How Does an Interior Designer Turn Inspiration Into Design?
FIELD NOTES
September 11, 2026
The best design ideas rarely arrive fully formed, even for an interior designer. Finding them means being willing to get a little lost first.
There are those lessons in life that stay with you long after you’ve forgotten most of the circumstances around them. For me, it's often little things, seemingly insignificant at the time, that somehow become part of thought and intuition.
I spent much of my first couple of semesters of college dabbling in different areas of the arts and humanities before finding my way to theater. I took several art and art history classes, which eventually turned into an art minor. In my Introductory to Painting class, one of the professor's first lessons touched on a concept that's stuck with me ever since.
It was the idea of creating a composition, and the concept that a painting should be approached as a whole rather than as a collection of individual parts (sounds obvious, I know, but the journey there is a bit nuanced).
Let’s say you’re painting a bowl of fruit. You wouldn’t want to first create a perfect apple, then move on to the banana, then paint the bowl. You’d move around the canvas, establishing the larger shapes and darker values, working on the background, then the bowl, then a piece of fruit, adjusting colors, adding light and shading, continually moving between the individual elements as the composition develops.
The individual elements matter, of course, but no single brushstroke, or perfectly painted apple, makes the painting. Color, texture, light, shadow and form are constantly changing how how each element reads, and you keep working between them until the whole picture begins to come into focus.
My creative approach to interior design works much the same way. And I bring this up because I often hear that this is one of the most mystifying parts of an interior designer’s work: How do we go from ideas to concepts to an actual design?
Getting Lost in the Weeds
I am a firm believer that before we “find ourselves,” we need to get a little lost.
I talk about this with clients early in the process because conceptual design requires a certain amount of trust. We’re going to dream together, and sometimes I’m going to show you something or take you somewhere that may initially feel a little outside your comfort zone.
But isn’t that part of why you hire a designer? If I only show you things you already know you like, we’d be limiting the possibilities to what you could already imagine on your own. And what would be the point of that?
A Peek Behind the Curtain
On any given project, a client might hand me a dozen inspiration images. By the time we’re deep into conceptualization, my team and I might have gathered some 300.
Don’t panic. I would never share all 300 with you. I’m not a sadist. I want to push you outside of your comfort zone, but I’m not trying to overwhelm you.
Instead, every image we gather goes onto an internal digital whiteboard that we create for each project. We start grouping and comparing images by room, palette, architectural details, furnishings, or sometimes simply because there’s something about an image that resonates with the project. Then, through the process of elimination, we remove anything that no longer belongs.
And this is where the process starts to look a lot like that painting.
We move things around the whiteboard, continually looking at them in relationship to everything else. An image that seemed perfect on its own might suddenly feel completely wrong once it’s placed beside the others. A floor plan might change how we’re thinking about the furniture, while a piece of furniture might send us back to the plan. Something we weren’t sure about can suddenly make sense because of what we put beside it.
Nothing is really being resolved on its own. We move back and forth between the individual elements until the larger composition begins to reveal itself.
A good idea isn’t enough. It has to work with everything around it.
The Obvious Solution Is Usually Just the Beginning
The same thing happens when I’m working through a floor plan. For any given layout problem, I might see five or six possible solutions, and I’ll usually start by drawing the most obvious one.
Sometimes it works. But working isn’t always enough.
So I’ll try another approach, maybe something a little less expected. I might get 30% into a layout before realizing exactly why it doesn’t work. So I stop, move things around and try something else.
But that time isn’t wasted. Maybe it reveals a relationship I hadn’t considered, or solves one small part of the problem in a way I can carry into the next iteration. Something that doesn’t work can be the very thing that gets me to something that does.
This back and forth happens throughout conceptualization. The floor plan informs the imagery, the imagery informs the furniture, and the furniture may send me right back to the floor plan. I may even bring in several material samples at this stage, not to make final selections, but to test color, texture and how they relate to everything else. Each decision gives me new information about the others.
The obvious solution might be where I start, but it's rarely where I stop.
Bringing It All Into Focus
Eventually, all of that exploration has to come back into focus.
Those 300 or so images might become 80 or 90 across all of the major spaces of a whole-home project, and from there they’re distilled even further into the mood boards that become part of our conceptualization package.
This is the point when the ideas finally leave our giant working whiteboard and are composed beautifully into the concept boards we’ll eventually share with you. And interestingly, it’s often not until we see those images paired together on the actual boards that the picture fully comes into focus for us, too.
Together with the floor and furniture plans and a preliminary material palette, they give you a clear sense of where we’re going. The concept is established, but the details are still to be developed.
The Conversation Starts Again
When we present the concept back to our clients, we’re not presenting a finished design. We’re presenting a point of view and asking them to react to it.
And those reactions are often much more useful than a simple yes or no.
A client might point to an image and say, “I don’t know about this rug, but I love everything else that’s happening here.” Or, “Tell me more about that light.” Sometimes it’s simply, “I would never have thought of this, but I love it.”
That’s the kind of response we’re looking for. Conceptualization gives us enough specificity to have a much more meaningful conversation than we could have had at the beginning, while still leaving room for the design to evolve.
Some clients want to see several possibilities and talk their way through them. Others hired me because they want a strong recommendation and would rather I tell them where I think we should go. Part of Discovery is understanding that, too. No two clients need to experience the design process in exactly the same way.
The concept may be taking shape, but we’re still moving around the canvas.
Finding the Picture
So how do we get from inspiration to design?
Not in a straight line.
We gather, interpret, draw, compare, test, discard, rearrange and try again. Some ideas survive almost untouched from the beginning. Others lead somewhere completely unexpected. And some disappear entirely, but leave behind the thing that gets us to the next idea.
Eventually, the noise starts to quiet down. The plans make sense. The imagery begins speaking the same language. The architecture, furniture, palette and mood start reinforcing one another.
We aren’t at the finished picture yet.
But now we know what we’re painting.
Until next time.
XO
PE
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