On Listening Before Designing

May 2026

There is a question I have learned to ask early in every project, and the answer rarely comes quickly. How do you want to feel in this room?

It sounds like a soft question. It is not. Most clients have spent years thinking about what they want a space to look like, but very few have been invited to think about what they want it to feel like. The pause that follows the question is often the most useful moment of a first conversation. It is the sound of someone realizing they have never been asked this before.

This is the part of my process I think about most. Before mood boards, before measurements, before any decision about cabinetry or stone, there is the slower work of understanding how a family actually lives, what their mornings sound like, where the light falls when it matters, and what they have been quietly tolerating in a home that no longer fits the life they are living. I have come to think of this as the real beginning of the design. Everything visible comes later.

My doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shaped this way of working more than I realized at the time. The years I spent studying recognition memory in interior spaces were, in a quieter sense, years of learning how to observe before interpreting. I could not measure how people remembered or felt about a room until I had carefully understood what they were responding to in the first place. That discipline of looking before naming has stayed with me. It is how I move through a home on a first visit. Watching how light enters at a specific hour. Noticing which chair has the worn cushion and which one has been quietly avoided. Paying attention to the things a client says easily, and the things they hesitate before saying. The hesitation is usually where the design begins.

There is also the matter of two people deciding together. A home almost always belongs to more than one person, and the way two people experience the same room is rarely identical. One may walk in and feel the light. The other may walk in and feel the layout. One may respond to texture, the other to flow. Neither way of inhabiting a space is more correct, and a design that only speaks to one of them will not feel like home to either. So part of listening is learning to hold two perspectives at once, and to find the version of the room where both people recognize themselves.

What I have come to believe, after years of research and the slow accumulation of conversations, is that beautiful rooms are not the product of good taste. They are the product of close attention. The materials, the proportions, the light, none of it works if the underlying observation is shallow. The design has to be built on something true about the people who will live there, and the only way to get to something true is to listen long enough to hear it.

This is why the first weeks of a project, the questionnaire and the site visit and the long opening conversation, are not preliminaries to the design. They are the design. By the time I am drawing a floor plan, most of the important work has already happened. The plan is only the visible record of a much longer act of attention.

A home cannot become what someone needs it to be if no one has first listened, carefully, to what they need. That listening is not the soft part of the work. It is the most rigorous part.

This reflection is part of the SoulSpace Journal, a space for design thinking shaped by research and lived experience.