Hey friend!
You asked for this, so here it is. A bit of a how-to, and a window into how my brain works when I walk through a house.
Here’s the short version:
I see rooms as suggestions.
The kitchen is where it is because someone, at some point, suggested it go there. Same with the dining room, the den, the odd little room off the back hall.
I don’t take any of it as fact.
I take it as a starting point.
Let me show you what I mean.
The kitchen that might be in the wrong room
Yesterday I walked through a client’s home here in Winnetka. Historic. Stately. Picturesque backyard. The kind of property that feels like a sanctuary even though you’re right in the middle of town.
The clients were warm and welcoming, and from the moment they opened the door, I knew I liked them. They called because they’re ready to make the house live the way they want it to.
Starting with the kitchen.
Which happens to be in a small room with eight-foot ceilings.
Directly next to it, partially open to it, is this incredible space with ceilings well over nine feet. In one section, the second floor has been pulled away entirely, so you’re looking up nearly twenty feet. A huge window pours light across the room.
They told me how much they cook. How central the kitchen is to the way they live. How awkward it feels to them now.
And I couldn’t help it.
I wasn’t thinking about how to make their kitchen better.
I was thinking:
Does the kitchen even belong in this room?
They’re already gutting it. And the room next to it could give them soaring cabinetry, a real island, big stone moments, better circulation, and a landing spot for groceries right off the mudroom on the way in from the garage.
And the old kitchen could become the sitting room it maybe always wanted to be.
So we’re going to explore it.
Maybe we draw it both ways and the kitchen stays exactly where it is. Maybe moving it next door unlocks the whole house.
Either answer is a good answer.
The important thing is that before you invest six or seven figures into making rooms beautiful, you make sure you’re drawing on the right canvas.
I watched them go quiet for a second.
Then they started pointing at walls.
They’d already spoken to several designers and contractors, and no one had asked the question.
Everyone else had started with:
How do we make this kitchen nicer?
Which is a perfectly reasonable question.
It just isn’t where I start.
Why I look at houses this way
Because after enough time, old houses are rarely the product of one master plan anymore.
They’re a hundred years of people solving one problem at a time.
Someone adds a room.
Thirty years later, someone else adds another.
The kitchen gets bumped out because that was the easiest side to bump out.
A porch gets enclosed. A staircase moves.A doorway disappears.
Do that for a century and the house you’re standing in becomes a record of all the people who lived there before you. Every one of them working with the budget, needs and problems they had at the time.
Some of those decisions were brilliant. Some were probably made very quickly in 1962.
None of those people were designing for the family living there now.
So I can’t look at a floor plan and assume it’s settled.
I see a long chain of suggestions.
And I have to ask which ones still hold.
What I think the expensive mistake actually is
People worry about expensive mistakes as if the risk is the marble.
“What if I spend all this money on stone and hate it?”
That’s not what keeps me up at night.
What keeps me up is putting six figures into a kitchen that was in the wrong room of the house to begin with.
Because once you’ve seen the better plan, every dollar you spent perfecting the old one feels very different.
Good design doesn’t start with picking prettier things.
It starts with making sure you’re solving the right problem.
What I’m doing when I walk through
If you were walking a house with me, this is what you’d see me doing.
First, I’m looking for the best room.
Not the best-decorated one.
The best bones.
The highest ceilings. The most light. The best proportions. The best connection to the living spaces and the yard.
Then I look at what’s living in it.
Very often, the best room in the house is holding a formal dining room that gets used twice a year, while the kitchen the family uses three times a day sits in a low, dark box next door.
I don’t see that as a decorating problem.
I see it as a suggestion somebody made a long time ago.
And I want to know if it still holds.
Then I start tracing how the family actually lives:
Where do the groceries come in?
Where do the kids drop everything?
Where does everyone end up at six o’clock?
Which doors do they actually use?
Where does the dog come in covered in mud?
I want the house arranged around those paths. And anything that’s already getting ripped out has lost its claim on the room it’s in.
Then we test the ideas:
We draw them.
We work through how the rooms connect.
We figure out what has to move.
And we get real numbers before we dismiss something as impossible.
Moving a kitchen sounds enormous.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes, especially when you’re already gutting that part of the house, it’s much less dramatic than you assumed.
The only way to know is to actually work through it.
And sometimes I do all of this and the house was right.
The kitchen stays.
Great.
Now we know instead of assuming.
If you want to try it
Walk your house tonight and ask yourself one thing:
Which room might be in the wrong place?
Not which room needs a new paint color.
Not which one needs better furniture.
Which room might actually be doing the wrong job?
Then reply and tell me.
I read every one, and I love these.
I’m doing this exact exercise in my own house right now, and I have an entire third floor that hasn’t made me a single good suggestion yet.
Tomorrow’s Sunday Strategy(ish) is the long version of all of it, including the two Workshoppe projects from the reel. If you’re not subscribed, that’s where to be.
Because for me, good design has never started with finishes.
It starts with asking the question before anyone swings a hammer.
Before you spend the money making a room beautiful, make sure it’s the right room.