On Knowing People’s Tastes

One of the great dilemmas of hiring anyone to do anything for you is the controversy of translating that hazy dream, idea or epiphany that’s locked in your head to something tangible and real. When you get down to it, hiring any professional, especially a designer, condenses to this simple predicament. So how does Amy and the Slaughter Design Studio team even begin to address the gap?

Have a Desire to Know

Spend more than a few minutes with Amy Slaughter or Cary Atkins or really anyone on the team and you’ll notice that they actually want to know something about you. It’s not the crowd you’ve met before who walks into a cocktail party and proverbially unrolls a long and comprehensive resume of past projects. Instead of self-glorifying, they stay curious, human, personable. 

“I’ll always ask about a person’s hobbies and interests. I’ll ask if they are collectors of anything, or if they keep sentimental pieces in their home”, says Amy. 

And that’s where it starts. A simple and nearly automatic process of listening to people and getting them to tell stories and provide context. A person who is well-travelled is often inspired by the places they love to go, and as Amy puts it, “When you see or hear these small examples, we can start to tune in to them, picking up key elements of their tastes.”

Tuning In to Another Person’s Taste

Amy Slaughter

Most of us are just too focused on ourselves to be any good at this. We don’t make a practice out of deep listening or drawing inferences about a person’s aesthetic from their wine-fueled description of dinner on a porch in Provence. But gems are a product of digging, and whether she realizes it or not, Amy is always digging. Even when she’s resting, she’ll come back to a project at week’s-start and have some creative inspiration. 

Amy says, “My moments of quiet reflection are key, they motivate me for the week to come.  Rest puts me in a happy place to really pursue an idea! It gives me creative energy!”

And that’s all part of the process. She needs to be reflective herself in order to invite a client into that process as well.

Mirroring Ideas

In a recent process, Amy and Cary joined a three-hour conference call with a client. In this time they reviewed floor plans and selections. The client was thrilled with the majority, but resisted on a few areas, bringing options of her own to the table. To some designers, this is an opportunity to have an emotional breakdown, for Amy and Cary, this was perfection! Great designs, spaces that really reflect a person, come out of a deeply collaborative process. And now, the ideas are outside the sphere of imagination, and living in lines and colors on a sheet of paper. Now, the client has a chance to see the dream in a more concrete way and can provide feedback. Creativity requires some tension, and in the end, together, they produced an extremely strong result that was not only deeply meaningful to the client’s personal taste, but also fit with every other detail that was creating the broader look. 

“When we find something that blends the worlds, it just works!”, Amy said.

Tuning Into a Theme

In a home just outside of Salt Lake City, UT that has started, the couple brought a selection of light fixtures that were beautiful, but no longer in production. They needed help finding something similar to what they had imagined and fixated on through their dreaming process of the past ten years. This is a strong opportunity to define the direction of the whole design. Lighting can become an anchor point in a person’s taste-palette that can spread into the rest of the selections. A Modern Mountain fixture needs to belong in a modern-mountain house. And so the taste theme comes into focus. But it’s not that easy, you can’t follow a trend, there’s a whole range of personal tastes that need to be explored, and a person’s inner conflicts resolved into cohesion. Many of these are nuanced and yet broad!

Balancing Habit with Vision

For example, “Don’t let this place look like a grandma’s house!” is an exact phrase Amy is hearing from her interior design clients. From Fredericksburg to Park City, and anywhere in the Texas Hill Country, nobody wants to build a house that looks or feels “old”. 

“I’m always challenging myself to ask, ‘what will this look like in 10-12 years?’” Amy’s not one for fast fashion. And while she’s recently accepted the idea that some people may really enjoy being on-trend and have the desire to keep retrofitting spaces, she can’t stop thinking about the long-term. Grandma’s house was always inviting, but it was always outdated. Amy has always said, “An old house filled with old things, just looks old! But, an old house filled with modern and old things looks fresh!”

So how do you look into the future? How do you design knowing that what’s aesthetically pleasing today may turn out to be the green shag carpet of tomorrow? “I think you have to go back to the basics to do this. Simplify things”, Amy says. Try hard not to over-embellish a home with too many complex or nuanced details. Choose colors & patterns that a client loves, but that complement the space itself. Often the condition of a chair that fits well in a space is ignored just because it’s proportioned so accurately. Use solid textures for the upholstery on big furniture and begin introducing more current patterns in different, but less permanent ways on pillows, rugs, and other accents. These are things to replace later, as styles shift, that are not multi thousands of dollars. A couple of pillows will never be as difficult to change as a set of sofas.

Intentionally Knowing People

This process of extracting an interior space from a person’s imagination isn’t systematic. That would be too robotic. Rather, the process is validated and weighty because of the intentionality behind it. Slaughter Design Studio isn’t an interior designer that just punches out off-the-shelf looks, plowing over the individual in the process. It’s a time-consuming and deeply relational program of listening and responding meant to complement the vision. It’s soft, and human and natural, and the end-result is that through this practice of taking time to know a person, you can create a space that truly reflects who they are, what they love and the life that they value.