday dinners. The way the dog takes over one corner of the living room. The fact that you always end up in the kitchen even when you meant to be somewhere else. These details are not trivial. They are the foundation.
What Happens When You Skip This Step
I wish I could tell you it didn’t happen all the time. Someone makes a significant investment in a renovation or a room refresh, and a year later something still feels off. The space is nice. It just does not quite work for them.
Almost always, when we dig into it, the issues trace back to the same thing: the design started with an aesthetic instead of a life. Someone fell in love with a look and reverse-engineered a room around it and forgot to consider the endgame.
The fix is usually not as dramatic as people fear. Sometimes, it’s just matter of rethinking the furniture arrangement, swapping one or two key pieces, or adding the functional elements that were missing from the original plan. But it is work that would not have been necessary if the right questions had been asked at the start.
If you are wondering whether you are ready to start a project, or whether your current space is a candidate for this kind of reset, our post on how to know when you are ready to hire a designer is a good place to start.
Design That Fits Your Life, Not Someone Else's
There is a version of interior design that is essentially cosplay. You find an aesthetic you love (Oh hello, Scandinavian minimalism, maximalist color, Texas Hill Country cozy) and you try to recreate it as faithfully as possible in your home. Sometimes it works. More often, it works in the photos and feels a little off in real life, because the aesthetic was designed for someone else's life, someone else's family, someone else's habits.
The spaces we are proudest of at KJI are not the ones that look the most like a design magazine. They are the ones where a client walks in after we finished and says, "This is exactly us." That is the goal. A beautiful room that fits.
You can see some of those spaces in our featured projects, and if any of them feel like a direction you want to explore, we would love to hear about what you are working with.
Your Home Should Reflect You and Your Lifestyle
No matter where you live, life is always demanding that we live bigger. Long days, full households, indoor-outdoor living, kitchens with all the bells and whistles.
As a designer based in Texas, I’d be lying if I said bigger isn’t a whole lot of fun. But when it comes to design, the key thing is to be sure that all the elements that you are looking for come together seamlessly for how you live while also reflecting who you are.
That is the standard we hold every project to. Want to find out what that looks like for you?
Let’s connect. We can’t wait to hear about how you live and, more importantly, how you want to live in your space.
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Interior decorating focuses on the aesthetic elements of a space. That means furniture, color, accessories, styling. Interior design encompasses all of that plus the functional and spatial planning that makes a room work for the people using it. A designer considers traffic flow, lighting, how spaces connect to each other, and how the room fits into the way the household lives.
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Most people have a feeling they want before they have a style they can name. Start there. If you can describe how you want a room to feel (calm, energizing, warm, bold) a designer can work towards the palette, materials, and furniture that create that feeling. You do not need to know whether you are "transitional" or "contemporary" before you reach out.
Kaki John is the owner and senior designer of Kaki John Interiors, an Austin-based interior design studio serving clients nationwide. She holds an Interior Design degree from the New York Institute of Art and Design and has been transforming homes since 2012, working across full-home renovations, new construction, and single-room redesigns. Her work has been featured in Voyage Austin.