Before the Mood Board: The 5 Questions That Shape Every Project
The mood board is where most people think design begins. It is where images are gathered, where direction starts to form, and where the project acquires its first visual identity. It feels like the start of something. In my process, it is nowhere near the beginning. Before any image is selected, before any material is considered, before I have any opinion about what a space should look and feel like, there are five questions I ask every client. The answers to those questions are the actual foundation of the project. Everything else is built on top of them.
The first question is the one that takes the longest to answer: what does this home need to do for you that it is not doing now? Not what you want it to look like. Not what you wish it had. What is it failing to provide? The clients who answer this quickly give me a list of spatial problems. The clients who take their time give me something far more useful: an honest account of the distance between the life they are living in their home and the life they want to be living there. One of those answers produces a renovation. The other produces a transformation.
The second question is about the people who will use the space the most. Not guests, not the version of the household that exists during entertaining, but the private configuration of daily life. Who gets up first, and where do they go? Who needs quiet and who needs proximity? Where does the family gather, as opposed to where they are supposed to gather? The answers almost always reveal that the home, as currently designed or as currently being planned, has been organized around a social performance of the household rather than around the household itself. A formal dining room that seats twelve for a family that eats at the kitchen island every night of the week is not a design choice. It is an aspiration that has been taking up square footage for years.
The third question concerns the room or the moment in the home that already works, the place where someone feels most at ease without being able to fully explain why. This question is often met with surprise. People expect a designer to focus on what is wrong. But the room that already works is carrying information about what this person needs from a space, information that is specific to them and that no amount of trend research or portfolio browsing will surface. A client who tells me they feel most themselves in a small study with low ceilings and walls of books has just told me something essential about scale, enclosure, and material warmth that will inform decisions throughout the project.
The fourth question is the one that most clients find unexpectedly difficult. What are you willing to give up? Every project involves trade-offs, and the ones made consciously and early are far less damaging than the ones made under budget pressure mid-construction. A client who has genuinely reckoned with what matters most and what matters least arrives at every decision point with clarity rather than conflict. The clients who defer this question arrive at those same decision points, having to choose under duress, and they frequently choose in ways they later regret.
The fifth question is the one I hold until the other four have been answered, because it only means something once the previous answers are in the room: what does success look like and feel like when this project is finished? Not what the house looks like in a photograph. What it feels like on an ordinary Tuesday, six months after construction ends, when the novelty has settled, and what remains is just the daily experience of living there. That is the target. Everything on the mood board, every material decision, every spatial choice that follows, is in service to that specific answer. When I have it clearly, the project has a true north. When it is missing or vague, the project has aesthetics instead of a direction, and aesthetics without direction is how you end up with a home that is accomplished and somehow still not yours.
Clients who have worked with designers before and come away feeling that something was missing are often surprised to find that the missing thing was established, or failed to be established, before a single image was ever chosen. The mood board is a tool. It is a useful one. But a tool applied before the foundation is laid builds nothing that holds.
If you are considering a project and want to begin with the questions rather than the images, that is precisely where I like to start.
I work with a small number of clients at a time, and I am deliberate about fit. If this approach to a project sounds like what you have been looking for, the discovery call is the right place to begin that conversation.