The Moment a Room Finds Itself

I was finishing the art and music studio on the third floor of the Lawbre when I realized the walls needed something. The room was already well underway. I had made the big decisions about how the space would function, with an art studio toward the front and a music area toward the back. The unusual black-painted wood floor was in place, along with the furniture and instruments. I wasn't trying to rethink the room. I just needed some good art for the walls.

After looking at quite a few possibilities, I settled on three New Orleans Jazz Fest posters. I thought I was choosing artwork. Instead, I changed the room.

As soon as I put the posters in place, the entire space felt different. They brought color and energy into the room, but it was more than that. Their graphic quality and connection to music suddenly made everything else around them make more sense. The art studio and music area no longer felt like two uses I had assigned to the same long room. They felt connected. What struck me was how little it had taken. I had spent weeks making decisions about that room, and then three small pieces of art changed the way I saw all of them.

The same thing had happened just downstairs in the library. I knew I wanted a yellow chair in that room. I liked the unexpected pop of color against the quieter palette, but for a while the yellow didn't connect to anything else. I still liked the chair, but it felt a little like a decision sitting by itself.

Then I added a limoncello print to the wall. Suddenly the yellow had somewhere else to go. The chair made more sense, but the print did something else I hadn't expected: it changed the way I saw that entire part of the room.

I had already placed a cabinet there, but once the limoncello print was on the wall, the cabinet no longer felt right. I took it out and replaced it with a bar cart, then added a small glass cabinet to the wall for drinks. What had started as finding a piece of art to connect with a yellow chair ended up changing the function and character of that whole corner of the library. That's the part of design that continues to fascinate me.

Design isn't only additive. It's relational.

Adding something to a room doesn't necessarily leave you with the same room plus one more object. That new element enters into a relationship with everything that's already there. It can make a color that once seemed isolated feel intentional. It can make something you were perfectly happy with suddenly feel wrong. Occasionally, it can send you back across the room to start moving furniture again. The limoncello print did that in the library. It started a chain reaction. The Jazz Fest posters did something slightly different. They didn't make me reconsider the studio. They made me understand it.

I think that's an important distinction from the anchor pieces I often use when I'm designing a house. An anchor tends to come early enough that I knowingly build around it. These pieces came later. I wasn't asking either of them to tell me what the rooms should become. But they did affect how I saw what was already there.

That's one of the reasons I try not to consider a room finished simply because I've checked off all the obvious things it needs. There can still be a moment when one small addition changes the relationships within it. Sometimes that means something else has to move or come out. Other times, nothing needs to change at all. You just suddenly see why it works.

That's what happened when I stood back and looked at those three Jazz Fest posters on the third floor. I had gone looking for something to fill the walls. Instead, I found the thing that made the room feel like itself.