Most rooms go wrong at the shopping stage, but the mistake was made earlier. A sofa gets chosen before anyone has asked how the room is actually used, and everything after that is compromise.

We plan every room on paper first. Nothing gets bought until the plan holds.

Start with how the room is lived in

Before measurements, we ask what happens in the space on an ordinary Tuesday. Where does the first coffee get drunk? Where do bags land? Which corner always ends up as the pile?

A room that looks good but fights its daily routine stays tidy for a week. We list the three to five things the room must do and design around those.

Measure the room, then measure the walk

Wall lengths are the easy part. The harder part is movement: the path from the door to the window, the gap between sofa and table, the swing of every door and drawer.

As a rule, we keep main walking routes at 90 cm and secondary gaps at 60 cm. Anything tighter feels crowded, even in a large room.

Fix the light before the furniture

Natural light decides where things belong. We note where the sun lands at 9am, noon and 5pm, then place seating, desks and dining tables accordingly.

Artificial light gets planned at the same time: one ambient source, one task source, one warm accent per zone. Adding lamps later is possible. Moving a ceiling point is not.

Pick the palette from one material

We never start with a color. We start with one material, such as an oak floor, a stone counter or a linen curtain, and build outward from it.

Two supporting tones and one deeper accent are enough. Everything else should quietly belong to that first material.

Buy last

Only now do we source furniture, and by then the brief is specific: a 220 cm sofa, a low walnut table, a lamp with a warm, dimmable bulb. Shopping becomes a matter of matching pieces to the plan, so far fewer wrong purchases get returned.

That's the whole method. It's slower at the start and much faster after.